Tag: review

Book review: Love, Lucy by Lucille Ball

Ginger Rogers’ mother Lela became a stage mom to Lucy and many other aspiring actresses.

The book Love, Lucy by Lucille Ball I actually read last summer, on a transcontinental flight from Newark to San Diego. I meant to write about it then, but forgot. Now it’s nearly thirty years since Lucy died, so I guess it’s time.

If you don’t know, Lucy was the star of the most popular situation comedy in the US in the 1950s, I Love Lucy. She had successful programs in the 1960s as well, The Lucy Show/Here’s Lucy.

The existence of the book is a tale of its own. After Lucy died on April 26, 1989, her children, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz, Jr., were tasked with wading through artifacts. Lucie came across a 300-page manuscript written by her mother c. 1964.

Most people, including Lucy’s closest friends, didn’t know about the existence of this work at all. Perhaps she didn’t want to share it because her portrayals would hurt her then-ex-husband Desi Arnaz. But he had died in 1986, so the book was published in 1996 and became a best-seller.

The details were astonishingly precise, starting with her birth on August 6, 1911, in her grandparents’ apartment in Jamestown, NY, in the southwest corner of the state. She had many challenges growing up, including her father dying at age 28 when she was not quite four.

She was raised by an extended family, including her beloved grandfather, who everyone called Daddy. Later, there was an what she thought was a legal injustice borne by Daddy which affected Lucy’s viewpoint throughout his life.

Lucy took almost any job in New York City: showgirl, extra in Broadway and road shows, modeling coats and dresses, posing for illustrators. It was as a “Chesterfield (cigarette) girl” that first got her to Hollywood.

Ginger Rogers’ mother Lela became a stage mom to Lucy and many other aspiring actresses. “Lela was the first person to see me as a clown with glamour.”

Many more tales were shared before she met this Cuban musician and band leader named Desi. They fell hard for each other, and married rather quickly after they met.

Keeping their marriage together, though, was challenging, as they were both on the road separately a lot. I Love Lucy, in part, was born from addressing that need.

If Lucille Ball, or her TV roles are interesting to you, or if you’re just trying how one young woman worked hard to make it in show biz, I highly recommend Love, Lucy.

Ken Levine: The History of Sitcoms podcast.

What’s My Line? game show (1954), Lucille Ball as mystery guest.

Movie review: Bohemian Rhapsody

In Bohemian Rhapsody, Rami Malek is as good as advertised as Freddie Mercury, the dynamic lead singer of the band Queen.

Bohemian RhapsodyOnce again, I played hooky from work to see a movie, this time Bohemian Rhapsody. I keep forgetting that just before the Academy Awards, the Regal Theater in Colonie Center brings back some of the Oscar-nominated films.

The good news: Rami Malek is as good as advertised as Freddie Mercury, the dynamic lead singer of the band Queen. He may I’ve read that when Malek had the false teeth in, it helped him in developing the character. Those who care about such things note: “After wins at the SAGs, BAFTAs, and Golden Globes, [he] has run away with the [awards] season,” and will likely win an Oscar.

Also, the makeup and casting people have created a cast that looks very much like the other members of the group: Gwilym Lee as Brian May, Ben Hardy as Roger Taylor, and Joe Mazzello as John Deacon, although they all appear more annoyed than angry during the band’s arguments, many of which, I’ve read, didn’t actually happen.

The real Mary Austin, Freddie’s sometimes girlfriend, played by Lucy Boynton, seemed satisfied by the portrayal of her relationship with Mercury.

I liked the stunt casting of an almost unrecognizable Mike Myers; the Wayne’s World movie (1992) helped a six-minute song to chart again.

Of course, the eclectic music of Queen is on display. The last scene of Live Aid in 1985 was fun. I saw a couple people in the theater crying at the end. All in all, it might have been a serviceable biopic with a (relatively) happy ending.

The BIG problem is that the movie is emotionally dishonest. It is well known that films based on the lives of real people take liberties with minor characters, dialogue, even chronology.

But the brief movie revelation is that Freddie had AIDS BEFORE the climatic Wembley concert in 1985, when he wasn’t diagnosed until 1987. As this article and others note, the movie then necessarily glosses over the societal response to the disease.

Bohemian Rhapsody is a mostly feel-good movie – did I mention it has the music of Queen? – and one can certainly enjoy it, particularly if you know nothing of the era. But don’t take it too seriously as a real depiction of Freddie Mercury’s life.

Undoubtedly, this is why it’s the worst-rated film of the Best Picture nominees among critics (61% positive on Rotten Tomatoes), yet is a crowd-pleaser (88% positive).

Movie review: Cold War (2018- Zimna wojna)

Pawel Pawlikowski, who was justifiably been nominated for a best director Oscar for Cold War, won at the Cannes Film Festival.

Cold War Zimna wojnaIf you don’t like everything about Cold War, the Best Foreign Film nominee from Poland, you may enjoy the nearly continually wave of music. It starts with a guy playing something that sounds, but doesn’t look, like bagpipes, and another fellow playing a fiddle. They alternately play and sing some folk song.

