Monday, April 11, 2022
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE RECAP | The Guardian
Looks like a hit-piece on U.S. television: from start-to-finish - but what Zach Vasquez writes is great! Gyllenhaal gives his best performance of the night as the “Patient Zero” of the old west in this slight, but enjoyably gross sketch.
Saturday Night Live: Jake Gyllenhaal hosts a mediocre episode
The Ambulance star gives it his all but the sketches, taking in Ketanji Brown Jackson, Child’a Play and cabaret, aren’t up to snuff
Sun 10 Apr 2022 09.44 EDT
Last modified on Sun 10 Apr 2022 11.34 EDTInsert: "Saturday Night Live opens at the White House, where President Biden (James Austin Johnson) congratulates Ketanji Brown Jackson (Ego Nwodim) on her historic confirmation to the supreme court. Justice Jackson is happy to do her part, ie, “work twice as hard as a white man my entire life, and then spend a week listening to Ted Cruz call me a pedophile”.
Biden leaves her alone in the Oval Office and encourages her take in the weight of the room’s history. She calls upon historical barrier breakers for advice and guidance, including the late Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Kate McKinnon) and Thurgood Marshall (Kenan Thompson), “conductor of the underground railroad” Harriet Tubman (Punkie Johnson), and Jackie Robinson (Chris Redd).
This cold open plays like a high school history presentation with slightly more jokes, but little in the way of actual laughs. The problem is the premise itself: the culmination of these figures’ struggles in Jackson’s appointment to the court is cause for celebration, not satire. But since SNL is a satirical show, you have to question what the sketch’s purpose is.
Jake Gyllenhaal hosts for the second time in 15 years. The actor reflects on how much he’s changed in that time, before launching into a rendition of Celine Dion’s It’s All Coming Back to Me Now with backup from Nwodim, Cecily Strong and Chloe Fineman. Gyllenhaal gives the song his all, but the result is little more than a karaoke performance.
Why’d You Like It? is a game show that asks people to explain why they “liked” certain Instagram posts. Pressed to explain why he “did the double tap” for a picture of a hot woman when he could have just looked at it, Gyllenhaal’s nervous contestant eventually admits, “I guess some part of me thought that if I liked it she would see that I liked it, and then she would follow me back, and then we’d DM, and then maybe at some point she’d want to have sex with me.” (This does not amuse his girlfriend in the audience.) The other two contestants are initially confident that they’ll escape a similar humiliation, since the posts they liked initially seem harmless, but they eventually break down and reveal they’ve fallen into the exact same thirst traps. A sharp dissection of the shallowness of social media and the way it’s warped all of our brains.
Dream Home Cousins is a show on HGTV in which the design for a young couple’s dream home turns into a nightmare after the husband’s aged mother decides to move in with them. Instead of an “oasis of relaxation,” the house becomes cluttered with medical equipment, “large, ceramic statues of ducks in 1930s gangster outfits” and black and white photographs of “stern looking ancestors.” As the creepy, suffocating matriarch, McKinnon hits several of her most overplayed beats while failing to bring anything new to the table.
The Singers Four are a cabaret group (Gyllenhaal, McKinnon, Strong and Bowen Yang) who reunite on stage to sing a ballad about celebrating life’s small victories, such as meeting Z-list celebrities, not scaring or upsetting sexual partners, hating Hamilton “before it was cool” and owning a TV. It’s fitting that a sketch about accepting mediocrity should be so, well, you know.
Next, a group of flowers are excited for Spring, until they’re visited by a number of horrors, including horny bees, perverted weeds, urinating dogs and violent decapitation. This never plays as dark or shocking as it wants to be, and the high-pitched voices the cast use make it all very annoying.
This is followed by another high concept sketch in which possessed child’s doll Chucky (Sarah Sherman) attempts to stab several coworkers at the corporate office he works at, resulting in an HR intervention. A Sarah Sherman special, this feels a bit too random and rushed, although the effects work is effectively uncanny.
