In this big screen spin-off of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, two small-town cable TV hosts and lifetime best friends (Mike Myers and Dana Carvey) spend their days and nights chasing babes (schwing!) and refusing to budge from their long-haired, head-banging style. Ably capturing the goofiness and exuberance of youth and love of music, director Penelope Spheeris (THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION PARTS 1 and 2) brings a natural sense of fun and abandon to the film. Features appearances by Rob Lowe, Chris Farley and rockers Meat Loaf and Alice Cooper.
cast
Mike Myers as Wayne Campbell
quote
Garth Algar: Benjamin is nobody's friend. If Benjamin were an ice cream flavor, he'd be pralines and dick.
One of the most standard architectures for a comedy team is the straight and the wacky. The straight person will generally seem either just very normal or perhaps romantic. The wacky person is, well, wacky. Examples are Crosby and Hope, Burns and Allen, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, Rowan and Martin, and even Bergen and McCarthy. Generally the wacky person gets most of the laughs and the straight person gets top billing just for setting up the wacky person's jokes. There is more potential when you have two or more comics playing off each other as you did with the Marx Brothers or what is to my mind the best of the teams, Laurel and Hardy. So Mike Myers and Dana Carvey--playing their SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE alter egos Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar--start with a plus. Both are comics. There is potential for some really good humor. Unfortunately, they rarely play off each other for laughs. Either each does his own thing or they just both do the same thing. Wayne's main thing is to make a joke or do something clever and then flash a big open-mouthed grin as if he were standing in front of a cheering audience. He also negates sentences by adding a belated " ... not." Garth's thing is to act a little befuddled and stupid. Not the most auspicious starting material, but with enough personality the team could have potential. Where they go wrong is that they are just not all that winning, and most of their gags are familiar and not funny.