The viewer sees a couple traveling the countryside of Poland just after World War II, looking for authentic folk singers from the countryside. I imagine it was like how ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax recorded musicians from the southern US and elsewhere.

Then the singers and dancers are culled in some Lawrence Welkian American Idol cattle call, with the best ones trained at a boarding school. They tour and become an unexpected hit.

But an apparatchik wants more songs touting Lenin and Stalin. It is cold war Poland in the early 1950s by then.

All of this is backdrop for an intense, “fatefully mismatched” love story between the singer Zula (Joanna Kulig) and the music director Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) which drives the story. Can one be more free in Communist Poland than in Paris? The movie’s tagline: “Love has no borders.”

The cinematography by Lukasz Zal is often gorgeous. His Oscar nomination is well-deserved. He has already won an award from the American Society of Cinematographers, USA. There is an early scene in the black-and-white film where even a mud path looks like beautiful marble.

Pawel Pawlikowski, who was justifiably been nominated for a best director Oscar, won at the Cannes Film Festival. He also co-wrote the screenplay with Piotr Borkowski.

Cold War is in Polish and French, subtitled. It’s rated R “for some sexual content, nudity and language.” It contains one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema, seriously, done with mirrors.

My wife and I saw it, naturally, at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany. I’ve asked for the soundtrack for my birthday.

Movie review: Shoplifters (Manbiki kazoku)

the movie Shoplifters (Manbiki kazoku) will be available on DVD on February 12.

ShopliftersMy wife and I had just seen the movie Shoplifters (Manbiki kazoku) at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany. A young woman of our acquaintance said, “I don’t know why it got such positive buzz. I thought it was meh.”

I totally understood. The film was a little slow to develop, and even at the end of the two hours, we had questions about the various relationships. Yet we thought it was very much worth seeing.

The story involved a Japanese family with the folks generally underemployed. Some of them resort to… well, see the title… to survive. There’s a code that comes with such thievery, which is that while it’s still in the store, it’s not really stealing.

Their lives get complicated when they find a young girl stuck outside in the cold. They take her in, and are surprised that, at first, no one reports her missing. She begins to learn the family “trade”.

One takeaway is the notion of what constitutes family. The father discusses the boy’s adolescent urgings in a way I’ve never seen before in cinema, precise but not too complicated.

This is a film by director Hirokazu Kor-eeda, whose work I am totally unfamiliar with. He seems well-regarded, with all of the films he wrote and/or directed as least 85% positive in Rotten Tomatoes. Shoplifters is 99% positive with the critics. The performances were strong.

The predominant description of the movie in reviews is that, in many ways it feels Dickensian, like a fresh take on Oliver Twist, as one put it. I’m not sure I would have come up with that parallel myself, but it’s not inaccurate. Why else would we be rooting for, at some level, people who are regularly breaking the law?

Shoplifters will be available on DVD on February 12. I’d be interested in the opinions of others on this movie from Japan which was nominated as Best Foreign Film for this season’s Oscars.

Movie review: Ralph Breaks the Internet

Shank (Gal Gadot) is from the online auto-racing game called Slaughter Race

Ralph Breaks the InternetThe first movie I went to see after the Academy Award nominations were announced was Ralph Breaks the Internet, a possible pick for Best Animated Feature. It is the sequel to Wreck-It Ralph, which I saw with a room full of kids, which definitely helped define the experience.

Whereas my daughter and I saw RBTI at the Regal Theater in Colonie Center on a Thursday afternoon, and there was no one else there. A couple people slipped in late to make out in the back and left well before it was over.

Ralph (voice of John C. Reilly) and Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman) have a nice, predictable existence: work by day in their respective games at the arcade, and hang out as best friends after hours.

But an incident puts Vanellope’s race car game, Sugar Rush, in peril. The friends enter the word of the Internet, which is as overwhelming as really it sometimes is. With some help of KnowItAll (Alan Tudyk) they navigate a dizzying array of options to find what they need on eBay. But how to pay for it?

Yesss (Taraji P. Henson) is the head algorithm of the trend-making site “BuzzzTube” and her segments speak to the cultural phenomena that pop up nearly daily, as well as some of the downsides.

Is Ralph Breaks the Internet an advertisement of the fact that Disney owns everything? The princesses, most or all voiced by the original performers, I liked a lot. The movie has fun with their various personas. 3CPO (Anthony Daniels), is on only briefly. And speaking of brief, you see the late Stan Lee for about two seconds.

Shank (Gal Gadot) is from the online auto-racing game called Slaughter Race, a far cry from Sugar Rush. She has a cadre of assistants, but she’s the great character on her own. 

There’s one scene that was pure King Kong. Ultimately, the movie was about how friendships evolve. Part of me that thought the movie was overstuffed with in-jokes and another that says that’s fine because one can catch more of them on repeated viewing.

If you get to the VERY end, you’ll see the previews from FROZEN 2; hey, I laughed.

Bottom line is that my daughter, who doesn’t always convey her feelings at the cinema, told my wife (not me) that she really liked the film. I thought it was good, not great, though I know I would have enjoyed it more if I could have gauged audience reaction.