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Wicked
Fantasy Comedy Musical / English / 2024
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I caught one of the trailers a while back and genuinely thought it looked kinda good. The premise of an origin story to the Wicked Witch of the West that makes her one-dimensional portrayal as the villain in The Wizard of Oz somehow sympathetic is honestly interesting, and I already knew the stage musical is wild popular, though I've never seen it myself.
My biggest concern was some pretty out-of-touch comments the Wicked Witch actress made online regarding a fanedit of an official poster.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I'd like to open with a brief comment about my theater experience. This was the most packed theater I've been in since The Force Awakens, however, unlike The Force Awakens, the audience was not super enthusiastic about this movie. No big laughs, no singing along... which is fine, it means I can have an uninterrupted viewing, but it was also kinda telling that other people who probably knew more than I did about the source material weren't super psyched.
As far as I could tell, all of the animals in this movie were CG. And the CG was noticeably better than Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, so that's fine.
I rewatched The Wizard of Oz for the ongoing MoFo Top 100 Musicals Countdown and to prepare for seeing this movie. Again, I have never seen the stage musical or heard any of the songs, so have no basis for comparison.
HOWEVER, according to the official Wicked the Musical's chat assistant, the runtime of the stage performance is about 2 hours and 45 minutes.
That's about the length of this movie and this movie allegedly only adapts half of the play. I saw some articles circulated prior to release about the creators publicly insisting that to truly do the musical justice they'd need to split it into 2 parts. If that were true, then I think that's a commendable concession to make, if the existing intermission in the play marks a good stopping point for a theatrical adaptation, then sure, let's make it 2 movies.
But when one of those movies is AS LONG AS THE PLAY, then I can only assume you are artificially extending the length of this movie, and that feeling was strongly corroborated when by the time the title finally dropped I already felt that the opening could have been way ****ing shorter.
That feeling persists throughout much of the movie and it's exacerbated in three ways:
1.) This is the sort of musical that insists on having characters "sing" their regular dialog. Not that there's a song, or even a backing track, they just have to make direct conversation super awkward by singing it.
But not only that, it can't even be said that ALL of the regular dialog is sung, so instead you frequently have this awkward middleground between regular dialog and full songs. I don't know how popular this style of musical is, but I'm just not a fan.
2.) Songs are often broken up by regular dialog. Popular and Defying Gravity are honestly probably the best songs in the movie, but both of them are irritatingly interrupted so the characters can talk out-of-song. The music almost entirely drops out for these moments and whatever flow they had going just completely dies, only to abruptly resume minutes later.
Just play the full song, why watch a movie if it's going to be an inferior experience to what you can hear directly from the inevitable soundtrack? It's the same issue I have with many music videos that insist on inserting the video's narrative into the middle of their song. Just play the whole ******* song uninterrupted!
3.) Some songs are just appallingly dull to watch. The Wizard and I is the most glaring example I can think of. It's not even a bad listen and it's as good a time as any to say that Grande and Erivo are both totally capable singers, but what a stupefyingly awful presentation sometimes.
In The Wizard and I, Erivo is just singing while walking around. Not doing anything, not being around anything, at most she oggles some colorful ornaments in a ceiling, but then that is followed by her dramatically running out into a vacant sepia-toned field to a vacant sepia-toned desert, then dramatically running back. NOTHING is happening onscreen, it is visually DESOLATE, completely bereft of anything whatsoever to justify putting this song to film.
And it's so weird too, because other songs are loaded with visual stimulation, there's an entire dance sequence in a mechanical library, when they arrive in the Emerald City it's like a Wizard of Oz acid trip...
Maybe I wouldn't feel so negatively toward it if the these songs were slower and more contemplative... or if so much of the movie wasn't already the characters just singing their dialog when nothing's happening.
All three of these issues comprise my biggest complaints with this movie. It's not a conventional case of "bad pacing", so much as it feels like they spread what they had very wide and very thin and didn't care strongly enough if they left gaps in the process.
Now that that's been covered let's talk about what this movie is about.