On Weekend Update, Colin Jost comments on the 10-year ban handed down by the Oscars to Will Smith, asking “Is that a punishment?” He suggests that Smith should be forced to humiliate himself by hosting next year’s ceremony. A little later, he describes Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s televised speech at Sunday’s Grammy Awards as heartfelt and impassioned but notes that he missed “an opportunity for a legendary GI Jane joke”.
The show Lights, Camera, Achoo! looks back at “some of the sickest performances in film history”. Tonight’s episode focuses on the tubercular cowboy Doc Holiday, as played by Val Kilmer in the western Tombstone, as well as a different actor in a lesser known movie from the previous year called Cough, Cough, Bang, Bang. A clip from the latter see’s Gyllenhaal’s Holiday interrupting a showdown between gunslinging rivals only to utterly disgust everyone by coughing, sneezing, farting and spewing blood and vomit all over the place. Gyllenhaal gives his best performance of the night as the “Patient Zero” of the old west in this slight, but enjoyably gross sketch.
A couples therapy session quickly goes off the rails when the therapist (Johnson) takes a phone call from her significant other and immediately goes on a furious rant, daring her partner to make good on her threats of gun violence, yelling “Come through bitch! It’s on sight!” The danger of the situation continues to escalate, with the therapist dragging the couple into the conflict against their will. The sketch is all over the place, but Johnson’s deranged outbursts and Gyllenhaal’s reading of sexually explicit text messages (which make use of lots of fish metaphors) in an ill-advised black female voice are the highlights of the episode.
Not half an hour after Colin Jost made several jokes about Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith, their daughter Willow joins Camila Cabello on stage for a performance of Psychofreak. This must have made for an interesting afterparty for the cast.
The final sketch of the night sees Bryant play a redneck trucker pitching truck-themed CDs featuring country standards, romantic ballads, spooky folks songs, and children’s classics, about peeing, running other cars off the road and picking up a hitchhiking El Chapo. It’s admirable that Gyllenhaal was so keen on musical comedy, but this isn’t any funnier than the other song-based sketches that preceded it. A thoroughly mediocre episode, the highs weren’t ever very high, but at least the lows weren’t egregiously low.
MASTERS OF THE GAME: $15,000,000 Tournament Purse
Intro: Scottie Scheffler capped off an amazing two months with his grandest feat of all, winning the Masters yesterday and validating his new status as the best player in golf.
Golfer Scottie Scheffler Wins First Masters—And Woods Finishes 47th
"Scottie Scheffler—the No. 1-ranked golfer in the world—extended his dominance by winning the 86th annual Masters tournament Sunday, outdoing second-place finisher Rory McIlroy by finishing the tournament 10 under par and claiming his first victory in a major championship, while five-time winner Tiger Woods struggled mightily in his part-time return to the sport.
$2.7 million. That’s the prize money Scheffler will take home from Augusta National Golf Club, the largest share of the $15 million purse from the Masters.
After a single-car wreck in February 2021 left him with major leg injuries, Woods said he would compete in tournaments part-time. This week’s Masters marked his first competitive appearance since the 2020 Masters a year and a half ago.
The PGA Championship, the next major golf tournament, will begin May 19 at the Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The U.S. Open will follow, teeing off June 16 from the Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. Following Sunday’s Masters, Woods told Sky Sports he was unsure if he will play in either of the upcoming majors, but confirmed he will play at the British Open in July: "It's my favorite golf course in the world,” Woods said of the Old Course at St. Andrews, where the British Open will take place, “so I will be there for that one, but anything in between that I don't know."
THE ZELENSKIY MEDIA MACHINE: Waging Information War for Public Opinion by Providing Press Handouts
A wink and a walk: Boris Johnson’s warm welcome on secret Kyiv visit
The PM flew to Poland and then travelled by Ukrainian rail for his meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskiy
"Boris Johnson embarked on his trip to Kyiv in utmost secrecy. He arrived in the Ukrainian capital on Saturday without the world’s media realizing he was there until footage of him strolling the streets with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy emerged. . .Only after he had returned to the UK did a Downing Street spokesperson confirm he had flown to Poland and then travelled by train via Ukrainian railways.
