Late Night (2019)
Late Night (2019)
The cold, bitchy hostess of a long-running late night talk/comedy show is surprised to find out her act has grown stale and her ratings are falling. She brings in a new writer too naive to accept that she's on a sinking ship, and ... maybe the show finds some new life.
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Johnny Lunchbucket
- Posts: 11475
- Joined: Fri Dec 28, 2018 8:02 am
Re: Late Night (2019)
Remember it was okay. Only okay
Re: Late Night (2019)
Yeah, this felt awful paint-by-numbers.
Emma Thompson is the host of a long-running talk show that, as noted, is running on fumes. As the ratings are falling, a new network head tells her it's her last year.
This feels a little false, because in my experience, late night viewers are so brand loyal that stale, formulaic execution night after night doesn't tend to hurt ratings. Jay Leno's Tonight Show felt stale almost from the beginning, but the ratings held steady (and generally ahead of Letterdude) year after year. People like familiarity before bed or something.
But that's not this woman's fate. Fortunately for her, she's recently fired a dude for having the temerity to ask for a raise, and he tells her on the way out the door that she hates other women. So just when she needs to freshen up her brand, she brings in a replacement who is the first woman (Mindy Kaling) on the writing staff in living memory. And despite clashes, they work to make Thompson's character fresh again — too fresh to replace.
Firstly, what a damned shame that, in late middle age, Emma Thompson has allowed herself to be typecast as a vampiric shrew, sucking the youth and life out of female protagonists. I don't know if this is the sixth straight time she's played such a character, but it feels like it.
And she sucks. It's neither a believably horrible character, which tends to be much more insidious, nor is she a dazzlingly entertaining Disney sort of evil, which perhaps they seem to be going for. In fact, her character works best as a cutout stand-in for Ellen, with the short blonde hair and the sneakers on the set working as visual cues, and the simultaneous contempt of her writing staff alongside her demand that they save her working as character cues.
Like most standup comedy on TV and in movies, she's not funny. Even good comics don't tend to come across in such scripts, but she doesn't even seem to have much of an idea what comedy is. Neither do her observations or political digs come across as meaningful or sincere.
What does wring true is seeing the writing staff drag themselves through the workday, plow through the newspapers for setups, and mail in their shit. I do believe that's how real late night comedy staffs work, and it does tend to very quickly make funny folks tired.
But the young(ish) female writer takes an unthinkable amount of shit (from the colleagues as well as the boss), commits to changing the show's tone, and keeps throwing life preservers to folks who don't deserve it, coming back from a termination not once but twice, ultimately changing the whole old-boys-club-under-a-dehumanizing-bitchy-woman culture. It just doesn't ring true. Kaling (whose cadences come across exactly like Mindy Cohn's and once you realize that, you can't get it out of your head — you're welcome) wrote as well as starred in the film, and you have to be very careful about writing a film where you're the hero. It worked with Sylvester Stallone and Matt Damon, because they weren't telling their own story. This is largely built from Kaling's own tale from her days working for The Office, and even if it's all the God's-honest-truth, it sure feels mythologized, with the one-year-later ending so perfectly wrapped and staged.
She and director Nisha Ganatra might have seen that for what it was if she had stepped back and cast somebody else in the role. We all tend to make ourselves the heroes of our own stories. Whether people buy that is another thing, but nobody wants to say it to or faces.
Emma Thompson is the host of a long-running talk show that, as noted, is running on fumes. As the ratings are falling, a new network head tells her it's her last year.
This feels a little false, because in my experience, late night viewers are so brand loyal that stale, formulaic execution night after night doesn't tend to hurt ratings. Jay Leno's Tonight Show felt stale almost from the beginning, but the ratings held steady (and generally ahead of Letterdude) year after year. People like familiarity before bed or something.
But that's not this woman's fate. Fortunately for her, she's recently fired a dude for having the temerity to ask for a raise, and he tells her on the way out the door that she hates other women. So just when she needs to freshen up her brand, she brings in a replacement who is the first woman (Mindy Kaling) on the writing staff in living memory. And despite clashes, they work to make Thompson's character fresh again — too fresh to replace.
Firstly, what a damned shame that, in late middle age, Emma Thompson has allowed herself to be typecast as a vampiric shrew, sucking the youth and life out of female protagonists. I don't know if this is the sixth straight time she's played such a character, but it feels like it.
And she sucks. It's neither a believably horrible character, which tends to be much more insidious, nor is she a dazzlingly entertaining Disney sort of evil, which perhaps they seem to be going for. In fact, her character works best as a cutout stand-in for Ellen, with the short blonde hair and the sneakers on the set working as visual cues, and the simultaneous contempt of her writing staff alongside her demand that they save her working as character cues.
Like most standup comedy on TV and in movies, she's not funny. Even good comics don't tend to come across in such scripts, but she doesn't even seem to have much of an idea what comedy is. Neither do her observations or political digs come across as meaningful or sincere.
What does wring true is seeing the writing staff drag themselves through the workday, plow through the newspapers for setups, and mail in their shit. I do believe that's how real late night comedy staffs work, and it does tend to very quickly make funny folks tired.
But the young(ish) female writer takes an unthinkable amount of shit (from the colleagues as well as the boss), commits to changing the show's tone, and keeps throwing life preservers to folks who don't deserve it, coming back from a termination not once but twice, ultimately changing the whole old-boys-club-under-a-dehumanizing-bitchy-woman culture. It just doesn't ring true. Kaling (whose cadences come across exactly like Mindy Cohn's and once you realize that, you can't get it out of your head — you're welcome) wrote as well as starred in the film, and you have to be very careful about writing a film where you're the hero. It worked with Sylvester Stallone and Matt Damon, because they weren't telling their own story. This is largely built from Kaling's own tale from her days working for The Office, and even if it's all the God's-honest-truth, it sure feels mythologized, with the one-year-later ending so perfectly wrapped and staged.
She and director Nisha Ganatra might have seen that for what it was if she had stepped back and cast somebody else in the role. We all tend to make ourselves the heroes of our own stories. Whether people buy that is another thing, but nobody wants to say it to or faces.