The two films today dropped recently. One is an incisive look back at one of the icons of the early days of television, Lucille Ball. The second is a near-future thriller, that sees bots turning against humans.
Being the Ricardos (Amazon Prime) - In the nascent days of television, the undisputed Queen of Comedy was Lucille Ball, with over 60 million viewers regularly tuning in to I Love Lucy, her Monday sit-com show with her husband, Cuban exile Desi Arnaz. This would be the 1950’s and 60’s, pre-social media; and so what the audience would see of her would be pretty much limited to what they’d see on the show. It’s the curiosity as to what happened behind the scenes that drives this Aaron Sorkin quasi-biopic. Sorkin writes and directs, and focuses on one very hectic week in 1953. Being branded a Communist then was no joking matter, and suspecting your husband has been having affairs doesn’t help any. And what Sorkin does, is drop us right into this crazy week, when the survival of the show hung in the balance.
Nicole Kidman portrays Lucy, and Javier Bardem is Desi - and to their credit, rather than imitating the two, they go more for interpretation, and imbibing the spirit of these two icons from the Golden Age of Television. While her on-screen persona is hinted at, and Nicole does her bit of reenacting particular sequences from the hit show, more of the film’s running time is devoted to what went on at different junctures of the show’s lifetime, including how they would weave in her pregnancy into the show - which at the time, was unheard of - like the iconic grape-stomping scene. Her gift for physical comedy, her facial expressions, and how the studio audience would all lap it up, are part of Sorkin’s narrative. Sorkin still writes better than he directs - so while the screenplay offers a number of juicy scenes of marital discord, it’s all offered like straight reportage.
Mother/Android (hulu) - There was a time when the young actress Chloe Grace Moretz was so much in demand, that it was hard to find a prestige film project that required a young girl and had not cast her. But somewhere along the way, some poor film project choices, or the constant search for the next big thing, had Hollywood relegating her to the sidelines - still working, but with nary a buzz. So it was with some interest that I noted she was the lead in this SciFi thriller on hulu. The premise has do with AI bots ‘revolting’, and trying to take over the world. As one military person in the film muses, it’s hard to contend with an enemy who doesn’t need to sleep at all. To raise the stakes of the plot, Chloe’s Georgia is nine months pregnant for much of the film.
So the narrative of the film has preggers Georgia, and boyfriend Sam (Algee Smith), taking a perilous journey to Boston - supposedly a safe colony, where one can live in relative safety from the androids. Naturally, it isn’t a case of a simple car drive, and the couple have to go off-track and off the radar to safely make it to Beantown. There’s commitment to the cause on the part of Moretz and Smith, but the sad fact, is that sooner than should be the case, we stop caring about their plight or if they’ll make it. Some of the film’s visuals impress and help us pass the time; but ultimately, you’ll feel like you’ve been here before, and there isn’t really anything to get excited about. Even the ‘twist’ at the end, is something you can see coming from a mile away.