Being the Ricardos: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars.

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This is a sub-mediocre, made-for-tv type of movie that is at times, insufferable.

Being the Ricardos, the Aaron Sorkin written and directed bio-pic that attempts to tell the tale of a very tumultuous week in the life of iconic comedienne Lucille Ball and her husband Desi Arnaz Jr., has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

The film itself, which made its streaming premiere on Amazon on Tuesday December 21st, is a rather pedestrian affair that suffers from an unsound narrative structure, tonal inconsistencies and a painfully poor script.

Sorkin’s writing style, which can best be describes as ‘walking, talking and exposition’, is an acquired taste, one which I have yet to acquire. I find his dialogue to be insufferable and his storytelling ability flaccid.

Making matters worse is that Sorkin’s quirky writing desperately needs a master craftsman director to make it work, like David Fincher on The Social Network, but Sorkin is a hack behind the camera and thus Being the Ricardos falls flat on its phony face.

The movie feels like a very special episode of a bad sitcom about a good sitcom. Adding to the lack of genuine drama is the fact that every sentient being with half a brain in their heads with a minimal relationship to the history of television knows exactly how the story ends. All of the drama is therefore devoid of any power.

But the reason Being the Ricardos is making headlines is not because it’s a mindless and middling affair. No, the film is getting attention because it’s mired in the most manufactured of controversies.  

Apparently the film committed the most unforgivable of sins by casting Oscar winning actor Javier Bardem as Arnaz opposite Oscar winning actress Nicole Kidman as Lucy. Why is Bardem playing Desi Arnaz a problem? Well, Bardem is a Spaniard and Arnaz a Cuban, which somehow violates some sacred woke law of diversity, inclusion and representation. To quote Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, “The Horror. The Horror.”

One know-nothing guardian of the grievance culture complained that Bardem was, like his Spanish ancestors, being a “colonizer” by playing the Cuban Arnaz.

“They (the Spanish) came in and erased who we (Latinos) were, and I can’t help but feel the same way when Bardem gets roles meant to share the Latinx experience.”

That bit of hysterical hyperbole overlooks the fact that many Hispanic and Latino families proudly identify not just with their national origins but with their distant Spanish roots out of class-consciousness, and that Desi’s wealthy, upper-class Cuban family most likely did too.

Director Sorkin tried to defend his casting of Bardem, saying, “it’s heartbreaking and a little chilling to see members of the artistic community resegregating ourselves.”

Considering Sorkin’s long-time, mealy-mouthed complicity with Hollywood’s diversity-obsessed woke warriors more interested in ‘representation’ than in artistry or quality, that statement is the equivalent of someone who made it rain outside complaining about the weather.

Another amusing thing about this contrived controversy is that no one is making a stink about Nicole Kidman, an Aussie non-comedienne, playing the most iconic American comedienne of all time, Lucille Ball. OK, Kidman may have technically been born in Hawaii, but to Australian parents only there on student visas. I’ve heard her ‘g’day mate’ accent and I bet she likes cricket, wombats, and ‘Men at Work’ too. She’s not a real American.

No one ever cares when British or Australian actors play Americans, and do so with their tone deaf, nasally attempts at an American accent. For instance, why isn’t there an uproar over Brit Tom Holland playing all-American hero Spider-Man, whose friendly neighborhood is Queens, New York? Are there no actors from Queens available?

These woke fools bitching about Bardem’s Spanish ancestry also rarely care when British actors of color, like Daniel Kaluuya, play African-Americans, like he did in Get Out and Judas and the Black Messiah.

The truth is, American actors of all colors and ethnicities miss out when British, Irish, Canadian and Australian actors play American roles. This injustice must be stopped!

Obviously, I’m joking. When casting, focusing on the specificity of an actor’s national background rather than their talent and skill is irrational and imbecilic and runs completely counter to the art and craft of acting.

As the ever-eloquent Bardem astutely pointed out in a Hollywood Reporter article,

“I’m an actor, and that’s what I do for a living: try to be people that I’m not. What do we do with Marlon Brando playing Vito Corleone? What do we do with Margaret Thatcher played by Meryl Streep? Daniel Day-Lewis playing Lincoln?...if we want to open that can of worms, let’s open it for everyone…we should all start not allowing anybody to play Hamlet unless they were born in Denmark.”

