Category Archives: Movies

The ‘Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid’ Project

Leave a reply

.

When I went to the theater with my friend Ray in 1982 to see Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, it was not because I was a deep fan of detective movies or film noir. Steve Martin and Carl Reiner were enough of a selling point to motivate me to see this comedy, and it’s something I never regretted.

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is both a satire and a salute to the detective and film noir films of the 1940s and 1950s, with Steve Martin as Rigby Reardon hired by Juliet Forrest (Rachel Ward) to investigate the mysterious death of her father, a famous scientist. Rigby’s investigation brings him into contact with numerous shady and dangerous characters before leading him to a cadre of Nazis in South America bent on continuing the war with America.

What makes this film special is that it’s a collage project with most of the shady and dangerous characters that Martin interacts with as Rigby carefully edited scenes from classic movies of the period. By careful use of over-the-shoulder shots, sets and costumes crafted to duplicate those seen in the archival footage, and sometimes the use of doubles photographed without their faces visible, the illusion that Martin is actually in these scenes is delivered with a degree of sophistication that’s impressive.

A few years after seeing and thoroughly enjoying this movie in my Introduction to Cinematography course I was exposed to some of the more important films that Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid used in its collages and my fascination with film noir began.

Last month I got the idea it might be fun to make it a challenge to watch every one of the 19 classic movies that this film borrowed clips from. By my own count, I’ve seen eight, leaving eleven yet to be experienced. I made a list, organized it by IMDB ratings, and decided to start from the lowest rated and work my way to the highest, skipping none—making this a mix of films new to me and old favorites.

  1. Double Indemnity (1944) – 8.3
    2. White Heat (1949) – 8.1
    3. Suspicion (1941) – 8.1
    4. The Killers (1946) – 8.0
    5. The Lost Weekend (1945) – 8.0
    6. In a Lonely Place (1950) – 8.0
    7. Notorious (1946) – 7.9
    8. The Big Sleep (1946) – 7.8
    9. Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) – 7.7
    10. Dark Passage (1947) – 7.6
    11. The Glass Key (1942) – 7.6
    12. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) – 7.6
    13. I Walk Alone (1947) – 7.4
    14. This Gun for Hire (1942) – 7.3
    15. Humoresque (1946) – 7.3
    16. Deception (1946) – 7.2
    17. Johnny Eager (1941) – 7.1
    18. Keeper of the Flame (1942) – 6.9
    19. The Bribe (1949) – 6.8

My project ran into immediate trouble.

The Bribe, which fascinated me most from the clips utilized by Reiner and Martin, was not streaming anywhere, nor was it available even as a video-on-demand (VOD) rental. There had been a single release on DVD 16 years ago in 2010 and long out of print.

I didn’t want to abandon this project—it seemed fun to me—but I also hated the idea of skipping some of the films that violated the very essence of the endeavor. Surrender seemed to be the only option until I remembered one tiny little fact: the San Diego Library System has DVDs.

A quick search of the catalog revealed that they had two copies of The Bribe on disc, and so soon, my friends, I will begin the climb up that list as my 2026 cinematic venture.

Share

It Should Not Be Titanic versus L. A. Confidential

Leave a reply

.

As we approach the Academy Awards once again, the discussion turns to snubs and the films that should have won Best Picture, with lively debate centered on 1997’s Best Picture winner, Titanic, and the beloved loser that year, the neo-noir L.A. Confidential.

L.A. Confidential is a complex story with intertwined story arcs of passion, corruption, ambition, and organized crime in post-War Los Angeles as it attempts to build a ‘modern’ police force. Adapted from James Ellroy’s doorstop of a novel with a bewildering number of characters and a pace that demands the audience keeps up as the twisty plot is slowly revealed, the script is a miracle of adaptation.

Titanic is an epic of motion picture wizardry, a tale of star-crossed lovers from opposite ends of society who meet and discover themselves aboard the famed and doomed ocean liner as it makes its fateful transatlantic crossing. Ridiculed both within and without the industry for its massive production and its legendary cost overruns, many believed before its release that it would signal the end of James Cameron’s ‘Golden Boy’ image as he finally suffered a disastrous box office bomb. Though the script suffers from cardboard villains and trite, clichéd dialogue, the movie became the most successful motion picture in history, losing that crown to another James Cameron film, Avatar.

