Thursday, February 24, 2022

Being the Ricardos

 













                         Since we're in the final days of February, for which means the end of love, well into some degree either way you know what I mean. Anyway, I figured I check out this movie that tells the story of America's original sweethearts in the 1950's, Being the Ricardo’s, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin the man most responsible for great works like A Few Good Men and The West Wing, and a personal favorite The Newsroom. This is somewhat of a classic tale of America's Sweethearts of their behind-the-scenes life, while shooting one of their latest episodes of I Love Lucy. I would argue that Aaron Sorkin is an exceptional writer when it comes to stories and politics in general and he know doubt has some great works to back it up I have now arguments there. But when it comes to his latest film I honestly don't know where he was trying to go with in terms of storytelling and history we already know. So, let's talk about the behind the scenes of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. 
                         In 1952, Hollywood power couple Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) and Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem) face personal and professional obstacles that threaten their careers, their relationship, and their hit television show.
                         I've seen a ton of Sorkin's films and the best way I can describe the many Sorkin Tropes are, in all of his films they always feel like a live play production where they’re very limited in terms of the outdoors and after every beginning or ending to an Act we have a special narration almost like a interview portion or telling a story in the style of just setting it in some kind of special event. And this film has almost all of Sorkin's Tropes when it comes to writing a story, which is fine if you’re doing it in your earlier work but this movie you can tell that he's using almost every sample of storytelling and editing technique from his past movies and to be truthful it just feels lazy a little on the boring side, for many reasons I didn't know anything about Molly Bloom's story until I saw the trailer to Molly's game and watched the movie and I defiantly looked at that movie and thought that it was fresh and interesting at the same time furthermore amazing, but with this movie I already knew about Lucy and Desi Arnaz in terms of there off screen persona moreover the real reasons why their show got cancelled was because Desi was obviously cheating on his wife that he never got fresh work ever again and I'll admit I didn't know about Lucy was branded a communist at the time but who didn't get branded with red tape during the Joseph McCarty era, but even if I didn't know that the way Sorkin directed the film and used the main topics of Lucy being a communist or is Desi cheating on her then solving these two problems all in one week just didn't set me back in surprise in all honesty. The most positive thing I can say about the movie was Nicole Kidman's performance as Lucille Ball, mainly because we've all know how she is on the TV show of I Love Lucy, but this movie we're giving a chance to see her behind the scenes and how committed she is when it comes to getting the comedic work right and I thought Kidman did a great job in not just getting the accent down but also giving her a humanized feel to the character, the other actors where okay but they weren't anything special. A side from Nicole Kidman's performance the whole movie just felt useless to watch all together moreover I can probably count the many times I was looking at my Fitbit or phone and I didn't pick up anything knew or anything different throughout the entire film. In fairness I wouldn't recommend watching this movie from the way I tried to hold on to the entire film, and really the movie would have been more interesting if the film was set after the events of the final show run then proceed to the divorce of America's Sweethearts because deep down that would of been more interesting storytelling than discovering if Lucy was a Communist or was Desi cheating on his wife, that's all I'm saying. 
     

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