SNL host Emma Stone accused of souping, trampolining, Brett Favre

Saturday Night Live host Emma Stone played the role of the dumbfounded student tonight in SNL’s devastating mock-up of a local television news broadcast, which made light of the fact that such broadcasts are often designed entirely to attempt to scare the locals into tuning in with sensationalistic and/or fabricated stories. The sketch had the local news claiming that local teenagers were participating in a disturbing new trend called “souping” in which they were supposedly getting high by drinking entire cans of expired soup. Emma Stone portrayed a high school student who had no idea what to make of the obviously fabricated story, while her mother (portrayed by Kristen Wiig) naturally believed the entire story from top to bottom.

The SNL sketch then went on to profile the made-up practice of “trampolining” in which teenagers are supposedly performing oral sex on each other via the boy sitting on the roof of a house while the girls jumps up and down on a trampoline. As if to drive home the point that local news broadcasts routinely make up scary-sounding local crises out of thin air without shame, the news station posted a “disturbing photo” of two teens performing trampolining, which was nothing more than a stick-figure drawing. Again, Emma Stone’s teenage character had no idea what the reporters were talking about, while her mother once again bought into the phony story.

Another sketch on SNL offered a spin on the recent Brett Favre controversy. Combining Favre’s long running blue jeans commercials with recent accusations of him exposing himself in photos led to a sketch in which Favre was promoting “open fly jeans.”

Forget MacGruber, check out MacGyver in iTunes

Okay, so we’ve already told you just how bad the upcoming MacGruber movie appears to be based on its television teaser trailer, so we won’t beat it to death. But here’s a novel idea: if you’re going to skip the movie (and we’re pretty sure most of were planning to just that even before the trailer surfaced), why not instead invest the time in the classic television series that the sketch was originally based on?

In fortuitously coincidental timing (or perhaps not so coincidental), various seasons of the original MacGyver TV show starring Richard Dean Anderson have been popping up in iTunes, one by one, over the past few weeks starting with the first season, and now all seven (although some of the later season seven episodes don’t yet appear to be there). Sure, going back and watching MacGyver at this point is like a trip down memory lane back to when the Berlin Wall was still standing and nearly every episode conveniently had some Eurasian communist government as the villain – but hey, that’s the world some of us grew up in. Be sure to start with the pilot episode, in which the bald guy who plays MacGyver’s boss Pete is bizarrely playing some other character instead.

MacGruber movie in 30 seconds

We know you missed last night’s MacGruber sketch on Saturday Night Live – since there wasn’t one, despite the impending release of the MacGruber movie and the fact that the movie’s co-star Ryan Phillippe was hosting – but just in case you missed the trailer for the upcoming movie which aired during a commercial break on the SNL broadcast, we’ll sum it up for you in a paragraph which should take you even less time to read than the watching the trailer would have taken:

Will Forte’s MacGruber character makes an overconfident joke about his bomb-diffusion skills, and before he finishes his sentence, the bomb blows up behind him. Bullets start flying, and MacGruber grabs Phillippe’s character and uses him as a bullet shield; Phillippe asks how MacGruber knew he was wearing a bullet proof vest; MacGruber claims he didn’t know. A female character excuses herself to use the restroom; MacGruber asks if she’s going to take a “number one” or a “number two”; she declines to state; he assumes the latter.

In hindsight, the trailer seems even worse now that we’ve tried to put it into words. It’s entirely possible that the movie’s makers have cleverly decided to use the worst bits of the movie in the trailer, in an attempt to make us think “this is so bad it must be good, so let’s go see it” – because these clearly can’t have been the movie best bits. If so, that would imply that the movie contains even worse jokes than in the trailer, which might somehow violate the laws of physics.

If you need more convincing, there’s a longer two minute-plus trailer available for viewing here.

If you were on the fence about going to see the MacGruber movie, our description above likely just saved you eight dollars and two hours of your life; if anyone does go to see it when it opens and finds that it’s not as bad as the trailer suggests, be sure to let us know.

Saturday Night Live: five bizarre things about tonight’s episode

1. Kesha’s space alien line: After a not-that-strange performance of her hit song Tik Tok, in which she wore an American flag and her band was dressed as aliens or astronauts, she dropped the line “Did anyone ever stop and think maybe we are the aliens?” on the audience. We don’t know what it means either. But the performance was fun.

2. Where was the MacGruber sketch? The not-that-funny SNL sketch has for some reason been turned into a full length movie, and Ryan Phillippe is the major non-cast star of the movie, and oh look, he’s hosting SNL tonight. And yet, wait for it… no MacGruber sketch. Maybe the show’s producers feared that if we saw Phillippe and Will Forte do MacGruber on the show, we’d feel like we’d already seen it and have no need to head to the movie theater afterwards. Or…

3. MacGruber trailer is startlingly unfunny. …maybe they didn’t want us to see Phillippe and Forte in action in a MacGruber sketch because there’s nothing to see. In a trailer which ran during a commercial break around the midnight mark, the MacGruber movie was revealed to be possibly even worse than we were expecting; seriously, the highlight of the trailer was MacGruber making a joke about a woman taking a #1 or a #2 when she got up to head to the bathroom. Maybe they’re going for the “so unfunny it’s funny” angle. Or maybe they just saved you eight bucks by showing you the trailer.

4. Lunatic sketch finally gets some context. You know that sketch where some normal-seeming middle aged guys are sitting around in lawn chairs drinking beer and start casually sharing stories which gradually reveal them all to be criminals and psychopaths? Yeah, we’ve seen it a dozen times before, and although their increasingly brazen descriptions of ludicrous crimes are typically chuckle-worthy, the sketch never really went anywhere – except this time, at the end, the guys picked up their protest signs and headed out to a rally – it turns out they’re not just lunatics, they’re tea party lunatics. Finally, the kind of sketch-ending twist (that we all should have seen coming but didn’t) that the show used to do so well.

5. Kesha’s second costume. If you thought the flag thing was tame the first time around, she made up for it when she performed her second song with an outfit that basically made her invisible except for the ton of neon lines of various colors running around her outfit – including a giant green cross on her chest (see grainy photo above). It may have qualified as being even stranger than whatever it was that Lady GaGa was wearing when she did SNL. Not that we’re keeping score.

Ten One Stylus is iPad-compatible

Ten One Design has announced, perhaps not surprisingly, that its existing stylus products for iPhone and iPod touch are fully compatible with the iPad. The lineup consists of the standard Pogo Stylus as well as the longer Pogo Sketch, the latter of which as a built-in shirt/pocket clip. Both products consist of an aluminum tube with a padded tip which the company claims offers a more precise touchscreen user experience. Both are currently available for $14.95 each.

Learn more about the Pogo Stylus and Pogo Sketch at TenOneDesign.com.

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Filed Under: Industry News
Tagged: accessories, iPad, pogo, sketch, stylus, TenOne Design, touchscreen