All along I’ve been fretting that even with the “work” she’s had done, Nicole Kidman (who turned 54 last June) will look too old to play Lucille Ball in her early 40s. But the Being The Ricardos trailer that popped earlier today alleviates all such concerns.

I don’t know how it was done (not through prosthetics, I’m told) but Kidman looks much younger here. Like she did in Eyes Wide Shut, I’d say. My first presumption is that the same kind of digital finessing that de-aged Robert De Niro in The Irishman was used here. That or Kidman has had some fresh work done, and of a very high order.

Aaron Sorkin‘s Being The Ricardos happens over a dramatically compressed one-week period in the early ’50s that actually spanned four years — the launch of I Love Lucy in 51, the “Lucy once registered as a Commie” thing in ’53, the January ’55 Confidential cover story that asked “Does Desi Really Love Lucy?,” etc.

In 2011, after serving half of her 26-year sentence for conspiring to murder her husband Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) was given a chance to get out of prison if she would submit to a work-release program. According to La Stampa, Reggiani said “I’ve never worked in my life, [and] I’m certainly not going to start now.”

C’mon, that’s a great, self-defining line! Easily as good as “no wire hangers!” or “don’t fuck with me, fellas!” or “Christina, get the axe!” But unless I was snoozing and somehow missed it, Gaga never says this line in House of Gucci and the quote doesn’t appear in an epilogue crawl. What does that tell you about where Ridley Scott‘s film is coming from? I’ll tell you where it’s coming from. It’s trying to cut Patrizia a break.

Reggiani was paroled in 2016.

Ridley Scott‘s House of Gucci (UA Releasing, 11.24) is a cool, muted, decently made docudrama about how the Gucci family business gradually went downhill in the ’80s and ’90s, and how the 1995 murder of Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) by killers hired by Maurizo’s ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), seemed to signify this decline.

The problem for me was one of expectation. Goaded by the trailers and that Patrizia Reggiani-slash-Lady Gaga money quote — “I don’t consider myself to be a particularly ethical person, but I am fair” — I was expecting Gaga to deliver a ruthless, high-camp, carniverous dragonlady — a new version of Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest.

Alas, despite what Team Variety and the fawning Twitter whores are saying, that’s not what this movie is. It’s not out to make Reggiani some kind of fang-toothed pit viper. It’s actually about trying to portray her in a half-sympathetic light. And so House of Gucci is basically about how an admittedly ambitious woman reacts when she’s scorned and bruised and cast aside.

@ladygaga makes her entrance in @gucci. Matriarchs are born, not made.👑 #HouseofGucci pic.twitter.com/hlJMpTiX6O

— House of Gucci (@HouseOfGucciMov) November 9, 2021

After 28 years with NBC and at 61 years of age, MSNBC’s Brian Williams could keep going for at least another 15 years, and yet the New Canaan, Connecticut resident has announced that he’s stepping down “to spend more time with [his] family.”

I don’t know what’s really going on here. The wealthy Williams is certainly entitled to do whatever the hell he wants. But since John Mitchell announced in July 1972 that he was resigning as Attorney General to spend more time with the family, that excuse has been universally derided as complete bullshit.

Williams knows that, of course. So using the words “spend more time with family” forces us to interpret it as a kind of code message. Williams is obviously telling us that the real reason is something else. I hope it’s not health-related.

Hats off to whomever designed this poster. Cool and classy, excellent poise and balance, a suggestion of tragedy. Kristen Stewart doesn’t wear a black outfit of any kind in the film, but that’s okay. The poster is the poster and the film is the film, and Spencer doesn’t live up to what the poster conveys or promises.

What are some other instances in which a poster was much more exciting and engaging than the film it was selling?

“I’ve never understood why Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three doesn’t get half the love that Some Like It Hot does. I will bravely defend this gem a week from Sunday (Nov. 21) at the Los Feliz American Cinematheque. Humor and satire so fast and brash that it makes His Girl Friday feel like The Tree of the Wooden Clogs!. Come on down!” — Daniel Waters on Facebook.

I’ll tell you why it doesn’t get half the love that Some Like It Hot does. Because some of it is dated, some of it isn’t funny, and one or two scenes are dreadful. (Don’t ask.) But Act Three, which is all about James Cagney‘s C.R. MacNamara, a ruthless Cola Cola executive, changing Horst Buccholz‘s Otto Ludwig Piffle, a scruffy, revolutionary Communist, into a monacle-wearing dandy in a three-piece suit within two or three hours, is dead perfect. Especially….

Cagney to Buccholz: “Is that all the gratitude I get for getting you out of jail?”
Buccholz to Cagney: “You got me into jail!”
Cagney to Buccholz: “So we’re even.”

I would love to watch this 1961 classic with an enthusiastic crowd, but I’m worried about the AC’s intention to show a 35mm print. I have the Bluray, and it looks absolutely exquisite. Why don’t they just show a digital version? Film is over-rated.

A couple of weeks ago I saw Robert Weide‘s Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (IFC Films, 11.19), a decades-in-the-making portrait of the late beloved novelist, whose novels Weide fell for a long time ago. And then he met Vonnegut and bonded with him, and began filming the doc back in the early ’80s (or something like that), and now, 40 years hence, it’s finally done.

I’m a Vonnegut fan and therefore partial, but Weide’s film is an intimate and devotional portrait of a fascinating, very special Great Depression and WWII-generation writer…a guy who became an inspirational cult figure for God-knows-how-many-hundreds-of-thousands of youths in the late ’60s and ’70s and beyond the infinite and all the way to Tralfamadore.

I’ve almost always been “somewhere else”, all my life. Hence the name of this column.

At any given moment I’m back in Paris or Prague or Hanoi, or in junior or senior high school or suffering through my tweener years, or tapping out a piece on my IBM Selectric in either my West 4th Street or Bank Street apartment, or hitting the Mudd Club in the early ’80s, or getting bombed or doing drugs with my friends in the early to mid ’70s or listening to David Bowie‘s “Beauty and the Beast” on a friend’s bedroom stereo in the late ’70s. Or traipsing around a wintry Park City during the hey-hey Sundance years (’95 to ’15).

Occasionally I’ll pay attention to people I’m talking to or events I happen to be witnessing or places I happen to be, but most of the time I’m Billy Pilgrim.