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.
It’s not Maggie Gyllenhaal and Dakota Johnson‘s “fault” — tens of thousands of fashion-conscious women blindly follow the dictates of avant-garde designers. And now, unfortunately bell-bottoms (aka ’70s-retro flares) have caught on. Two of the perpetrators are Gucci and Ganni Plissé-Georgette.
HE to Gyllenhaal, Johnson: Please don’t — they look awful. Not to mention Johnson’s ghastly super-wide jacket lapels.
…that no one and I mean no one will have the nerve to ask during this evening’s post-screening q & a.
Thanks There’s no disputing that Beanie Feldstein‘s performance as Monica Lewinsky (particularly that look of shock and intimidation and primal fear) is fully present, and obviously skillful and affecting.
But for a miniseries in which the makeup department used every trick in the book to make the actors look as much as possible like the character they were playing (especially in the matter of Sarah Paulson‘s Linda Tripp), they were given a hopeless task when it came to Beanie. I’ve seen all seven episodes thus far, and her lack of resemblance has thrown me each and every time. Why then?
The apparent idea was to emphasize Beanie/Monica’s victim status…the huge gulf between mousey little Beanie and Clive Owen‘s silky Bill Clinton…doubling-down on Clinton’s opportunism and sexual exploitation. But if a gifted actor with at least a slight physical resemblance to Lewinsky had been cast, the miniseries would have been that much better.
“Why didn’t the Eternals intervene when Ultron tried to destroy the world, or when Thanos was about to wipe out half the universe, you ask? Apparently they’re only allowed to take action when the deviants are involved.”
Or why, HE asks, didn’t they step in during the Nazi holocaust to try and save a few million Jews from horrible death? Or during the mass murders of Cambodian citizens in the mid to late ’70? Part of the answer is that the Eternals believe that tragedies are teaching experiences, and that people grow after experiencing them. Apparently they’re only allowed to take action when the deviants are involved.
But really, how worthless are the Eternals in a general sense?
I’ve chatted with Leonardo DiCaprio a few times, and can confirm he’s around six feet tall. At 5’7″ Jeff Bezos is five inches shorter than Leo, and shorter still if Leo is standing on an elevated platform of some kind. Bezos’ girlfriend Lauren Sanchez is 5’3″, and therefore four inches shorter than Bezos and nine inches shorter than Leo. Sanchez is reacting to Leo as if he’s the coolest, most glorious, super-sexy alpha male she’s ever encountered in her life, but I’ve seen women behave this way with celebrities a thousand times in a thousand different places. If she was unattached could Leo have her without breaking a sweat? Apparently, but remember his alleged rule about a certain age limit.
After serving a 20-year term in Spandau Prison for exploiting slave labor during World War II, the urbane and well-spoken Albert Speer — Nazi armaments minister from ’42 through’45, grand architect and Adolf Hitler confidante — published two well-written, self-serving books about his Nazi experience.
“Inside the Third Reich” (’69) was the most widely read and influential as far as Speer’s reputation was concerned. He presented himself as a basically decent and civilized family man who made a deal with the devil and was therefore “inescapably contaminated morally” for his complicity with the Nazi regime…forever stained and doomed to carry a searing sense of guilt for the rest of his life. “”
Out of these two books Speer became known not as “the good Nazi,” as many have called him, but the “not quite as bad as the other Nazi fanatics” guy with at least some sense of moral self-awareness and regret…a man who hadn’t denied his guilt and had served his prison sentence, and was looking to somehow atone in the years he had left. Speer died at age 76 in 1981.
Speer Goes to Hollywood director Vanessa Lapa, producer Tomar Eliav — Thursday, 11.4, 1:40 pm.
Vanessa Lapa‘s Speer Goes to Hollywood (opening today) is a 97-minute argument that Speer wasn’t the urbane smoothie he portrayed himself as, and that he was aware of the extermination of the Jews, and that he was just as much of a Nazi shit as Himmler or Geobbels or Bormann or any of the others.
It is HE’s belief that Speer was definitely an ambitious, anti-Semitic, cold-hearted prick who engaged in a Faustian bargain for his own professional benefit. But it is also HE’s view that his saga is not anomalous, and that many seemingly or ostensibly civilized people have supported evil policies and homicidal regimes throughout history.
The Brazilian senate recently endorsed a report that accused president Jair Bolsonaro of the Covid-related murder of tens of thousands of Brazilians due to neglect, incompetence and anti-scientific denialism. How many tens of thousands of Americans needlessly died as a direct result of Donald Trump‘s similar response to Covid-19, and who would argue that Dr. Deborah Birx wasn’t at least partly complicit in these deaths? Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger knew that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, but they kept it going for three or four years after the Nixon administration took power in January ’69 and in so doing caused the needless deaths of tens of thousands of Vietnamese. 1.7 million people were murdered in the Cambodian killing fields — were the Khmer Rouge cadres who saw to these deaths born killers, or were they just loyalists who did what was expected? How many hundreds of thousands died in China’s Great Cultural Revolution? 17,000 were killed during the French terror of the 1790s. How many hundreds or thousands of present-day careers have been destroyed by woke terrorists?
Throughout history ambitious cutthroat types have done almost anything to get ahead or serve their superiors, and they’ve never given a damn how many innocent lives were sacrificed in the bargain.
How much different can Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story (20th Century Studios, 12.10) be from Robert Wise‘s Oscar-showered 1961 version?