In a grainy video published by the railway service, the prime minister paid tribute to the transport workers for their bravery, before pausing for photos with them in a train carriage. “I gathered you’re called the iron people … I think it also reflects the spirit you’re showing and the spirit of Ukraine in standing up to the appalling aggression we’re seeing. We in the UK stand in sympathy and solidarity with you,” he said in the video message.
Johnson had been reported to be “desperate” to visit Kyiv for weeks, and he made it just a day after the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, and the same morning as the Austrian chancellor Karl Nehammer.
It is understood the trip to Ukraine was supposed to be kept secret until the prime minister returned to the UK, but it was announced by the Ukrainian embassy in London in mid-afternoon on Saturday in a tweet saying “Surprise” and accompanied by a winking emoji.
Surprise 😉 pic.twitter.com/AWa5RjYosD
— Embassy of Ukraine to the UK (@UkrEmbLondon) April 9, 2022
> Once in Kyiv on Saturday, his walk around the capital took him to Independence Square and past a monument to the “Heavenly Hundred” heroes who died in pro-EU protests in 2014.
> Johnson also had a meeting with Zelenskiy, sitting alone across a large desk, where he pledged armoured vehicles and anti-ship missile systems.
> Appearing alongside Zelenskiy in a recorded broadcast clip, Johnson said the west would continue to “ratchet up” sanctions on Moscow as he praised the courage of the Ukrainian resistance.
“I think that the Ukrainians have shown the courage of a lion, and you Volodymyr have given the roar of that lion,” he said. “The UK and others [will] supply the equipment, the technology, the knowhow, the intelligence, so that Ukraine will never be invaded again. So Ukraine is so fortified and protected – so that Ukraine can never be bullied again. Never be blackmailed again. Never be threatened in the same way again.”
The latest support package represents a significant stepping up of UK military assistance to Ukraine.
> Johnson appeared to receive a warm welcome from the Ukrainian public, with footage of an encounter with one Ukrainian man praising Britain’s contribution to his country’s war effort.
> A woman gave Johnson and Zelenskiy ceramic cockerels – a symbol of Ukrainian defiance since a pottery rooster remained standing on a dresser after the Russian bombardment of Borodyanka.
If there were any difficult moments in terms of security or his reception, these have not made their way into the public domain.
. . . Zelenskiy’s chief diplomatic adviser said on Sunday the visit was “very timely and very important” in terms of the war. Igor Zhovkva told Sunday Morning on BBC One that the prime minister’s unannounced visit to the Ukrainian capital came at the invitation of Zelenskiy.
“Any visit that is happening now to the Ukraine is done on the invitation of the president of the Ukraine. Prime Minister Johnson received this invitation and he agreed. It might be a surprise for you but it is not a surprise for us. We were preparing for a while. This visit was very timely and very important in terms of war,” he told the programme.
Photos and footage of the visit were largely provided by the Ukrainian government press office as handouts. . ."
INTERCEPT VIDEO Culture Wars Arriving Soon in a Local Suburban School Board Near You
video
In the liberal suburbs of Fairfax County, Virginia, conservative parents like Carrie Lukas have come to local school board meetings to air their frustrations with the failures of the public school system during the Covid-19 pandemic. In late January, Lukas used her two minutes during public comment to criticize mask mandates and call for school privatization.
But when Lukas came to the microphone, she represented more than her family. As the president of a right-wing think tank called the Independent Women’s Forum, Lukas also advanced the interests of her billionaire donors: some of America’s wealthiest people who, for decades, have backed efforts to defund public schools, attack teachers unions, and undermine the scientific community.
The various crises in public education during the pandemic — both real and manufactured — have offered a prime opportunity for wealthy interests to advance this agenda. Meanwhile, Republicans nationwide hope that carrying the “parents party” mantle will help win over suburban voters and carry them back to power in national elections."
Sunday, April 10, 2022
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Flash News: Ukraine Intercepts Russian Kh-59 Cruise Missile Using US VAMPIRE Air Defense System Mounted on Boat. Ukrainian forces have made ...