Bardem is a great actor, as evidenced by his Best Actor Oscar nominated performance as, ironically enough, gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas in the Julian Schnabel’s As Night Falls (2000).

His being attacked for his improper ethnic or national background is, unfortunately, something that is becoming common place in Hollywood when it comes to casting Latino roles.

For example, In the Heights shamelessly marketed itself as a celebration of diversity as its Asian director (John Chu), Latino writer (Lin Manuel-Miranda) and mostly Latino cast told the story of a Latino neighborhood in New York City. But the movie came under fire from the woke brigade for its lack of “Afro-Latinx” representation.

Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story was sold as the righting of a historical wrong as, unlike the 1961 original movie, it cast only Latinos in Latino roles. Some still complained though that the lead role, Maria, was played by a woman of Columbian descent instead of a Puerto Rican.

The funny thing about this Being the Ricardos casting controversy is that Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman, despite not being Cuban or American respectively, and despite the vacuous script and dreadful direction guiding them, are the two best things in this awful movie.

Thankfully, neither actor tries to do an impersonation of their famous character. Instead they attempt to create actual human beings and not caricatures. Unfortunately, Sorkin’s script does not support them in this endeavor, but Kidman and Bardem should at least be recognized for their honest attempt, no matter how far they fall short.

The lessons that needs to be learned from Being the Ricardos and the surrounding casting contrvoersy are that, one - Aaron Sorkin is a truly terrible director. And two, within reason, we just need to let actors actually, you know, act…and we should leave the social justice preening for the college campus and the New York Times. Hollywood, its movies, its audiences, and the art of acting, would be much better served if we did.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

In the Heights is a box office bust...so let's ban the box office!

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

Whenever the woke diversity and inclusion agenda fails a test, it’s always the test’s fault – never the test-taker’s.

It started in 2020, when the Academy Awards put new rules into place that required future films to be diverse and inclusive in order to qualify for nomination. Now, to bolster that diversity and inclusion agenda, the woke enemies of merit in art and entertainment have set their sights on eliminating box office receipts as a measure of cinematic success.

In the Heights, a musical with an Asian director, Latino writer and all-minority cast, made a measly $11 million at the box office in its opening weekend, instead of the $25 to $50 million some delusional fools were projecting. It’s looking as if it will make considerably less in week two (it ultimately came in 6th on its second weekend with a paltry $4.3 million), but, apparently, we need to ignore its failure to sell tickets and laud its inclusivity aims.

In an LA Times article titled ‘How Hollywood’s box-office parlor game hurts movies like “In the Heights”, writer Ashley Lee declares that the film industry “will have to learn to define the ‘success’ of a film more broadly than in dollars and cents” if it wants to fix its “intractable diversity problems”.

This idea is reminiscent of colleges dropping the SAT and elite high schools dropping difficult entrance exams to boost diversity, or when the military or fire department weakens its physical entrance test to accommodate women.

This ‘equity’ approach, which is meant to result in equality of outcome, as opposed to equality of opportunity, beautifully sums up our narcissistic, petulant and coddled era, in which, if anyone fails a test, then it’s the test’s fault and not the test-taker’s.

As for Lee’s idea of dismissing the box office, it makes perfect sense, according to woke illogic, as once diversity and inclusion become the most important things about a movie – which the Academy Awards now claim they are – then, of course, box office receipts as a metric for success become obsolete.

To the woke, if a movie checks the right identity boxes, it’s already a smash, regardless of whether it makes money, is a highly crafted work of art or is entertaining.

Of course, this is all just more hypocritical woke preening, pandering and virtue signaling, as Lee and her ilk use the box office as a bludgeon as much as anybody when it suits them. For example, in a glaring case of ‘physician heal thyself’, the article bemoans the “parlor game” of box-office projections and expectations that, when not met, set a negative narrative around a minority-led film, but plays the same parlor game, linking to another piece that claims ‘“In the Heights” is the rare Latino blockbuster. Three Times writers on what that means’. That headline ran the day the movie opened and made presumptions about how it would be received that ultimately failed to materialise.