For some unearthly reason, someone decided that we needed a highschool drama about the Wicked Witch of the West, how she's some lowkey magical prodigy, but everyone hates her cause she's green, and Glinda actually a huge bitch.
Part of this movie plays this concept like a parody, but part of it also plays it super straight. We get the turbo-popular collar-popped Jock character who rolls into school, floods every girl's panties on sight and any male he interacts with becomes perma-gay, like that's kinda funny, right? But then we tease some genuine romantic interest between Elphaba and this guy and even do a whole passionate song about it... as though it's serious?
It's stuff like that when I'm sitting in the theater thinking to myself that "this movie was NOT made for me".
On the flipside, the absolute best part of this movie is Ariana Grande as Glinda, and I say that as somebody who doesn't listen to her and has no opinion of her music, or knowledge of her acting background.
As the movie goes on, Glinda becomes an increasingly hyper-exaggerated stereotype of a preppy highschool rich kid. That's already been done to death many times, but her performance as a "terminally blonde" character comes off as so natural that her ditzy mannerisms and occasionally sudden and offensively severe selfishness just makes her pretty amusing and even endearing to watch, especially when she heel-face-turns into Elphaba's friend.
Elphaba is a nice "straight man" for her to play off of, and she has some moments of her own... I was concerned that in this day and age that Elphaba wouldn't get away without being treated as a huge victim, or being obnoxiously confrontational and lecturing towards Glinda and the other students... in fact she does act that way towards the Prince Charming character, but he immediately calls her out both times for assuming how he might be judging her (they also keep the obvious racial allegory cut down to a throwaway "I don't see color" punchline).
So that's all fine, BULLET DODGED, honestly, but at the same time, Elphaba doesn't really have an arc in this movie, and that sucks when the movie's supposed to be about her. Obviously she wants to meet the Wizard, obviously there must be some conceit to get her to "go bad", and big surprise when the Wizard turns out to be an *******.
So... it's not exactly that Elphaba makes some poor decisions and she becomes a villain by some tragic development in her character... she's just kinda flawless from the outset and ends the movie without having been morally compromised in any way...
...and we opened this movie with a song celebrating her death and "wickedness". She's a villain cause she's green and objects to animal enslavement... which is NOT the sort of subplot I was expecting to show up whatsoever.
What in the **** is that about anyway? Humans and non-humans used to coexist, but then they're being increasingly robbed of their ability to speak somehow and subjugated for reasons that OBVIOUSLY must be coming from the Wizard, yet not one puts that together until he outright says it?
Also, this is something that I can't help but question how it manages to reconcile itself with The Wizard of Oz movie. The Wicked Witch is still evil in that movie, yet Oz is for some reason completely unphased by a talking lion? Let alone a tin man and scarecrow, who I imagine deserve even less rights by virtue of... hurr hurr bigotry?
I get that Elphaba is green... and therefor Elphaba is empathetic towards others getting otherized (which is real ****in' basic)... but Oz doesn't even make a case for why we're suddenly pulling our goat teachers out of classrooms.
SPEAKING of otherizing... where in the **** are the munchkins in this movie? Dude literally taller than the main characters deadass says he's from "Munchkinland". There are so few movies as it is that dwarves are shoe-ins for roles, but we didn't even PRETEND that they exist.
Did we need to chipmunk all their voices to hell and back again? No, of course not, but like AT LEAST CAST SOME KIDS OR SHORT PEOPLE, WHAT THE ****!?
I literally only just found out that Peter Dinklage is in the movie... voicing the ****ing goat character. So you hired 1 dwarf... to be heard and not seen... reacting to a message saying that "animals" should be seen and not heard.
Are dwarves' place not on the big screen? Did Peter Dinklage do some stupid shit again to block other dwarves from getting acting jobs? This is worse than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory just reusing the same actor for all of the Oompa Loompas, and if you're worse than Charlie an the Chocolate Factory in ANY respect... you gotta reevaluate your life.
The only other thing I really want to complain about in this movie is the scene where Elphaba dons the witch hat and Glinda becomes her friend. Big important scene, right? Gotta do it right.
