In the land of Oz, ostracized and misunderstood green-skinned Elphaba is forced to share a room with the popular aristocrat Glinda at Shiz University, and the two's unlikely friendship is tested as they begin to fulfill their respective destinies as Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West.
17 Dec Wicked (2024)
Information Warfare
I became entangled with Oz in a serious way outside the movie. The Edgar Cayce Foundation in Virginia Beach is a legacy of a trend in the 1930s, begun long before where we seek more elaborate external forces than a single God. This trend devises angels, spirits, past lives, and complex smaller stories entangled in a larger competition between good and evil. Frank Baum was engaged in the Edgar Cayce phenomenon, I learned. So while his first two books were simple exercises in metaphor, his later work became quite a bit more ‘spiritual’ and not unlike Dune.
A second encounter with Oz came through this enterprise, of writing about film. I find Judy Garland’s path through our lives as a grand cross-film tragedy of a soul with the power to collectively charm, controlled by others for their ends. That power is magic, and I see it in souls in other of the tracks in our collective lives.
So I am primed to have these two compressed in its own story, someone with tragic magic, and opposed deviant master storytellers. I forget that the balance in filmmaking — big budget filmmaking at least, is 100% in the attention capture game. No one in this project intends to explore any of the things that interest me, so if there is some interesting element, we get it by accident of the market.
But we do get it. The pace is traditional, not as explored by ‘Chicago’ and mastered in ‘Moulin Rouge’. The songs are also in the mainstream belt-out tradition of the stage where a thin balance is maintained among a character’s internal monologue made large, a punctuation in the plot simplifying things, and a direct dialogue with the viewer. How much they balance is on the last seems to be the riskiest thing in these productions. For me, this worked for the two signature songs ‘popularity’ and ‘gravity’. I cannot say how they were modified for the film, but my guess is quite a bit.
The one remarkable pleasure is the world in which all this exists. They took risks similar to those of Barbie, but far more successfully in my mind. This world is not wholly coherent; the people are a poor fit for the environments as if they are transplanted suddenly with us as viewers. But as they are all dancers using decades old choreography it seems a good decision. The design is mostly Prussian in form, decor and colour. I understand the historical references (in film), but find it a bit of a joke; as Goldblum shows off his much admired model, I know there is a nearly identical wizard behind the film doing much the same.
Posted in 2024
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
No Comments