The box-office success of Black Panther, which made over a billion dollars, and female-led movies such as Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman are often used as evidence by those who say diversity is the ticket to prosperity. Hell, In the Heights only exists in its current form because director Jon Chu had a blockbuster with Crazy Rich Asians, with its all-Asian cast, and writer Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, with its majority-minority cast, raked in wads of cash.

Not surprisingly, considering its fatally flawed philosophical foundation, the rest of Lee’s vapid article is peppered with vacuous declarations about diversity and inclusion problems in Hollywood – most notably, “the vanishingly rare major studio movies with nonwhite leads”. I wonder if she actually watches movies, given, over the past 30 years, Denzel Washington and Will Smith were two of the biggest movie stars working in Hollywood, and, in the past decade, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Michael B. Jordan and the late Chadwick Boseman have dominated major studio films.

In addition, in 2020 alone, Tenet, Sound of Metal, Soul, Minari, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, One Night in Miami and Judas and the Black Messiah all had “nonwhite leads” and were nominated for Oscars. And Will Smith’s Bad Boys for Life and Jumanji: The Next Level, starring Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart, ranked first and fourth, respectively, at the US box office for the entire year. This proves that, contrary to Lee’s inane claims, Hollywood’s use of “nonwhite leads” is neither “vanishing” nor “rare”.

I’m a cinephile who prefers the arthouse to the cineplex, so box office is not exactly something I hold up as a symbol of cinematic virtue. But, in the case of In the Heights and other examples of mainstream Hollywood entertainment that are designed to rake in money, using box office receipts to measure their success or otherwise is the only viable and logical metric. In La La Land, the only color that truly matters is green, so the notion of eliminating that particular measure of a film’s success would go down like a lead zeppelin…and definitely not like Led Zeppelin.

The reality is that the woke can rig the system to honour their trite version of ‘diversity and inclusion’ with Academy Awards, but if they want lasting power in money-hungry Hollywood, their movies had better make bundles of cash or their whole house of politically correct cards will come tumbling down right on their empty little heads.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Minari: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An over-hyped venture that ultimately underwhelms.

Minari, written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, tells the semi-autobiographical story of Chung’s South Korean immigrant family as it tries to achieve the American dream in 1980’s Arkansas. The film, which stars Steven Yeun, Han Ye-ri, Youn Yuh-jung and Will Patton, has received six Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (Yeun) and Best Supporting Actress (Youn).

Having survived the slog of cinema that was 2020, where even the very best films of the year like Mank, Nomadland and Judas and the Black Messiah are not great films, I held out hope for Minari to ride in on a white horse and save this year of cinema from death by a thousand mediocrities.

Unfortunately, Minari is not up to the task.

Minari is not a terrible movie, but it is not a very good one either. It suffers from many flaws, most notable being it doesn’t know what it is or what it wants to be and therefore ends up being a whole lot of nothing.

For example, in theory it has all the trappings of an arthouse movie but is so painfully conventional in execution it becomes devoid of interest and artistic credibility.

Minari is sort of like a working class Korean immigrant version of Marriage Story mixed with a culture clash/fish out of water/American Dream story, but it never successfully or even adequately tells any of those stories, preferring the approach of throwing everything into the stew yet creating no flavor.

A major flaw with the storytelling approach of Minari is that it has a generalized perspective, so there is no one particular protagonist to lead us through the story. Since Chung is writing auto-biographically, it would have been interesting to have his childhood perspective lead the way. But Chung seems incapable of the skill that would require, and therefore he halves the baby and spreads perspective around which saps the story of dramatic power.

Chung is also a rather unimaginative visual stylist, as Minari is a painfully flat film with sub-par framing and composition as well as a dull and stale color palette.

There are some interesting performances in the movie, most notably by Yeun and Will Patton of all people, but Chung’s lackluster direction is unable to contain these performances and therefore the drama dissipates even when the actors are running on all cylinders. Chung’s inability to break through the conventional leaves viewers detached and disinterested in the plight of these characters despite some skillful acting work.