Spielberg’s will presumably be woke-ier, for sure. (More critical of Riff and the Jets, more embracing of Bernardo and the Sharks as well as the general Puerto Rican perspective.) In the Wise version tenement back alleys and fire escapes were freshly painted in one or two scenes; Spielberg almost certainly won’t go there. Janusz Kamiński‘s partially desaturated cinematography will distinguish itself from Daniel Fapp‘s somewhat prettified capturings, and will doubtless seem snazzier and more sophisticated in terms of framing and cutting. And perhaps the performances in the new version (principally from Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose, David Alvarez and Mike Faist) will feel stronger and more affecting that those from those from the old gang (Richard Beymer, Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris, Russ Tamblyn).
But these aspects aside, Spielberg’s film can’t help but resemble its cinematic forebear in countless ways. The story is the story, the musical is the musical.
It makes you look weak or woozy or somehow dependent upon the warm bath of booze in the blood. If someone picks up a camera, always put the glass down. That said, Newman and clan look awfully good here. Those moist Connecticut lawns and especially the fragrance following a rainfall. Judging by the gray in his hair, I’d say it was taken around the time of Fort Apache, The Bronx (’81) or The Verdict (‘82).
In a recent chat with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, Sopranos godfather & creator David Chase acknowledged for the second time that Tony Soprano was indeed “hit” in the final seconds of the last episode, “Made in America,” which aired on 6.10.07.
Chase’s first acknowledgement happened during a 2018 q & a with “Sopranos Sessions” co-authors Matt Seitz and Alan Sepinwall. Chase accidentally let it slip that Tony died in the final minute, and even cursed at Alan and Matt for making him cough this up.
Does anyone recall that in the immediate aftermath of that 6.11 airing, a lot of people didn’t know what had happened, and some declared that the ending was inconclusive?
N.Y. Times columnist Alessandra Stanley, 6.11.07: “David Chase’s last joke was on his audience, not his characters. Tony, Carmela and A. J. are gathered at a diner in a rare moment of family content that cried out for violent interruption. A shifty-looking man walks in and eyes them from the counter, then, in a move echoing a scene from The Godfather, ominously enters the men’s room. Outside, Meadow is delayed, trying to parallel park, then begins walking toward the restaurant.
“Nothing happens. Credits. What?”
N.Y. Post headlines — ‘SOPRANOS” FINALE WHACKS FANS…SHOW’S FINALE FIRES ‘BLANKS’…DARK SCREEN CAPS DISAPPOINTING WRAP…PHIL’S GRISLY HIT IS THE LONE HIGHLIGHT.
“Tony Soprano lives on in perpetual dread and uncertainty — unpunctured, undead, and prevailing after a fashion. That, for better or worse, is what the final episode of The Sopranos left viewers with this evening.
“And anyone who writes in complaining that I’m spoiling the party by writing this can go stuff it. A comprehensive sum-up piece by the AP’s Frazier Moore went up at 11:50 pm eastern, Nikki Finke ran a negative reaction piece even earlier, and finale details are all over Monday morning’s N.Y. Post.
That long-simmering, much-whispered-about rumor about Kirk Douglas having sexually assaulted Natalie Wood at the Chateau Marmont in the summer of 1955…that story has been confirmed by the late actress’s younger sister, 75 year-old Lana Wood, in a forthcoming memoir called “Little Sister” (Dey Street, 11.9).
At the time of the incident Douglas was 38 and Wood had just turned 17. The get-together had been arranged by their mother, Maria Zakharenko, who thought that “many doors might be thrown open for her, with just a nod of his famous, handsome head on her behalf,” according to Lana, who was around eight at the time.
AP: “It seemed like a long time passed before Natalie got back into the car and woke me up when she slammed the door shut,” Lana writes. “She looked awful. She was very disheveled and very upset, and she and Mom started urgently whispering to each other. I couldn’t really hear them or make out what they were saying. Something bad had apparently happened to my sister, but whatever it was, I was apparently too young to be told about it.”
“According to Lana, Natalie did not discuss with her what happened until both were adults and Natalie, after describing being brought into Douglas’ suite. She told her sister, ‘And, uh…he hurt me Lana. It was like an out-of-body experience. I was terrified. I was confused.’
“Lana recalls Natalie and their mother agreeing it would ruin Natalie’s career to publicly accuse him. ‘Suck it up’ was Maria’s advice.
“Douglas’ son, actor Michael Douglas, said in a statement issued through his publicist: ‘May they both rest in peace.'”
The Power of the Dog (Netflix, 12.1 — formerly 11.17) is a chilly and perversecattle–ranchdrama that insists over and over that it’s a very bad thing for toxic males to suppress their homosexuality. (HE agrees.) Campion is a top-tier filmmaker and there’s no disputing that this is a quality-level effort, but Dog‘s milieu is grim and stifling and melancholy, like the dark side of the moon.
Yes, Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent as the enraged and closeted Phil — a variation on Daniel Day Lewis‘s “Bill the Butcher” in Gangs of New York or “Daniel Plainview” in There Will Be Blood. The older-looking Kirsten Dunst, 39, delivers the second best performance. The fleshy, rotund, moon-faced Jesse Plemons plays Cumberbatch’s gentler, kinder brother. And don’t overlook Kodi-Smith McPhee as Dunst’s delicate teenaged son.
Note: The following National Lampoon piece, written by John Weidman, appeared in July 1971.
