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Wicked and Wish
Dec. 30th, 2024 06:13 pmThis 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.
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.