Chung’s biggest failing though is as a writer, as he is incapable of trusting his audience with a pure arthouse experience and therefore sprinkles in narrative arcs and beats that are cookie-cutter conventionalities that fall dramatically flat. The contrast of this conventional story being wrapped in the deliberately paced trappings of an arthouse movie creates a frustrating movie decidedly at cross purposes with itself.

Ultimately, with the generalized perspective, the conventional narrative arcs and the tedious visual aesthetic, Minari feels like a bad tv drama more than a serious piece of cinema and Oscar contender.

As evidenced by the plethora of Oscar nominations and a stunning 98% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, Minari is being lauded as a phenomenal film. But it seems to me that this is wishful thinking rather than accurate analysis of the film on screen.

In the wake of last year’s stirring success of Parasite, a spectacular piece of filmmaking by Korean director Bong Joon-ho, Minari has no doubt been given a boost among the critical elite in the hopes of bolstering “diversity and inclusion” and recreating Parasite’s stirring success.

In the flat earth society that is our culture, Parasite and Minari are in the same category despite having nothing in common except that they share the same language and ethnicity of director. This is absurd, but it is how our culture thinks and works, especially in the era of identity politics.

If Minari were the same story but centering around the struggles of some white family, critics would rightfully ignore it for the uninspired, middling movie that it is. The fact that mediocrities like Chung and Minari are nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay speaks to how precipitous the decline in the art of cinema has become and to the hyper-delusional nature of a film business glorifying “diversity and inclusion” instead of talent, skill and craftsmanship.

In conclusion, there is absolutely nothing interesting or remarkable about Minari. It is an underwhelming and instantly forgettable film that is not deserving of any accolades or praise. If you want to see a mundane, middle-of-the-road movie, Minari is definitely for you.

©2021

Judas and the Black Messiah: A Review and Commentary

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but fantastic film that vibrates with a formidable vitality that also features two Oscar-worthy performances by Daniel Kaluuya and LaKieth Stanfield.

Judas and the Black Messiah, which opened in theatres and on the streaming service HBO Max on February 12th, recounts the true story of the betrayal of Fred Hampton, the charismatic chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, by Bill O’Neal, an FBI informant.

The flawed but fantastic film, written and directed by Shaka King, features a fascinating story and scintillating performances from Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton and LaKeith Stanfield as O’Neal, which makes it among the very best movies of this thus far cinematically calamitous year.

I have never been much impressed by Daniel Kaluuya as an actor. I thought Get Out was ridiculously overrated and thought his performance in it was too. But as Fred Hampton, Kaluuya utterly disappears into the role and creates as charismatic and compelling a character as has graced screens all year. Kaluuya’s Hampton vibrates with a natural magnetism and intensity that is glorious to behold.

As great as Kaluuya is, and he is great, LaKieth Stanfield actually has the harder job and does equally outstanding work. O’Neal is a tortured and tormented soul, and Stanfield masterfully shows us all his shades. Stanfield’s subtle, complex and detailed work is most definitely Oscar-worthy, and is a testament to his impressive skill and craftsmanship.

Other performances don’t fare quite as well as Kaluuhya and Stanfield though. Jesse Plemons, an excellent actor, does the best he can with a terribly under written role as an FBI agent, and Martin Sheen, also an excellent actor, is so dreadful as J. Edgar Hoover it is like he’s acting in a different, and much worse, movie.

The biggest issue with the film is that its secondary narratives, one which involves Hoover and the other involves Hampton’s girlfriend Deborah Johnson, lack a dramatic cohesion and power, and they distract from the main story and scuttle much needed momentum. The Hoover angle is distractingly cartoonish and the love story between Hampton and Johnson is uncomfortably lifeless, as Dominique Fishback is, to put it mildly, underwhelming in the role of Johnson.

Other issues with the film are that Shaka King’s direction was not quite as deft as I would have preferred. The script and the editing also could have been a bit tighter, but with that said, the film definitely has an undeniable energy to it and pulsates with a power that is impressive.