The problem with the award is that it’s a singular honor when in fact there should be two awards at the top honoring outstanding achievement in motion pictures.

There should be Best Film, which in 1997, I would award to L.A. Confidential. This would be an award which judges the picture based on its themes, its writing, its story, and how those elements synthesize. It would be an award to recognize the artistry that explores the nature of humanity and the human soul. This award should go to the producers, the people responsible for finding and developing the story from concept, through however many writers and directors are involved, to final form.

The companion award should be Best Production. This would recognize outstanding achievement in the production of a motion picture, the mastery of coordinating hundreds of skilled artists and craftsmen. The nearly impossible task of maintaining such an army and keeping it focused on an artistic vision and realizing that artistic vision. Titanic is a near perfect example of a film that shows a real mastery of production along with all three of The Lord of the Rings installments. This is a director’s award, the person tasked with guiding the day to day work of that vast army.

Sadly, that is not the world we inhabit.

Share

Helen of Troy Wasn’t Real

Leave a reply

.

Later this year we’ll get Christopher Nolan’s next epic and chronologically scrambled film, his adaptation of The Odyssey. I’m a fan of Nolan’s work, in general, Interstellar mistakes cynicism for wisdom — a fault that often appears when he works with his brother Jonathan — so I expect to put my butt in the theater when this is released.

Rumors have slipped out and I do not believe that they have been verified that Nolan has cast actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the mythical reason for the war and destruction of Troy. As Ms. Nyong’o is far from the Aryan ideal of feminine beauty, the usual quarters of the internet have released their hateful monkeys, pretending to be aghast at this ‘historical inaccuracy.’

Daniel Benavides – Creative Commons License

First off, Helen of Troy is a fictional character.  There is no ‘historical accuracy’ in any casting of her. She probably doesn’t look like how Homer or anyone of his time would have pictured the subject of the epics, but that hardly matters. Beauty and what is considered beautiful is such a slippery concept, shifting so quickly from culture to culture and, hell, from year to year within the same culture. No, the intense ‘debate’ has little to do with history and much more to do with weak and scared people needing something, particularly culture, to reassure them that they are the best in the universe and that their pale skin is evidence of that fact. ( I am pretty damned pale myself, but all that really means is that I consider the sun an evil force.)

This is not the first time we have been subjected to this vile nastiness cosplaying as ‘accuracy.’

When Marvel released Thor in 2011, there were the same cries and thumping of sunken chests over the casting of Idris Elba as Heimdall. Again, we were assaulted with the argument it wasn’t ‘accurate’ as though Heimdall existed in reality and not simply the product of mead-induced story-telling.

1989’s Batman saw the same thing erupt, though with far less notoriety due to that being the pre-internet age, with the casting of Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent. Again, a fictional character though this time one with a history of being depicted visually.

Lupita Nyong’o is not only a fantastically attractive person, she is a highly skilled and proficient actor, someone who has mastered her craft. If she is playing Helen of Troy, I will be perfectly fine with that and will find it far, far easier to suspend my disbelief than when I was assailed with Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist.

Share

Movie Review: Three Strangers (1946)

Leave a reply

.

Counted among Warner Brothers’ film noir catalog, Three Strangers shares a thematic aspect with The Night Has a Thousand Eyes in that it is a noir with a strong atmosphere of the supernatural about it.

Warner Brothers Studios

A mysterious woman wordlessly lures a man to her apartment in London. Once inside another man, obviously intoxicated, rises from the sofa. The woman explains that she also invited this gentleman, again without knowing anything about him, even his name. She speedily explains that at least for the moment, they must not reveal their names or anything about themselves to each other. In her apartment she has a statue of the Chinese goddess Kwan Yin and at midnight as the new year begins, it is said that the goddess will open her eyes and grant a wish to three strangers, provided that they wish for the same thing. They agree to wish for money via a lottery ticket for the national horse race. They sign the ticket, making it a contract amongst themselves, using a blotter to obscure their names as they sign so no one sees another’s name.

