Wicked
Santi🎄☃️

Review by Santi🎄☃️ Patron

Wicked 2024

★★½

Watched Nov 23, 2024

Since almost 100 years, the medium of the moving image, pictures, motion pictures and the magic of cinema has captivated so many people, a way of escapism from the horrors of our world. The transition of black and white to color, is a landmark achievement showed perfectly in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, capturing the magic of Oz and giving us the fantasy genre as we know it.

In the humble year of 2024, I’ve now noticed that we’ve kind of gone backwards in terms of capturing the color within the medium of cinema, as a way to evoke character, a way to make a scene feel lively. We’ve also seen to lose the art of how to light a scene properly, lighting is meant to spotlight a certain actor’s performance. What does my mini-lecture on lighting and color have to do with Wicked? Well, it’s mainly one of the main problems that I had with the film itself. I know what you’re thinking “Santi, it’s not that big of deal, you’re too focused on lighting and technicolor to even critique a movie.” You might be right, but I felt as though that I wasn’t as connected to the story of Elphaba and Glinda’s friendship as much as I wanted to.

That’s not to say that the movie’s the worst thing since bland tomato paste. I just wanna preface and say yet again, that I love musical movies as long as they have a certain style, great songs and an interesting story. Wicked has great songs and has great choreography, two of the songs I liked were “Dancing Through Life” and “One Short Day”, and I think the visual effects were solid for the most part.

The standout is the chemistry between Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, and I thought they were both really good. Ariana particularly shines as Glinda, I think it’s great that she got to play this character and was a dream of hers. I also think that it’s insane to me that she’s considered for Best Supporting Actress accolades, again, she’s great, but I’m just not sure that she’s Oscar-worthy, I think Joan Chen in Didi is worthy of that title alone. Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero is also really good, I think he’s very charming. As far as Peter Dinklage, Michelle Yeoh and Jeff Goldblum, they’re just there.

Besides the backlighting, blurred backgrounds and the unholy desaturation of color, I just wasn’t as connected to the story as much as I thought I would be. I do have a respect for the Wizard of Oz IP, but I don’t think it should fall victim to the Corporate Overlords that are now MCU-ifying and squeezing the cow utters of beloved IP for a profit to keep the Hollywood industry afloat. After seeing Jon M. Chu’s anti-art comments on a Reddit thread, it has dampened my viewing of the film in general. Jon, you do realize that fantasy is not real, right? If you make fantasy look real it’s going to look bad regardless. Jon M. Chu isn’t exactly a director that I particularly liked. His Justin Bieber doc was solid for 2010, I didn’t care that much for Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights was certainly a musical with great songs and did well for Latino representation but the miscasting controversy and change in the relationship between Nina and her father severely affected the film’s reputation. Jon is what I like to call a “director-for-hire”, he doesn’t bring a certain touch or passion to his filmmaking, and he comes to direct his actors and dancers and gets his paycheck after filming is completed.

This could also stem from the fact that I watched Arcane’s final episodes which were amongst the greatest piece of fiction I’ve ever seen, and I didn’t really focus because of it.😭 I also don’t think the film properly communicated it’s thematic statement of fascism and that sometimes doing the right thing will make you the villain regardless. Maybe I just haven’t cared about a Broadway Musical that I saw on a 5th grade trip 15 years ago. 

Definitely Ariana stans and theater nerds are going to come after me for this, but Idc, that’s just how I feel. The praise it’s getting is making me sad that West Side Story(2021) and Tick Tick Boom are being forgotten. Guys, these movies are right there! Those are musical masterpieces that I hold in high regard. 

Anyways, thank you for reading. I’ve been hungry for 3 hours and I need to eat. BYE BYE.✨

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