Well, it is the most awkward thing in the world to watch Elphaba hit the dance floor and improvise some goofyass chicken-armed routine to the pulse-pounding soundtrack of DEAD SILENCE.
I don't care if Glinda feels sad for her and hugs her in the end, I'm just cringing into my theater seat watching this unfold.
Long story short; there was a lot of potential in this movie, but it made some very strange choices, some very bad choices, and ultimately this is the sort of flick that is either unjustifiable compared to the soundtrack, or desperately needs to be recut to shave like an hour or more off of it.
A shorter punchier movie would have been much much better than what we got. Eventually we'll get the full songs released and someone will post a 10 minutes supercut of Ariana Grande as Glinda on Youtube and there will be no reason to see this movie.
I have no interest in seeing Part 2, but I am now very curious at how much better a stage production with barely a fraction of the budget could do.
Final Verdict: [Meh...]
UPDATE 11/23/24:
I have discovered Wicked """Slime Tutorials""", and having skimmed through a few of them I can now compare some aspects of the movie and the stage play.
I'm surprised to find the movie is actually very faithful to the play in terms of it's plot, personality, jokes, and songs, however the play OBVIOUSLY flows much better than the movie and there's naturally less expectation for visual stimulation in a stage performance so songs like The Wizard and I don't feel halfbaked in the same way they do in the movie.
They manage to do so much more onscreen with some songs like Popular and What is This Feeling?, with time lapses, wardrobe quickchanges, and contrived mechanical contraptions, etc. That's all possible with movie magic, so it's glaringly obvious when it's absent.
I think my biggest issue, now having seen parts of the play, is just that it's taken so long to get ANY complete official video recording of anything whatsoever even remotely close to the stage production for people to rewatch, to immortalize what they think is so great, but up until now have been forcing people to pay to attend a stage production in-person just to see it ONCE and then never again unless they shell out and reattend for a different performance.
And this version... is just the most bloated, dragged out, overlong, version of the musical you could watch. This desperately needs a fanedit, or better, an official edit that cuts out all the extra garbage we don't need.
Wicked
Fantasy Comedy Musical / English / 2024
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I caught one of the trailers a while back and genuinely thought it looked kinda good. The premise of an origin story to the Wicked Witch of the West that makes her one-dimensional portrayal as the villain in The Wizard of Oz somehow sympathetic is honestly interesting, and I already knew the stage musical is wild popular, though I've never seen it myself.
My biggest concern was some pretty out-of-touch comments the Wicked Witch actress made online regarding a fanedit of an official poster.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I'd like to open with a brief comment about my theater experience. This was the most packed theater I've been in since The Force Awakens, however, unlike The Force Awakens, the audience was not super enthusiastic about this movie. No big laughs, no singing along... which is fine, it means I can have an uninterrupted viewing, but it was also kinda telling that other people who probably knew more than I did about the source material weren't super psyched.
As far as I could tell, all of the animals in this movie were CG. And the CG was noticeably better than Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, so that's fine.
I rewatched The Wizard of Oz for the ongoing MoFo Top 100 Musicals Countdown and to prepare for seeing this movie. Again, I have never seen the stage musical or heard any of the songs, so have no basis for comparison.
HOWEVER, according to the official Wicked the Musical's chat assistant, the runtime of the stage performance is about 2 hours and 45 minutes.
That's about the length of this movie and this movie allegedly only adapts half of the play. I saw some articles circulated prior to release about the creators publicly insisting that to truly do the musical justice they'd need to split it into 2 parts. If that were true, then I think that's a commendable concession to make, if the existing intermission in the play marks a good stopping point for a theatrical adaptation, then sure, let's make it 2 movies.
But when one of those movies is AS LONG AS THE PLAY, then I can only assume you are artificially extending the length of this movie, and that feeling was strongly corroborated when by the time the title finally dropped I already felt that the opening could have been way ****ing shorter.
That feeling persists throughout much of the movie and it's exacerbated in three ways:
1.) This is the sort of musical that insists on having characters "sing" their regular dialog. Not that there's a song, or even a backing track, they just have to make direct conversation super awkward by singing it.