They wait for midnight, gazing at the candle-lit statuette. The hour is struck, and a wind extinguishes the flame, plunging the room into darkness. By the time the candle is relit, the hour has passed. Then Crystal Shackleford (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who can now safely reveal her name, insists that she saw the statuette’s eyes open, as the myth insisted. The first man, Jerome Arbutny (Sydney Greenstreet) insists he saw no such thing, with the third person, Johnny West (Peter Lorre) taking no serious part in the debate if the eye opened or not. The three go their separate ways, Arbutny cynical that anything serious has transpired, West willing to believe but more interested in more drink to fuel his alcoholism, and Shackleford devout in her faith that this idol will bring about fortune for them all.

The rest of the film follows the three through their troubled lives. Arbutny has embezzled funds from a trust he manages for an eccentric widowed peer, the discovery of which will ruin him financially and reputationally. West, in a drunken stupor, was shanghaied into being a lookout for a burglary that went badly and ended with the murder of a police officer. Shackleford instigated the entire affair in hope of winning back her husband who, after unspecified marital difficulties, has taken an extended business trip to Canada. Each person’s life spirals more and more out of control. Arbutny finds no source of funds to cover his theft and his client is now suspicious. West ends up taking the fall for the murder one of his compatriots committed, and Shackleford’s husband returns, demanding a divorce so he may marry his new love. When the lottery ticket turns out to have drawn not only the name of a horse in the race but one favored to win, the film turns to its final act without ever addressing if it had been mere chance or supernatural forces at work as the characters suffer the consequences of their choices.

Three Strangers is an fascionating sort of film noir. Produced in 1946, it is early in that genre’s formation, so the dipping into the supernatural is not an attempt to revitalize a form but one that rose organically when John Huston conceived the story. It is a film I have heard of for quite some time and this week finally got around to watching. In terms of film noir, there are better movies that I will revisit much more often than this one, but it is also interesting enough to warrant watching and with a collection of characters that are entertaining with all their faults; Icy the woman who loves West despite his drinking, Gabby their accomplice in the robbery who is a brute but one with a code and the clerks working in Arbunty’s office all give the film charm and depth. . I really like how the supernatural—not only Kwan Yin but the spirits of the dead visiting their loved ones—is handled so deftly that it can be mere coincidence or actual evidence that there is much more to the world than what we can see, hear, and touch. Three Strangers is a gritty crime noir that suggests perhaps the world is not as material as it appears.

Share

Remaking the Exorcist

Leave a reply

.

After the box office failure of Exorcist: Believer, which Universal, who had acquired the rights from Warner Brothers had hoped to revitalize the franchise and launch a new horror trilogy, the project was taken away from its director, David Gordon Green.

A new film currently known simply as The Exorcist has been handed to the reigning prince of cinematic horror, Mike Flanagan.

While there are some Flanagan projects that I have found to be inspired and masterfully crafted, in particular Doctor Sleep a sequel to The Shining that manages to honor both the original source material and the cinematic legacy, I have serious doubts about yet another Exorcist project. The Exorcist, in my opinion, should have never had any sequels and the concept of a ‘franchise’ is utterly repellant.

 First off, a horror franchise is a deeply difficult thing. Oh, there are tons and tons of them about and every studio dreams of having a run that is like Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, or Scream, but what horror existed in those movies quickly vanished with the sequels. To me those movies ceased to horrify and only titillated with more and more elaborate methods of murders combined with advancing practical effects. I can’t remember ever being disturbed by these sequels and horror should disturb you emotionally not inspire cheers from gore as spectacle.

The second reason I am highly skeptical of an Exorcist franchise is that this story, this tale, was never constructed for that sort of open-ended treatment. The Exorcist, both novel and screenplay, was William Peter Blatty’s method of dealing with his own crisis of faith.  It was not a cash grab, but a work produced by a devoted Catholic who found his own way thorny and used fiction to explore answers to his deep theological questions. While the rest of the world considered The Exorcist a horror novel and film, Blatty and director William Friedkin, did not, treating the material as a theological mystery. With the exception of Blatty’s work with the novel Legion adapted into The Exorcist III, none of the sequels possessed the deep questioning nature of the original source material, they pursued effects and shock value, making them ultimately forgettable. yet another sequel to The Exorcist is the last thing cinema requires.

Little is actually known about Flanagan’s project and rumor has suggested that instead of a sequel he may be remaking the original film, a new adaptation of the novel.

This too would be a mistake.

