SNL's Pete Davidson praises “Short-Ass Movies” with Simon Rex and Gunna

The pandemic has caused many of us to specialize our streaming viewing habits—despite the seemingly endless hours of alone time that have become available, some of us have found our abilities to sit still and focus have evaporated. Pete Davidson captured this phenomenon in one of this week’s Saturday Night Live digital shorts. In the rap video “Short-Ass Movies,” he praised films with an efficient running time, rapping he’s “a simple man with no attention span.”

“Night after night, there’s only one kind of movie I’m always looking for, and that’s a short-ass movie. A really short movie, like at most an hour 40,” he said.

Davidson referenced Netflix scrolling-and-winnowing: “Right before I click it, I look below the line, and that’s where I see the run time.” In one example, he recoils at the three-hour, 47 minute duration of Once Upon a Time in America (which is actually great and you should totally watch, if you have the patience—although we do get where Davidson is coming from). He also reveals that he went to see The Batman in the theater and “pissed his pants” because it was “longer than The Hobbit.”

“On movie night, you won’t be getting any yeses, if you show up with any double VHSes,” Davidson warned.

Chris Redd appears, along with Gunna, this week’s musical guest, who advocates for his favorite movies, “Liar Liar, Evil Dead, Punch-Drunk Love, Eraserhead”—all of which clock in at around the 90-minute mark.

On Instagram this week, Simon Rex (star of the critically acclaimed Red Rocket) teased that he’d be appearing in a filmed bit with Pete Davidson on this week’s SNL, and this was it. As his alter ego, Dirt Nasty, he promises he has “nine great ones just waiting for you.” They’re all the ‘80s Ernest movies, created by Jim Varney. Rex’s uncanny replication of promo photos for the character is worth the watch alone.