Watching this makes me desperately wish there was a more vocal movie-watching bloc who would be willing to denounce Aaron Sorkin as insufferable.
The typical Aaron Sorkin project features characters who all have IQs of 150, and possess the exact same degree of interest in holding extremely inefficient conversations that are always branching off into a minimum of three tangents per interaction. It seems like Sorkin's characters possess the listening skills of autistic Onion News reporter Michael Falk.
I assumed that with his run of "Moneyball", "Molly's Game" and "Trial of the Chicago 7" that Sorkin found a way to temper his most irritating elements.
But "Being the Ricardos", while an exciting story, is simply Sorkin writing Sorkinesque caricatures which is a pretty bad fit when the story is about show business and Sorkin attempts to give camera blocking the same gravity as a federal trial.
It's also a problem because this story should be about the Ricardos and it's hard to believe that the Ricardos sounded like Aaron Sorkin. This has led to noticeable anachronistic language (the word gaslighting didn't exist in 1953) and charges of inaccuracy on the part of Lucy and Desi's daughter.
On top of that, the dialogue is just plain annoying. In an early scene, Vivian Vance almost forces a conversation onto Bill Vance without his consent three times about a 7-year-old communist that he's clearly not interested in having. In the same scene, Lucy starts innocently hazing a director but it's not funny and it mostly sounds like Aaron Sorkin's typical justification of the creative ego over anyone who gets in the way of the creative process (similar battle lines were drawn out in past Sorkin projects like the train wreck "Studio 60" and "The Newsroom")
The subject matter is exciting as is the story but Aaron Sorkin needs to get out of his own way.
The typical Aaron Sorkin project features characters who all have IQs of 150, and possess the exact same degree of interest in holding extremely inefficient conversations that are always branching off into a minimum of three tangents per interaction. It seems like Sorkin's characters possess the listening skills of autistic Onion News reporter Michael Falk.
I assumed that with his run of "Moneyball", "Molly's Game" and "Trial of the Chicago 7" that Sorkin found a way to temper his most irritating elements.
But "Being the Ricardos", while an exciting story, is simply Sorkin writing Sorkinesque caricatures which is a pretty bad fit when the story is about show business and Sorkin attempts to give camera blocking the same gravity as a federal trial.
It's also a problem because this story should be about the Ricardos and it's hard to believe that the Ricardos sounded like Aaron Sorkin. This has led to noticeable anachronistic language (the word gaslighting didn't exist in 1953) and charges of inaccuracy on the part of Lucy and Desi's daughter.
On top of that, the dialogue is just plain annoying. In an early scene, Vivian Vance almost forces a conversation onto Bill Vance without his consent three times about a 7-year-old communist that he's clearly not interested in having. In the same scene, Lucy starts innocently hazing a director but it's not funny and it mostly sounds like Aaron Sorkin's typical justification of the creative ego over anyone who gets in the way of the creative process (similar battle lines were drawn out in past Sorkin projects like the train wreck "Studio 60" and "The Newsroom")
The subject matter is exciting as is the story but Aaron Sorkin needs to get out of his own way.