BEFORE: Nicole Kidman carries over from "How to Talk to Girls at Parties", I said I was going to take any opportunity to drop in another Oscar-nominated film - I already had two films queued up with Ms. Kidman in them, that was always part of the plan, so why not just squeeze this one in between the other two, make it three-in-a-row, and at the same time greatly increase my chances of seeing some of the other nominated performances, possibly even see an Oscar-winning performance BEFORE it wins? A quick look through the nominations tells me that in most categories, after today I will have seen at least one, possibly two of the nominees. Best Picture - 2 out of 10, Best Director - 1 out of 5, Best Actor - 2 out of 5, Best Actress - 1 out of 5, Best Supporting Actor - 3 out of 5, Best Supporting Actress - 1 out of 5, Best Original Screenplay - 0, Best Adapted Screenplay - 2 out of 5.
Then in the second tier, my record's not so good - Best Animated Feature, Best International Feature, Best Documentary Feature, Best Documentary Short, Best Live Action Short and Best Animated Short, I've seen nothing, nada, goose eggs. Ah, but then in the technical categories, my record's a little better, Best Sound - 2 out of 5, Best Production Design - 2 out of 5, Best Cinematography - 2 out of 5, Best Makeup and Hair - 3 out of 5, Best Costume Design - 1 out of 5, Best Film Editing - 1 out of 5, and Best Visual Effects - I'll be at 4 out of 5 as soon as I watch "Free Guy" next week.
To be clear, all I've seen are "Dune", "The Power of the Dog", and now THIS one in the major categories, also "House of Gucci", "Coming 2 America", "Shang-Chi" and "Spider-Man: No Way Home" in the technicals. But with just 7 or 8 films watched (plus "The French Dispatch", I still can't believe it got ZERO noms), I've now got a dog in (almost) every fight - and I did this by only watching the movies I wanted to see, so I'm good with that. I'll get to all the others - "Licorice Pizza", "Belfast", "Nightmare Alley", "West Side Story", "CODA", "Don't Look Up", "King Richard", "The Lost Daughter", "The Eyes of Tammy Faye", "Encanto", "The Mitchells vs. the Machines" and "Tick...Tick...Boom" as soon as I can - I would say that four of those are coming up in my April chain for sure, but others on that list aren't even available on streaming yet - whether that's a winning or losing strategy is kind of to be determined, I think.
And here's the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" line-up for tomorrow, March 15:
6:15 am "Lady Be Good" (1941)
8:15 am "Strike Up the Band" (1940)
10:15 am "Easter Parade" (1948)
12:00 pm "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" (1947)
1:45 pm "Little Women" (1949)
4:00 pm "Pride and Prejudice" (1940)
6:00 pm "The Stratton Story" (1949)
8:00 pm "National Velvet" (1944)
10:15 pm "Hamlet" (1948)
1:00 am "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948)
3:15 am "Anchors Aweigh" (1945)
Ha ha, I'm claiming four films tonight, thanks to past marathons of Fred Astaire and Cary Grant films - I've seen "Easter Parade", "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer", "Hamlet" (the Olivier one), "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" - I thought I'd seen "Anchors Aweigh", but I think I'm confusing it with "On the Town". Whoops. Another 4 out of 11 brings me to 65 seen out of 164, or 39.6%.
THE PLOT: Follows Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz as they face one crisis that could end their careers and another that could end their marriage.
AFTER: I think I'm still on solid ground putting this one into the tail end of the "romance" / "relationship" chain, because at the heart of the story is the marriage of Lucy and Desi (I also just added the new documentary about them to my Summer Docs & Concert series, of course it fit in somewhere, so this topic will be covered TWICE this calendar year). I'm going to have to count the days left in March, though - there's an extra Ryan Reynolds film I want to add next week, too - I just need to leave enough room for the Nicolas Cage films, but if it gets tight I can drop one of the one that I was going to have to rent from iTunes, it's not that big a deal. The chain always has to be a LITTLE flexible on these matters, if I'm going to get to my Easter film on time.
I did work at a screening of this film, but I wasn't able to watch it there - I only peeked my head in a couple of time because I just wanted to see how close the two leads ended up resembling Lucy and Desi, and I think they both oddly passed this test. Now the film is on Amazon Prime, so I watched it at home, just about three months after passing up watching it on a movie screen. I kind of dig how quickly movies are getting onto streaming these days, it's saving me some money and time - or perhaps it only FEELS like it's saving me money and time, but it's really not.
Just me?
