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After a lovely day of having a barbecue, playing with my daughter and snoozing, my wife and I unusually had the energy left to watch a film (don’t worry we were still in bed by 10pm- I never really liked staying up late, so I love being a parent because you can sometimes justify going to bed at 8pm). We weren’t in the mood for anything too long or too heavy and plumped for a Kristen Wiig film we’d never heard of called “Welcome to Me”. Usually I would be sceptical of taking such a punt, but I love Kristen Wiig so much that I’d happily take a chance and watch anything she’s done. The first time I saw her was when she stole the show with a tiny part in Knocked Up and we then caught loads of her Saturday Night Live episodes, where she is consistently brilliant (in a show that blows very much hot and cold) and I can’t wait to see her in Ghostbusters (or to go back and destroy all copies of the original Ghostbusters, except one, in which I superimpose breasts and vaginas - plural- on to all the male leads, so the the babies who are annoyed that the new version has women in it are made to cry even more).
We watched the Skeleton Twins recently, which I didn’t enjoy as much and “Welcome To Me”, though a bit more comic, was another more serious acting job for Wiig. And she’s fantastically believable and terrifyingly broken and unpredictable playing a woman with a borderline personality disorder who wins the lottery. I am not sure the film itself quite works or what it’s trying to say outside of satirising obsessions with fame and the way that mentally ill people can be lauded and allowed to wallow in their delusions by the idiot’s lantern. But although having shades of the Truman Show about it, it was quite rare for a modern day movie in that it didn’t really follow many conventions and I didn’t know what was going to happen next, the character’s psychosis making her fairly unpredictable. Some time around the point where she started neutering dogs on “live” TV it began to lose me and I had hoped it would have the bravery to stick to its guns and not have a happyish ending. But certainly for what looked like the equivalent of a straight to video release (forgive me if the fog of parenthood meant that I missed this making a big splash at the cinema) it was a great find and just short and engaging enough to keep my fading attention and make me think.
American comedy seems to be dominated by brilliant women at the moment, with Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Amy Shumer and Kate McKinnon doing incredible work in both being funny and forcing idiots to have to shut up about their ridiculous prejudices (or have to shout them so loud that you become aware of how screwed up they are). We have equivalent talent in the UK and I wish we had something along the lines of Saturday Night Live to bring it out. I mean we’ve got As It Occurs To Me, but anyone appearing in that will become less well known than they previously were (though I do hope to showcase some “unknown” acting and directing talent in that).
Is it too much to expect British TV to come up with a format that would put the country’s hottest new writers in a room and get the country’s hottest and funniest young comedy actors to act out what they write? Sadly I think it is. And as hit and miss as Saturday Night Live can be, the hits are fucking huge.
