Wicked and Wish

[osprey_archer]

This has been a very movie-ful weekend! On Saturday I went to see Wicked and on Sunday I watched Wish, both of which I enjoyed as visual spectacles but didn’t love.

Wicked is in fact the first two-thirds of the musical Wicked. (How are they going to make another complete movie out of a third of the musical, you ask? Who can say.) It’s visually lush and enticing, many of the songs are bangers, and I loved Galinda instantly. The MOST annoying person in the world but also somehow the most delightful? An absolute triumph for Ariana Grande. I also loved the Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel (the original Galinda and Elphaba) got cameos doing a stage show together in the Emerald City. Lots of fun!

However. The movie really really really wanted me to like Elphaba, to the point of making people point and scream when they see her (because she’s green!), and because I am basically a contrary person I therefore spent most of the movie looking for a reason to dislike her. Eventually the movie broke me and I liked her despite myself but I assure you I fought hard.

But also I’m really just the wrong audience for “What if the villain was actually the good guy and just MISUNDERSTOOD?” Like. Of course you can construct a story where the villain had good reasons for their seeming villainy, which was actually just their attempt to restore justice to this cruel world. But I rarely feel that these stories engage with the original text in an interesting way, and if it fails to do that then I just don’t care.

***

Wish I thought was a visual delight. I loved the floating dreams and the pretty island and the crooked tree hanging over the water where Asha used to sit with her father gazing up at the stars, and I liked Asha and her friends and her goat sidekick, until he started talking. Disney should just stop it with the talking animal sidekicks. They’re always so much cuter when they can only bleat.

And I enjoyed all the little visual nods to other Disney movies. The references are fun if you catch them, but don’t detract from the movie if you don’t, which I think is an important quality in the Easter egg. No one should need to be encyclopedically knowledgeable about all the entries in a franchise in order to appreciate a movie. (Looking at you, Marvel!)

The songs were fine, but not catchy; nothing on the level of “Let It Go” from Frozen or “We Know the Way” from Moana. The songs in Wish are just too wordy, I think. It’s hard to imagine belting them out at karaoke.

Also, since Frozen 2, Disney has attempted a number of “let’s overthrow the Establishment” stories, and they’re just not that good at it, possibly because they are in fact the Establishment. In Wish, the inhabitants of the island overthrow the evil sorcerer king Magnifico by wishing real hard all at the same time. Then Magnifico’s wife takes over as the benevolent monarch and everything is solved.

I am not expecting Disney to go all Battleship Potemkin, but since they’re not going to go all Battleship Potemkin, maybe they should accept that stories about revolutionary structural change are not their forte.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Yeah, I think it must be really, really hard for Disney, as a corporate entity, to get behind revolutionary structural change. Nothing smacks of sellout or astroturfing more than a megamillions development and promotion budget! (I actually don't know anything about Wish, so this comment isn't about that movie in particular but just about Dead-Center-Establishment trying to pull off the message of an I-filmed-this-on-my-phone-while-homeless film.

I agree with your analysis of films/stories/comics that do the What-if-Villain-But-Actually-Not? plot. I think any individual one of those can be fun (or not), but as a TYPE, yes: completely what you say. Basically, "What if Villain, but actually not?" undoes itself at step one. Either, yes, villain! In which case, you may feel tremendously for the villainous protagonist, but at the same time, Dude. That was wrong and bad. I feel for you, but. Or no, not actually villain! In which case you're no longer really doing a villain story.

[minutia_r]

I three am the wrong audience for this sort of woobie villain story, for the pretty much the same reasons that you and Osprey have already listed. We can sit in the hater corner together!

[asakiyume]

I am especially not a fan of the notion of [not]villain is [not really] villainous because people were mean to them over their looks ... even though I realize that people being mean to people over their looks is a problem since time immemorial, and that's cruel, and people who've suffered are going to react to having suffered--one way or another.

And I mean: part of it with looks is that looks are a heuristic for other things: fearing or despising illness or age or deformity or just simply body types or features from other places. But all that seems like whoa, way more of a thing, like a whole other universe of a thing, from What if Cruella DeVil (sp??? IDK) has a backstory. Or the wicked witch of the west, or the evil stepsisters in Cinderella or whatever.

[osprey_archer]

Not!Villain was bullied as a child and this gives them carte blanche to do whatever they want for the rest of their life (but also they never did anything REALLY bad, people just MISUNDERSTOOD).

Like. Maybe the people who bullied not!villain were ALSO bullied, which is why THEY were mean, andperhaps THEY were just misunderstood too! We could continue down this hall of mirrors indefinitely.

[asakiyume]

The Great Chain of Misunderstood Villains.

[osprey_archer]

Disney's quasi-revolutionary films are all "What if we get rid of the BAD stuff but it leaves all the GOOD stuff intact exactly as it is and has no negative or unforeseen consequences for anyone except maybe That One Bad Guy?" Which is simply not terribly believable and kind of misses the point that structural inequality is by its nature something that can't be gotten rid of by getting rid of One Bad Guy.