Anyway, the good news I have to report is that the casting for this biopic was SPOT ON - it's good news because there are like 100 more biopics coming our way, after this one and "Respect" and "Spencer" and the one about Jonathon Larson and the one about Venus & Serena Williams' father, and "The Eyes of Tammy Faye", we've only seen the tip of that iceberg. There are a couple due soon about Elvis, expect films about KISS and Ozzy Osbourne and my personal favorite, "Weird Al" Yankovic. If that's not your thing, others are coming that will focus on Peggy Lee, Dusty Springfield, Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Madonna, Marianne Faithfull, Bob Marley, Cher and the Bee Gees. By this time next year, it's possible that 50% of all Hollywood films being released will be biopics. OK, maybe that estimate is a bit high. But Nicole Kidman nails the LOOK and the VOICE of Lucille Ball, so things are looking up. Javier Bardem is, OK, fine as Desi Arnaz - but come on, J.K. Simmons as William "Fred Mertz" Frawley? It's the role he was BORN to play. Not really, but I guess he sort of aged into it - anyway, he really kind of disappears into the role as the irascible, aging, frequently drunk and eternally pissed-off actor. He already won an Oscar for "Whiplash", but a second one's not out of the question. However, he's up against TWO actors from "The Power of the Dog" and also the deaf actor from "CODA", who's gaining momentum from the SAG Awards and BAFTAs. (I maintain that he should have been nominated for J. Jonah Jameson in "Spider-Man: No Way Home", but maybe that's just me.)
This film directed by Aaron Sorkin starts out with an intent to focus on a particularly crucial week in the life of Lucy and Desi - SPOILERS AHEAD if you haven't seen this film, or "I Love Lucy" before. It's basically the week that the tabloids call Lucille Ball out for once being a member of the Communist Party, and that was a pretty big thing back in the 1950's. Sen. McCarthy? The Red Scare? Anybody remember? Careers were ruined, lives were ruined if actors didn't swear loyalty oaths to the U.S. and publicly denounce the rising threat of Communism, which I get it, but the whole idea seems to go against little things like freedom of speech, freedom of thought and the right to vote however you choose, things that were kind of guaranteed by the Constitution. Why did we even HAVE a Communist Party in the U.S. if nobody was allowed to vote for it, and everybody who joined it got into trouble? That sounds a bit like entrapment to me. "Hey, come on, it's election time, here's a ballot and a pen, vote for any candidate you want...only NOT THAT ONE! Geez, now you're in trouble..."
Lucy DID join the Communist Party, something about doing it to please the man who raised her, or something - the excuse seems really flimsy, but apparently she never went to one meeting or rally or campaigned for any candidate. Then again, she did have RED hair, so she must have been a godless Commie! I guess maybe it was one of those crazy fads from the 1920s like wearing fur coats or flagpole sitting or swallowing goldfish - yes, people did that, it was a weird time. She only joined the Communist Party because it was cool, didn't she? I knew it. Also, in the same week, Lucy found out she was pregnant (for the second time) and she and Desi made the decision to work that into the plot of the show, even though the network censors wouldn't let them even use the WORD "pregnant" on TV, or for that matter, show a married couple sleeping in the same bed. CBS was a family network, after all, they couldn't show women being pregnant or giving birth, only wasn't that the technical definition of "family"? Where did TV audiences think that babies came from? Oh, right, from the stork? WTAF?
And on top of all that, it was also the week (supposedly) where the tabloids also reported that Desi had been seen around town with other women, and though he claimed to his wife that the stories weren't true, that the media was making something out of nothing, and that all those times he came home late or didn't come home at all, he was playing cards with friends, or sleeping on his boat. I think we all can kind of figure out where this is heading - yeah, it's also the week where Lucy started to figure out that maybe the tabloids were on to something, and that her husband had something going on the side. Yes, this was the 1950's, and there were different rules for husbands as there were for wives - I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying that's kind of how things were. Celebrity husbands, especially, weren't really expected to be faithful - with all the gossip and all the divorces over the years, I'm not sure that any celebrity husbands ever were. I'm sure a few Hollywood wives cheated, too, but come on, Hollywood husbands were just the worst.
Wow, that does sound like a busy week! And if the film had just stuck to that week, they might have really had a tale to tell - but (unfortunately, in my opinion) the director just couldn't stick to the plan, Sorkin couldn't resist flashing back to that time that Lucy and Desi met while working on an RKO picture, and also that time when they first slept together, and all those times they met up in the Hollywood Hills when he was coming home from playing at the club, and she was heading over to the movie studio, and they passed like two ships in the night. Very romantic, yes, but those events DID NOT HAPPEN during the week in question - and so we're dealing with excessive time-jumping here, plus the film lines up a certain set of parameters by stating that it's only going to focus on one very momentous week, and then it starts breaking the very rules it just laid out, and showing us events from several years before the "I Love Lucy" show was even created. How the hell is anybody supposed to follow this, when the scenes are all out of order?
Look, I allowed this for Sorkin's last film, "The Trial of the Chicago 7", because while the film focused mainly on the TRIAL (it's, umm, right there in the title) the film did have to flash back to show us the events surrounding the violence at the Democratic National Convention, which is what the trial was all about. But that's a cheat, it's all too seductive, and once a director gets a taste for bending the space-time continuum backwards or folding it in on itself, he's going to want to do it again and again. Then what you end up with is a big random mess like this story, with no temporal focus, and it's all over the place - or is that "all over the time"? Jesus, man, just start the story in the beginning, put the middle in the middle and end it where you want to end it, it's NOT complicated! The plot synopsis on Wikipedia has all the events in the proper order, why doesn't the MOVIE?