One final issue was the sound mixing. I watched the movie on HBO Max and the sound mix was utterly abysmal. Much of the dialogue, Daniel Kaluuya’s most of all, got lost under the music in the mix. This could be a function of HBO Max, which unfortunately is a horrible technical streaming service, or it could be I am going deaf, or it could be the sound mixing was atrocious…who knows…but it was irritating.

Predictably, most critics are using the film to connect the more recent Black Lives Matter movement with the revolutionary Black Panther movement of the 1960’s spotlighted in the film.

This is an intellectually egregious and mind-numbingly vacuous interpretation of the movie and its narrative.

The film isn’t about our current manufactured myopia regarding race, it’s about power and the great lengths those with it will go to subjugate those without it and maintain the status quo.

Infamous FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, embarrassingly portrayed in the movie by Martin Sheen in an obscenely amateurish prosthetic nose, deemed the Black Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” for among other reasons because their free breakfast program for kids wasn’t just for black kids but for all kids.

In response Hoover unleashed COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) and its dirty tactics on the Black Panthers just as he had done previously to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and other leftists.

As highlighted in the film, the Black Panthers/Hampton were seen as direct threats to the power structure of the U.S. because they worked to bring all poor and working class people together, be they black, Native American, Latino and even Confederate flag-waving whites, against a common enemy, the ruling class, which subjugated and abused them.

Hampton, MLK and Malcolm X weren’t targeted by COINTELPRO’s massive surveillance and infiltration operation and ultimately assassinated under extremely suspicious circumstances because they were standing up just for black people, but because they were working to bring all peoples together to fight against the corrupt and criminal political power exploiting poor and working class in America and across the globe.

In comparison to the towering revolutionaries of Hampton, King and Malcolm X, Black Lives Matter are shameless courtesans to the establishment.

The FBI obviously don’t see BLM as a threat, hell it is such a collection of useful idiots the feds probably started it in the first place. The power structure’s greatest fear is that poor and working class black and white people will stop directing their anger at each other and start directing it at Washington, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. BLM is a critical tool to thwart that impulse and keep the proletariat separated by race…conveniently divided and conquered.

This is how something as innocuous as “All Lives Matter” is transformed into a racial slur instead of a rousing rallying cry. BLM gives away its establishment protection game by so aggressively making enemies out of potential allies, proving they’d rather separate people than bring them together for a clear common cause – stopping police brutality.

There are other signs that BLM is the establishment’s controlled opposition.

For example, when a protest by QAnon clowns at the capitol building turned riot it was immediately labeled an “insurrection” and false stories about it were propagated throughout the mainstream media and the feds hunted down the perpetrators, but these same feds and media supported the BLM “mostly peaceful protests” that attacked police stations and government buildings and took over portions of major cities like Portland and Seattle and turned other cities into looted, chaotic, burning madhouses for months.

Another example is highlighted in the film when Hampton belittles the idea of a school name change as some kind of substantial victory. BLM specializes in this sort of self-righteous symbolism, empty sloganeering (Defund the Police!) and toothless grandstanding that intentionally doesn’t address the actual conditions under which poor people suffer. It is all style over substance, as BLM would rather bring down statues than hunger, homelessness or homicide rates.

What makes Judas and the Black Messiah so poignantly tragic is that it shows that the FBI, which the left now adores, have always been the frontline workers for American fascism and their victory over genuine dissent has been spectacular.

This is why we now have vapid, race-hustling racial grievance grifters like Al Sharpton instead of intellectual giants like Malcolm X and MLK. And why we got the “hope and change” charlatanry of Barack Obama, a maintenance man for the status quo who dutifully bails out Wall Street while Main Street crumbles, instead of the revolutionary Fred Hampton. And why we are fed the lap dog of Black Lives Matter play-acting at defiance while being whole-heartedly embraced by the corporate and political power structure, instead of the bulldog of the Black Panthers putting genuine fear into the establishment.

The Black Lives Matter contingent think they’re Fred Hampton, but they’re frauds, phonies, shills and sellouts, just like Bill O’Neal. And that’s why I recommend Judas and the Black Messiah…not just for the film’s cinematic dynamism or the standout performances of Kaluuya and Stanfield but because it rightfully exposes those bourgeois BLM bullshitters.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021