Since its publication I have read the novel the Exorcist three or four times. I do not count it among my favorite books, but it is fascinating and an interesting glimpse into the time it was written. The script and motion picture are excellent adaptations, some of the best. Nearly all of the novel’s core story and more importantly questions are there, particularly with the final revisions later released. If this is a re-adaptation of the novel I fail to see what they can include that wasn’t in the original film’s take. What was left out deserved to be left out. Audiences, even in the 70s and more so today, would laugh at Father Karras’ quest to prove that it was telekinesis that moved the objects and not demonic possession. (Really, in the 70s psychic powers were all the rage in fiction and in the culture.)

The 1973 film was a miracle of adaptation, in script, in direction, and in casting. It was lightning in a bottle that I doubt even Flanagan can recreate.

Share

Classic Movie Review: Little Caesar (1931)

Leave a reply

.

Last week I watched a YouTuber movie reactor watch Soylent Green for the first time. That film was the very last movie with Edward G. Robinson a film star whose career stretched back to the very start of the sync-sound era of motion pictures. After viewing the reaction, I had a hankering to watch another film with Edward G. Robinson and instead of pulling Double Indemnity from my collection I decided to go with the movie that launched Robinson as a star Little Caesar.

Warner Bros Studios

Released in 1931, Little Caesar is most definitely a pre-code movie. We meet Caesar Enrico ‘Rico’ Bandello (Edward G. Robinson) as he and his buddy Joe (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) rob a gas station, in the process murdering the attendant. Unlike Joe, Rico has no traces of remorse as they eat supper in an isolated diner following the horrid crime. Ambitious for more than petty robberies, the murder isn’t even on his mind, Rico drags Joe to the ‘big city’ where he quickly joins a mob and begins his meteoric rise (isn’t it ironic that we use ‘meteoric rise’ when meteors are most known for falling) to the top of the city’s organized crime community followed by his equally swift downfall.

Little Caesar is part of the Blu-Ray boxed set The Ultimate Gangster Collection. With its release in 1931, this film is an example of just how quickly Hollywood adopted synchronized sound into their productions. While the quality of the sound still needed improvement, the production capability was there and aside from the occasional use of title cards as deployed in silent movies, Little Caesar looks and sounds very much like the films that would follow for the rest of the decade. As a ‘pre-code’ movie, Little Caesar is a bold tale that follows its lead character as he murders his way to fame and fortune with a downfall that was not engineered by the police forces of the ‘big city’ but rather by betrayal from a friend.

Of course, this was the movie that made a star of Edward G. Robinson, and while he did play gangsters again, most notability in Key Largo, Robinson escaped typecasting and his career stretched from the 1930s into the early 1970s. If you watch classic Looney Tunes cartoons and see Bug Bunny facing off against a gangster, that gangster is a parody of Robinson’s performance in Little Caesar, which set the template for the genre.

At an hour and seventeen minutes, Little Caesar had little time for a ‘realistic’ climb to greatness for Rico and instead swiftly moves the character along, only stopping for an occasional bit of detailed action. Aside from Rico and Joe, the characters are flat, serving more as elements of plot than living breathing people and one should not go into watching this film with modern sensibilities about writing and psychological realism, but one should watch Little Caesar.

Share

Movie Review: 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Leave a reply

.

The newest installment in the 28 Days Later, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DeCosta, opened this weekend, and my sweetie-wife and I attended a Sunday matinee.

Bone Temple picks up just a very short time after the ending of the previous franchise entry with that film’s protagonist, 12-year-old Spike, a captive of the ‘Jimmies,’ a tiny, deranged band of sadistic marauders led by Jimmy, a man who survived the outbreak since childhood and now believes himself to be the embodiment of Satan’s will on Earth.

Sony Pictures

In a parallel plotline the movie follows Dr. Ian Kelson, also a character carried over from the previous movie, as he continues his isolated life amid the grand ossuary of towering bone that he constructed to honor the dead. Kelson’s experiments with the infected lead him to a sort of friendship with a massive, infected man. When a member of the Jimmies spies Kelson, dancing with an infected, they mistake him for Satan himself setting the two forces into conflict for the film’s final act.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a fine and perfectly serviceable follow-up to 28 Years Later. It is competently directed by Nia DeCosta and with a script by Alex Garland, the originator of the franchise, that has no serious plot holes, consistent believable characters, along with moments of action, horrific violence, and humor. And yet, for all that the best praise I can give this production is that it is ‘fine.’ Garland, who so often explores large ideas and questions with his writing, think 2024’s Civil War,Ex Machina, or the mind twisting Men, does very little of that with this movie. The deepest theme I can pull out of The Bone Temple is that some people are good and try to be of service to others, some are bad and seek pleasure in the pain that they can inflict on others, and many, if not most, are simply trying to survive a cruel and indifferent world. This is hardly the sort of statement one would expect from the scriptwriter of Annihilation.