Another problem is that on this very momentous week, the episode is being filmed is called "Fred and Ethel Fight". Really? I'll admit I don't know all the episodes of "I Love Lucy", it was a bit before my time, but why not the episode where she's working in a chocolate factory? Or the one where she drinks too much vitamin supplement and can't pronounce the name of the product in the commercial? Why not the one where she's stomping grapes in Italy (though they did find a way to work that one in, via Lucy's imagination in a flash-forward - but that's cheating. Seriously, the movie spends about 20% of its time on Lucy trying to work out better blocking for a scene where Ricky comes home and plays "peek-a-boo" with her, and she pretends to not know who he is? Really? Who cares about this? We're supposed to deduce from THIS that Lucy was some kind of comic genius, a brilliant stager and physical comic? This seems like one of the lamer moments from the sit-com, a total throwaway action, and it's just not worthy of being the focus of so much of "Being the Ricardos".
NITPICK POINT: There was an orchestra in the studio for every episode of "I Love Lucy"? Was it there to entertain the live studio audience during the breaks, like on a modern talk show? Or to play the theme song to start the show? Either way, it seems a bit weird, like an additional expense that wasn't required, or perhaps a hold-over from when they used to record shows on the radio with a full orchestra or swing band. You're telling me that Desi Arnaz, the pioneer of the three-camera studio set-up, the man who figured out how to build a studio set-up that would display adjacent sets with all the rooms in a fake house and STILL have room for the audience on the sound stage, the man who initiated the change from grainy kinescopes to shooting TV on better-looking film, THAT GUY never figured out that you didn't have to record the show's opening theme for every episode? That you could just record the theme ONCE and then never have to pay for the orchestra again? I find that very hard to believe - every producer is ALWAYS looking for ways to cut costs, and if there was a way to shoot an episode without paying 27 guys in white dinner jackets top dollar to tune their instruments and work for 5 minutes for a full day's pay, it's that producer's JOB to find it. Plus, a recording would be more reliable, it always sounds the SAME, there would be no missed notes from the band or out-of-tune trumpets, which is always a possibility.
OK, maybe that was Desi's band, and they were all his friends and mates, and he was all about getting them paid for working each episode, and maybe they entertained the audience between set-ups, I don't know. But I'd think that at some point a network executive would have stepped in and said, "Why do we have a full orchestra on stand-by all the time? Why can't we just play a couple records?"
NITPICK POINT #2: The big "problem" of Lucille Ball being a member of the Communist Party is solved here by Desi just explaining the conundrum to one studio audience - which doesn't really seem like a solution, because there are maybe 100 people in that live audience, and millions more at home who watch the show on TV and didn't get to hear Desi's speech. Millions more who got their news from the newspapers, and same problem, they didn't get to hear Desi's explanation, either. Were they counting on each member of the audience to go home, tell their families that it was all a wacky misunderstanding, and then ask those family members to help spread the word? Also, Desi holds up a telephone to the microphone to get the audience to hear a testimonial from J. Edgar Hoover, to prove that Lucy was cleared by the H.U.A.C. several months earlier - that's the proof? Even in the 1950's, I would expect that people would realize that ANYBODY could be on the other end of that phone line, anybody could CLAIM to be the head of the FBI, and it could have just been some guy imitating Hoover. Right? Or were people still so enthralled by this new telephone device that the prank call hadn't been invented yet? Hey, if you're J. Edgar Hoover, what are you wearing RIGHT NOW, tell the truth!
I'd still like to think that somebody could win an Oscar for this film, but I can't really say for sure. Anyway, all three nominated actors already HAVE Oscars, so if they don't win, they'll still be OK. I haven't read any articles handicapping the races, and that's kind of by intent, but also because I've been so busy. I think I'm just going to go with what I've seen, except I'll watch "Free Guy" next week, then call it a day.
Also starring Javier Bardem (last seen in "Dune"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home"), Nina Arianda (last seen in "Lucky Them"), Tony Hale (last seen in "Happythankyoumoreplease"), Alia Shawkat (last seen in "The Runaways"), Jake Lacy (last seen in "Their Finest"), Clark Gregg (last seen in "In Good Company"), Nelson Franklin (last seen in "Captain Marvel"), Jeff Holman (last seen in "Love & Mercy"), Jonah Platt, Christopher Denham (last seen in "Money Monster"), Brian Howe (last seen in "Return to Me"), Ron Perkins (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), John Rubinstein (last seen in "The Boys from Brazil"), Linda Lavin (last seen in "How to Be a Latin Lover"), Ronny Cox (last seen in "Deliverance"), Baize Buzan, Matt Cook, Josh Bednarsky, Dana Lyn Baron, Dan Sachoff, Max Silvestri, Peter Onorati, Lawrence Novikoff, Rick Batalla, Melinda Sullivan (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), and the voice of John Funk.
RATING: 6 out of 10 cigarette brands sponsoring TV shows (yeah...)
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