BEING THE RICARDOS is a straight-to-Amazon movie, the latest from playwright turned TV show creator turned screenwriter turned director Aaron Sorkin. It tells the story of one week in the lives of ‘50s sitcom icons Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, when a radio show had reported on Ball registering to vote as a communist in 1936, and they went ahead preparing an episode of I Love Lucy thinking their careers might be over.
Because this is Sorkin, and a movie, it’s about how a beloved American icon could’ve been taken down by the red scare, but it’s also about the nature of comedy genius, the struggle for artistic freedom, workplace dynamics, and marital strife. Sorkin piles on the separate events of Lucy telling the network she’s pregnant and of discovering Desi’s infidelity, leading to the end of their glorified-on-television marriage. I spent the whole movie thinking “These couldn’t possibly have happened in the same week, could they?” and of course no, they did not. (He also changed which episode was being filmed.) (read the rest of this shit…)
GREEN ROOM has a pretty good spin on a classic setup: a touring punk band in a siege movie. This shitty young band called The Ain’t Rights, living out of their van and crashing with strangers, spending more on beer than on gas, going out of their way for questionable gigs in The Middle of Nowhere, Oregon, end up locked in the dressing room of a scary skinhead club because one of them walked in on a murder. The Punks Who Knew Too Much.