As a horror film, whatever that phrase might mean to you, The Bone Temple, for me, does not deliver. I enjoyed the film, but more as a drama and character study than a genre film. Mind you, a genre film can be a great drama and character study while delivering the terror, unease, and apprehension that makes for a great horror film. Midsommar is a terrific example of the film that does that, as does The Haunting (the original not the action movie remake.) The real horror that is presented in The Bone Temple is the horror that people do to each other, that people are the real monsters, but that has been a subtext of the zombie movie since its inception with Night of the Living Dead and this movie breaks no real ground in that regard.

The performances in the film are competent. Alfie Williams (Spike) is given far less to do this time around than in the last movie where his character and his choices drove the narrative. Jack O’Connell (Jimmy) delivers a perfectly by the book portrayal of the sadistic psychopath, but Garland’s script aside from a minor trait of actually believing he is the son of Satan gives Jimmy nothing that steps outside of the well-trod path of the cinematic psychopath. It is in Ralph Fiennes’ (Kelson) portrayal of the kind doctor lost in a mad world that gives the film its depth. It is from Kelson that we see humanity and humor and a truly unforgettable musical video performance.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is worth seeing, particularly if you are a fan of Ralph Fiennes, but I doubt that the film will linger long in your memory.

Share

A Thematic Problem with The Red Shirt Issue

.

Yesterday evening, I came across a post from a friend online that expressed their middling reaction to del Toro’s Frankenstein prompting a return of my own thoughts that del Toro had worked so hard to make his monster sympathetic that no one of consequence died at its hands, a major deviation from the source text.

del Toro’s use of nameless crew to be killed in a thrilling and exciting opening combat scene with an unstoppable monster makes for a great opening to his luscious film but becomes hollow when the rest of the time the monster is presented melodramatically sympathetic and without emotional or ethical flaws. One could be forgiven for forgetting that the movie opened with mass murder. After all, they were literally nobodies.

Now, I have written about this before calling it his ‘Red Shirt’ problem. For those who are unaware, ‘red shirts’ refers to the often unnamed and wholly uncharacterized extras presented as security officers in Star Trek. These day players came onto the scene and in popular (but exaggerated) opinion died in droves.  The essence is still on target, they were essentially nameless characters brought on to dramatize the danger of that episode, a necessary evil of the time as no network program could go about killing its major and central characters. (This was decades before Game of Thrones would make it a drinking game.)

Western literature and oral tradition stretching back into prehistory is corrupted with a nasty little idea, that some people are simply born better than the rest of us. The nobility deserves their castles, their rich food, and the product of our labor, our bodies, and our lives because of the blue blood that courses through their veins. The ‘Chosen One’ narrative so popular in everything from religion to Star Wars is a product of this form of thinking. Luke and Aragon are good people because they were born to it, not from choice, not from making a decision to be good, but by their very blood. The force and the right to rule flows from their heritage and not their choices. We, the non-chosen, need to step aside and let out betters make the choices that will rule our lives. Our duty is to serve and to be thankful.

And here is the poisonous subtext in the ‘red shirt’ problem, it perpetuates this division of people into those worth and deserving of sympathy, consideration, and ultimately power from those lower, nameless people of the great ‘unwashed masses’ whose existence only matters in the moment that it impacts the monied and good-blooded people worthy of names. There are your ‘betters’ to whom you must defer with titles such as my lord, sir, mister — and to whom you must pay your obedience or suffer the lash and then there is everyone else, ‘red shirts’ to be used and discarded either on the battlefield or the factory to advance the lives and lifestyles of their ‘betters.’ The subtext of nameless victims in horror and action movies is that some lives are inherently more valuable than others.