But not only that, it can't even be said that ALL of the regular dialog is sung, so instead you frequently have this awkward middleground between regular dialog and full songs. I don't know how popular this style of musical is, but I'm just not a fan.
2.) Songs are often broken up by regular dialog. Popular and Defying Gravity are honestly probably the best songs in the movie, but both of them are irritatingly interrupted so the characters can talk out-of-song. The music almost entirely drops out for these moments and whatever flow they had going just completely dies, only to abruptly resume minutes later.
Just play the full song, why watch a movie if it's going to be an inferior experience to what you can hear directly from the inevitable soundtrack? It's the same issue I have with many music videos that insist on inserting the video's narrative into the middle of their song. Just play the whole ******* song uninterrupted!
3.) Some songs are just appallingly dull to watch. The Wizard and I is the most glaring example I can think of. It's not even a bad listen and it's as good a time as any to say that Grande and Erivo are both totally capable singers, but what a stupefyingly awful presentation sometimes.
In The Wizard and I, Erivo is just singing while walking around. Not doing anything, not being around anything, at most she oggles some colorful ornaments in a ceiling, but then that is followed by her dramatically running out into a vacant sepia-toned field to a vacant sepia-toned desert, then dramatically running back. NOTHING is happening onscreen, it is visually DESOLATE, completely bereft of anything whatsoever to justify putting this song to film.
And it's so weird too, because other songs are loaded with visual stimulation, there's an entire dance sequence in a mechanical library, when they arrive in the Emerald City it's like a Wizard of Oz acid trip...
Maybe I wouldn't feel so negatively toward it if the these songs were slower and more contemplative... or if so much of the movie wasn't already the characters just singing their dialog when nothing's happening.
All three of these issues comprise my biggest complaints with this movie. It's not a conventional case of "bad pacing", so much as it feels like they spread what they had very wide and very thin and didn't care strongly enough if they left gaps in the process.
Now that that's been covered let's talk about what this movie is about.
For some unearthly reason, someone decided that we needed a highschool drama about the Wicked Witch of the West, how she's some lowkey magical prodigy, but everyone hates her cause she's green, and Glinda actually a huge bitch.
Part of this movie plays this concept like a parody, but part of it also plays it super straight. We get the turbo-popular collar-popped Jock character who rolls into school, floods every girl's panties on sight and any male he interacts with becomes perma-gay, like that's kinda funny, right? But then we tease some genuine romantic interest between Elphaba and this guy and even do a whole passionate song about it... as though it's serious?
It's stuff like that when I'm sitting in the theater thinking to myself that "this movie was NOT made for me".
On the flipside, the absolute best part of this movie is Ariana Grande as Glinda, and I say that as somebody who doesn't listen to her and has no opinion of her music, or knowledge of her acting background.
As the movie goes on, Glinda becomes an increasingly hyper-exaggerated stereotype of a preppy highschool rich kid. That's already been done to death many times, but her performance as a "terminally blonde" character comes off as so natural that her ditzy mannerisms and occasionally sudden and offensively severe selfishness just makes her pretty amusing and even endearing to watch, especially when she heel-face-turns into Elphaba's friend.
Elphaba is a nice "straight man" for her to play off of, and she has some moments of her own... I was concerned that in this day and age that Elphaba wouldn't get away without being treated as a huge victim, or being obnoxiously confrontational and lecturing towards Glinda and the other students... in fact she does act that way towards the Prince Charming character, but he immediately calls her out both times for assuming how he might be judging her (they also keep the obvious racial allegory cut down to a throwaway "I don't see color" punchline).
So that's all fine, BULLET DODGED, honestly, but at the same time, Elphaba doesn't really have an arc in this movie, and that sucks when the movie's supposed to be about her. Obviously she wants to meet the Wizard, obviously there must be some conceit to get her to "go bad", and big surprise when the Wizard turns out to be an *******.
So... it's not exactly that Elphaba makes some poor decisions and she becomes a villain by some tragic development in her character... she's just kinda flawless from the outset and ends the movie without having been morally compromised in any way...
