Kidman’s Most Devoted Admirer on “Being The Ricardos”

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A friend and I were discussing the strength of Academy-voter enthusiasm for Nicole Kidman‘s performance in Being The Ricardos.

I honestly like and respect her Lucille Ball as far as it goes, but I’m not getting the Best Actress fervor. Put it this way: I admired her in Being The Ricardos, but I like Lucille Ball‘s performances in Five Came Back or Too Many Girls a bit more.

We all know what the Nicole narrative was before everyone saw Being The Ricardos. “She’s wrong for the part, doesn’t look like Lucy, they should have hired Debra Messing,” etc. Then it opened and everyone said “oh, Nicole’s better than we expected…not bad!” And then somehow that got turned into Best Actress Oscar heat.

Kidman’s Lucy is satisfactory but is it Oscar-level good? She’s fine but it’s almost laughable to even compare her Lucy performance to Penelope Cruz in Parallel Mothers.

While Jordan Ruimy also approves of Kidman’s Lucy performance, he claims it isn’t as good as she was in To Die For, Birth, The Hours, The Others, Moulin Rouge, Destroyer, Birthday Girl, Bombshell, The Paperboy, Rabbit Hole, Portrait of a Lady and Dogville.

This led me to wonder what David Thomson, author of “Nicole Kidman” (’08) and arguably her greatest fan, thinks of her work in Being The Ricardos. So I reached out and Thomson replied as follows:

“I agree with Jordan. I think Being the Ricardos is an absurd project that ends up dejected. Whereas the younger Kidman could take silly ventures and make them seem necessary. I don’t think Kidman is turned on by Lucille, whereas we felt she was eating To Die For (among others) alive.”

Alternate Thomson take: “Miraculously Kidman could channel her sexuality into the unlikely form of Virginia Woolf [in The Hours], but she can muster none of that interest in Lucille Ball. I suspect she [had] dreamt of being Woolf but finds Ball a pain in the neck. Just guessing.”

Yo! Wannabes Pretending to Make “Godfather”

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I’ve said from the beginning that casting of The Offer, the Paramount + series about the making of The Godfather, would be extra difficult because everyone knows the players so well — faces, voices, mannerisms. Each and every performance would have to deliver a masterful impersonation for the film to really work. The new trailer makes it clear this aspect was a bridge too far.

I’ll tell you right now that Dan Fogler portraying Francis Coppola in The Offer…any Fogler casting in anything is a problem as he always seems to play slovenly, dregs-of-the-gene-pool types, but casting him as Coppola is a jape, an insult. For one thing Coppola has a certain voice that Fogler doesn’t even come close to imitating, plus Coppola was a bit stocky but not a fatass.

I knew that the instant I heard Fogler-as-Coppola speak the famous line “I believe in America”…I knew right away that Fogler was the wrong guy to hire.

My second reaction was “good God, what’s happened to poor Giovanni Ribisi?” He’s turned into a beach ball! This is almost as upsetting as the Bridget Fonda thing. If he wanted to bulk up to play Joe Colombo, he could have gone with a fat suit, no?

As for Miles Teller as Godfather producer Albert Ruddy…well, he doesn’t look anything like early ’70s Ruddy, a 40ish Canadian Jew with graying hair. The 34 year-old Teller, who stepped into the role when Armie Hammer was deep-sixed and soon after caused on-set worries when he refused to be vaccinated, has dark, thick hair and seems closer to his early 30s than early 40s.

Matthew Goode as Robert Evans might be okay.

The one possibly hopeful note is that Michel Tolkin is the screenwriter. The director is Dexter Fletcher (Rocketman).

I still say that Darrell Easton’s I Believe in America is the best “making of The Godfather script” I’ve ever read.

14 Weeks Hence

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I thought after the spread of Omicron that the dates of Cannes ’22 might be up in the air. But apparently they’re intending to hold it between Tuesday, 5.16 and Saturday, 5.28. I haven’t been there since 2019 but I’m looking to attend this one. So I’m sending off my credential request and sniffing around for lodging, preferably someplace small and cramped and appropriate for hand-to-mouth journalists on a budget. No balcony views, single beds, tiny kitchens, etc.