“Red shirts” are not only a lazy and cheap play for a short cut to dramatic stakes, the practice subtly subverts the egalitarian ideals that all lives are valuable regardless of the accident of their birth or their importance to any particular narrative by regulating some characters to nameless and forgettable disposal.

Share

A New Motion Picture From the Creator of ‘Chernobyl’

.

Craig Mazin, the writer, producer, and show runner of the hit shows Chernobyl and The Last Of Us who has proven his ability to shock, horrify, and unsettle even the most steadfast of viewers with stories of humans caught in circumstances that test them to the limits of their endurance, often with dreadful deaths along the way.

The podcast Scriptnotes is hosted by John August and Craig Mazin and is  heaven for scriptwriting and things interesting to scriptwriters. It actually covers much more than that. I have set aside any dreams of scriptwriting but still I am devoted to the podcast as a weekly dose of sanity in my ears.

For years Craig has mentioned obliquely a script he and a producer have been working on, a challenging one to crack its story and its voice. This week the man who gave us the technological terror of Soviet Nuclear design and the uncanny horror of fungal possession released the first look at his newest project.

Here is the trailer.

youtube placeholder image

Share

Wicked: The Jenga Tower of IP

.

While I was unwell this past weekend and too dizzy for my usual activities, I sat in my large recliner and watched Wicked on Amazon Prime.

Now, Wicked, the 2024 film, is an adaptation of Wicked the Stage Musical, which itself was an adaptation of the 1995 novel Wicked, which was a retelling of the classic book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but reimagined with the “wicked witch” of the West as its protagonist.

I am not a great fan of musicals, though there are a few in my library of DVDs and Blu-rays, so I had no burning desire or need to rush out last year and see this in the theaters. That said, it made a perfectly fine way to pass the time as my head spun with some sort of sinus issues.

Universal Studios

The story centers on Elphaba, a young woman born with two very powerful traits: one, a wild magical ability that manifests when she is emotionally upset—not quite a wizarding Hulk but close—and the second, bright verdant skin. Scorned by her father for her complexion, though the suggestion that she is a bastard is slid into the story, it is not made explicit. Ridiculed by everyone, Elphaba develops into a withdrawn and defensive young woman played by Cynthia Erivo. (Personally, I found the overt and powerful prejudice towards Elphaba a little difficult to square in a land with such a variety of strange and unusual lifeforms as Oz possesses.)

Elphaba’s life is turned around when, escorting her younger and disabled sister Nessarose to Shiz University, her untrained magical talent is noticed by an instructor, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), and she is instantly enrolled and forced to room with the popular and utterly self-centered Galinda (Ariana Grande). The two women start off with a strong dislike towards each other but become friends. Elphaba comes to the attention of and is honored with an audience with The Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum), where the two friends learn a terrible and life-changing truth about the land of Oz.

Wicked in all its iterations has a large and loyal fanbase, but I have never counted myself amongst them. Now, having seen the film, I can say that I liked it but did not love it.

The central performances are compelling enough, with Ariana Grande’s coming as a bit of a surprise to me. Pop stars and singers are often thrust into acting roles, and far too often they have neither the temperament nor the skills for nuanced acting performances. Some may think that because Galinda is a vain, self-centered, and not-too-bright woman, that it would be an easy role to play, but it is a truism that playing dumb is much more difficult than playing smart. Add to the challenge that all the characters, save Elphaba who anchors the production, play heightened and exaggerated versions of themselves, and Grande’s challenge is magnified.

Cynthia Erivo delivers another stunning performance both in her singing talents and in her acting ones. She is the emotional heart of the story, and if her performance doesn’t work for you, then the entire film will not either.

Wicked is colorful, over-the-top, and fun, but it is also, not barring that this is only half of the stage musical, overlong, with beats and songs that could be excised without any appreciable change to the film.

For example, when Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) convinces the student body to break the rules and visit the club “Oz Dust,” there is a substantial and elaborate number. The Prince is a “bad boy” and they are breaking the rules. However, nothing comes of the rule-breaking, not even when “caught” by Madame Morrible, as the plot needs to progress. What matters in the club is the beginning of Galinda’s and Elphaba’s friendship. The entire song and dance served no narrative purpose.

That said, even though the film is too long, it was fun to watch, and I do not feel that I wasted my time with Wicked.

Share