Trump and Kennedy
Go tanning together
shareWhy didn't they just let Baldwin play Trump since he's done it for like EVER as opposed to Kennedy and his portrayal is terrible??
shareHe sucked at trump. It wasn't funny. It was more HATRED than HUMOR. The over-exaggerated lip-movements he did were both annoying and inaccurate. Good riddance. I like the new guy so much better. Proving that even though I voted for Trump, I'm not offended at the impersonations. I just can't stand Baldwin.
shareIt is interesting that as Alec Baldwin seeks to do SOMETHING to extricate himself from the tragedy that was the "Rust" movie fatal shooting, his rather "lordly" friend Lorne Michaels has been the one to give Baldwin an opportunity to make appearances "semi-regularly" on Saturday Night Live.
Baldwin's other opportunites since Rust have evidently been numerous -- but not major. There are all sorts of "straight to streaming movies" being made , often outside of the US where Baldwin has been able to make some coin, but one assumes that -- Baldwin isn't getting paid much for them(as opposed to Bruce Willis in his own quite different tragedy , who was evidently paid a million or two per short appearance in HIS made for streaming movies.)
So Lorne is "sticking up for his friend" and it still feels weird.
This was most pointed a few weeks ago when somebody joined "the Five Timers club" of SNL hosts and as the OTHER 5-timers were front and center, Baldwin rather sat by himself in a corner after delivering his few lines. Perhaps that staging was on PURPOSE ("We all know that Alec is an outsider right now, so here you go") but it did slightly dampen the sketch.
That's where Alec Baldwin IS right now...his apppearances dampen the sketch. And placing him ALONGSIDE the new guy playing Trump just rather heightens the problem.
But I expect that Lorne Michaels will keep giving Baldwin air time indefinitely -- slowly bring him back into the party.
Should Michaels retire soon after this 50th year -- maybe Baldwin leaves with him.
CONT
Two things to remember about Alec Baldiwn BEFORE the Rust tragedy:
ONE: The guy WAS funny. That's one reason that Michaels kept bringing him back to host. His whispery voice -- X-rated sexy in his thinner, younger days -- now worked for comedy as he would deliver his lines with a certain funny, knowing pomposity. And on the show 30 Rock -- hatched by SNLer Tina Fey -- Baldwin was key to the whole thing. Without Baldwin in it to center the comedy with his gravitas(he HAD been a movie star for awhile), 30 Rock wouldn't have been much -- the others weren't all that funny except for Fey, who got lifted higher with every Baldwin scene.
Back in 2006, Baldwin was cast in Scorsese's The Departed, and though surrounded by young stars(Leo, Matt, Markie) and one legend(Nicholson), Baldwin still held his own and was downright FUNNY in the scene where he talked to Matt Damon while hititng golf drives. ("You wear a wedding ring, that's good. Shows there's a woman who can put up with you and that your dick still works.")
TWO: Even in his "better days" (movie star in Glengarry Glen Ross and The Hunt for Red October before the TV stuff), Baldwin had a reputation as one of the crazier, meaner, more arrogant males in Hollywood. Plenty of tabloid fodder and examples of Baldwin "punching down at the little people" in "don't you know who I am?" ways. His quotes in the SNL oral biography were pretty dismissive of others -- he raged how one SNL stepped on his joke, he was contemptuous of the "drooling nerds" who became movie stars, etc.
So it all came together with the Rust shooting. As his own lawyers said, there was no legal reason to prosecute Baldwin just for being an asshole(paraphrased.) And indeed, he "got off" -- which likely would have happened anyway, but he hired the kind of high-priced lawyers who killed the case early on evidentary reasons -- money talked.
CONT
Which is one reason there is likely STILL animas "out there" towards Alec Baldwin and his SNL appearances. Much as he "got off" via lawyers that only the very rich can buy, he has been "given back a small career" by the friend that only a rich can have (Lorne Michaels.)
Eh, let him continue. He's still kinda funny when he gets the right lines.
And I DO wish his trial had continued long enough not so much as to convict him as to show that he just MAY have contributed to a sloppy, hectic filming under the gun of a star's power and arrogance.