It’s Been A Long Time But….

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Remember Joaquim Trier‘s The Worst Person in the World? Easily one of the best films of 2021 — among HE’s top five. An excellent character study of a youngish woman (Renata Reinsve) who has no real center and can’t be satisfied with any one partner. It premiered in competition at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival last July, and Reinsve wound up winning the Best Actress award.

Tatiana and I saw it last November. I liked it so much that I begged to be invited to a second screening, but the publicist became white-knuckle terrified when I wrote about the fact that Reinsve closely resembles a younger version of dp Svetlana Cvetko, a close friend, so that was the name of that tune. I was officially shunned for mentioning the resemblance.

Trier’s film played at Sundance last week, and is competing for the Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards. And now, after weeks and weeks of waiting and wondering, it’s finally opening theatrically in the U.S. Four days from now, to be exact — Friday, 2.4, at the Landmark at the Westside Pavillion.

“Personal Shopper” Forever

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It was decided early on that Kristen Stewart‘s Princess Diana in Spencer would be campaigned for Best Actress, and I mean before anyone had seen Pablo Larrain‘s film. Once I saw it in Telluride I knew for a fact that it stunk, and was basically a dream-trip, loony-tune Diary of a Mad Princess. Knowing all the while that Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper is easily her best movie ever.

Did Stewart’s “people” even consider promoting her Personal Shopper performance for Best Actress? Of course not. Because your empty-Coke-bottle Academy members never vote for a lead character in a scary movie.

So I feel rather badly for Stewart — she knocked it out of the park almost six years ago and nobody gave enough of a shit. She does a decent job as crazy Diana in the mediocre, mostly-painful-to-sit-through Spencer and people are going “oh, she’s so wonderful!” Because she’s playing the tragic princess.

For me, Personal Shopper deliver the biggest high of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. It left me breathless and even a trembling a bit.

“Assayas taps a wellspring of thought on forms of communication [while drawing] parallels between 19th century drawing room seances and Skype calls. In Personal Shopper, death is just another form of alienation, a physical remove from a person we once knew. Words themselves come under close scrutiny, and Assayas asks if we can ever truly connect with another person if we’re not standing right in front of them and communing fully with the senses. The incessant buzz of a smartphone becomes an attention-grabbing scream from out of the ether.” — Little White Lies’ David Jenkins.

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Don’t Forget Russell’s Elvis

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With Baz Luhrman‘s Elvis (Warner Bros., 6.24) only five months away from opening commercially (and a month sooner if it premieres at the ’22 Cannes Film Festival, which may or may not happen in May) it’s surely time to take a fresh look at John Carpenter‘s Elvis, a nearly three-hour ABC TV flick which premiered on 2.11.79.

It was praised for being harshly realistic as far as The King’s anxieties, failings and foibles were concerned, and particularly for Russell’s performance, which had a fair amount of rage and nailed Presley’s voice.

Carpenter’s film aired only 18 months after Presley keeled over on the toilet seat in August 1977. It ends on an upbeat note in 1970, and therefore skips the decline years — no looking to persuade President Nixon to make him a special narcotics agent in December ’70, no fat Elvis, no prescription drugs, no peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches.

Will Millennials and Zoomers in particular give a shit about an Elvis movie? Presley pre-dates even the boomers as his heyday was between ’54 and ’58, back when the nothing generation kidz of the ’50s (kids who dressed in chinos and loafers and wore flattops and admired James Dean and Marlon Brando) was in their mid to late teens.

To the average Millennial or Zoomer Presley might as well be Johnny Ray or Frank Sinatra.

Five years ago Shout Factory restored the original elements of Carpenter’s film to create a first-rate Bluray. The original TV cut apparently ran 168 minutes but the Bluray runs 11 minutes longer — 179 minutes. I can’t find an HD trailer for the Bluray — only a trailer for the 2010 Shout Factory DVD version. Plus an awful-looking “pink” trailer.