...and we opened this movie with a song celebrating her death and "wickedness". She's a villain cause she's green and objects to animal enslavement... which is NOT the sort of subplot I was expecting to show up whatsoever.
What in the **** is that about anyway? Humans and non-humans used to coexist, but then they're being increasingly robbed of their ability to speak somehow and subjugated for reasons that OBVIOUSLY must be coming from the Wizard, yet not one puts that together until he outright says it?
Also, this is something that I can't help but question how it manages to reconcile itself with The Wizard of Oz movie. The Wicked Witch is still evil in that movie, yet Oz is for some reason completely unphased by a talking lion? Let alone a tin man and scarecrow, who I imagine deserve even less rights by virtue of... hurr hurr bigotry?
I get that Elphaba is green... and therefor Elphaba is empathetic towards others getting otherized (which is real ****in' basic)... but Oz doesn't even make a case for why we're suddenly pulling our goat teachers out of classrooms.
SPEAKING of otherizing... where in the **** are the munchkins in this movie? Dude literally taller than the main characters deadass says he's from "Munchkinland". There are so few movies as it is that dwarves are shoe-ins for roles, but we didn't even PRETEND that they exist.
Did we need to chipmunk all their voices to hell and back again? No, of course not, but like AT LEAST CAST SOME KIDS OR SHORT PEOPLE, WHAT THE ****!?
I literally only just found out that Peter Dinklage is in the movie... voicing the ****ing goat character. So you hired 1 dwarf... to be heard and not seen... reacting to a message saying that "animals" should be seen and not heard.
Are dwarves' place not on the big screen? Did Peter Dinklage do some stupid shit again to block other dwarves from getting acting jobs? This is worse than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory just reusing the same actor for all of the Oompa Loompas, and if you're worse than Charlie an the Chocolate Factory in ANY respect... you gotta reevaluate your life.
The only other thing I really want to complain about in this movie is the scene where Elphaba dons the witch hat and Glinda becomes her friend. Big important scene, right? Gotta do it right.
Well, it is the most awkward thing in the world to watch Elphaba hit the dance floor and improvise some goofyass chicken-armed routine to the pulse-pounding soundtrack of DEAD SILENCE.
I don't care if Glinda feels sad for her and hugs her in the end, I'm just cringing into my theater seat watching this unfold.
Long story short; there was a lot of potential in this movie, but it made some very strange choices, some very bad choices, and ultimately this is the sort of flick that is either unjustifiable compared to the soundtrack, or desperately needs to be recut to shave like an hour or more off of it.
A shorter punchier movie would have been much much better than what we got. Eventually we'll get the full songs released and someone will post a 10 minutes supercut of Ariana Grande as Glinda on Youtube and there will be no reason to see this movie.
I have no interest in seeing Part 2, but I am now very curious at how much better a stage production with barely a fraction of the budget could do.
Final Verdict: [Meh...]
UPDATE 11/23/24:
I have discovered Wicked """Slime Tutorials""", and having skimmed through a few of them I can now compare some aspects of the movie and the stage play.
I'm surprised to find the movie is actually very faithful to the play in terms of it's plot, personality, jokes, and songs, however the play OBVIOUSLY flows much better than the movie and there's naturally less expectation for visual stimulation in a stage performance so songs like The Wizard and I don't feel halfbaked in the same way they do in the movie.
They manage to do so much more onscreen with some songs like Popular and What is This Feeling?, with time lapses, wardrobe quickchanges, and contrived mechanical contraptions, etc. That's all possible with movie magic, so it's glaringly obvious when it's absent.
I think my biggest issue, now having seen parts of the play, is just that it's taken so long to get ANY complete official video recording of anything whatsoever even remotely close to the stage production for people to rewatch, to immortalize what they think is so great, but up until now have been forcing people to pay to attend a stage production in-person just to see it ONCE and then never again unless they shell out and reattend for a different performance.
And this version... is just the most bloated, dragged out, overlong, version of the musical you could watch. This desperately needs a fanedit, or better, an official edit that cuts out all the extra garbage we don't need.