Wicked (Part 1)

Galindafied and Elphabatized
or

Defying Gravitas ("Well, That's a Little Perky...")

 

I didn't know from "Wicked". Never saw the show. Never read the book. The only thing I knew was from YouTube videos watching Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth doing songs from the show. That doesn't give you any sense of what the show is and what the story is about. You can glean that it's a "ret-con" origin story for the Wicked Witch of the West (played by Margaret Hamilton in the version of The Wizard of Oz that everybody knows and loves).

 

It's a trend. As I wrote in my review of Maleficent: "I don't mind when a villain gets his just desserts, but I don't want to "feel for" them when they receive it. I want no sympathy for villainy, no matter the lawyering of its arguments. The fact is I don't care why the Grinch stole Christmas, why the Wicked Witches terrorize Oz, or why Booth shot Lincoln or Oswald shot Kennedy. I don't care why the creep killed those people at USC. Some things cannot be explained away, or understood for their motivations. God help me when I do understand the terrible actions in this world. They are acts of evil, un-pure and simple."

"It is a tragedy that we even have the opportunity to ponder them at all."

 

"Making Maleficent sympathetic diminishes us...and diminishes her."

I haven't changed much in my thinking. Other than to suppose that argument is a little heavy for something like "Wicked". And it does a good job of making the black-and-white/good-and-evil extremes of L. Frank Baum's stories more complex and nuanced. (So, calm down, you musical-theater students! I'm just pondering here and I wouldn't do that if "Wicked" didn't have some significance). I felt the need to see it, anyway, because, after seeing all the corporate tie-ins involved with the thing ubiquitously on television commercials, I began to think that not seeing it might make the economy collapse. I had to do my part.

So, here's John M. Chu's version of Wicked (Part 1 it should be emphasized, this part ends right at the intermission of the play, with the rest of it to be released next year), and it takes full advantage of green-screens and movie-magic (just as the 1939 The Wizard of Oz made the most of the special effects technology of its day*) and is choreographed, production-designed, and cinematographed within an inch of its stage-life, except now taking advantage of the new camera technologies that give you a flying-monkey's perspective of Ozian landscapes.

The film begins in media res of events of The Wizard of Oz with the camera gliding over the homicide scene of the Wicked Witch of the West's watery demise, with its sodden floor, the empty robes and the unadorned hat the only signs of what had gone before. We're whisked—past the figures of Dorothy and her companions making their way to the Emerald City to present the witch's broom to the Great and Powerful Oz—to Munchkinland where the decidedly un-heighth-challenged citizens celebrate the death of the one remaining bad witch when Glinda the good witch (Ariana Grande) confirms that, indeed, the Wicked Witch of the West has been liquidated, and her muted reaction to the news is muted. She reveals that she knew the Wicked Witch and reveals that, yes, they were even friends.

She recalls that the Witch (Cynthia Erivo) was named Elphaba Thropp—conceived as a result of an affair between the Munchkinland Mayor's wife and a traveling salesman and disowned by the Mayor when she is born with green skin-tones, making her an outcast. They have a second child, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who is born paraplegic and so the parents' affection and care gravitate to her with Elphaba seen as merely a caretaker. When the Mayor has Nessarose enrolled at Shiz University, Elphaba accompanies her, but when things get a little dire, she displays unbridled magical powers that attract the attention of Shiz's Dean of Sorcery Studies, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh). She is enrolled over the Mayor's protestations with Morrible becoming her private tutor and is roomed with Galinda Upland (Grande), the perpetually bubbly social queen of Shiz.

They do not get along. Galinda sees Elphaba as a drag and Elphaba sees Galinda as...typical. But, the two do see moments of value in the other, especially when Elphaba begins to stick up for animal rights at Shiz—talking animals being the legacy instructors at the University. But, the animal professors are being replaced by biped instructors by order of the Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum) and that they be prohibited from talking, instructionally or otherwise, and to the ostracized Elphaba that feels more than specist, it feels authoritarian and she's had enough of that in her personal life, thank you. It's not nearly bad or merely bad, but really and sincerely bad.

That's the gist—The growing trust between Galinda and Elphaba and the growing distrust between Elphaba and the Wizard, and what to do about it. Oh, there's boyfriends, too (Jonathan Bailey and Ethan Slater) just to complicate things, and lots and lots of ancillary characters on the fringes because they have to have dancers. It's a musical, after all.

I'm hot-or-cold with musicals. The form always makes me suspicious, even while understanding that breaking into song is a better expression of feeling than "talking it out." But, those songs and those feelings have to be really strong to earn their place in the narrative. Anything less and you're wasting story-telling time and just harmonizing-in-place. Here, that number is "Dancing Through Life" which is just a pace-killer (although it serves as the intro piece to Prince Heartthrob, Fiyero). The thing just goes on forever and had me thinking of P.L.Travers' critique of Disney films with their "cavorting, twinkling, and prancing to a happy ending like a kamikaze." Fortunately, that's the only point where, if I had a watch, I'd be checking it. The rest of the film sails right on by with something always entering frame to goggle at or enjoy a vocal performance.

And let's face it, the show is a bit of a two-hander between the characters of Elphaba and Galinda/Glinda and that's where Wicked is at its best. Grande is a natural for Glinda although the performance is leavened somewhat by the introduction of a cool aloofness that helps solve the problem of Glinda perky-power-housing through the show to the detriment of the more austere Elphaba character. The movie transfers some of that energy to the chorus of characters surrounding the two and it allows you to really appreciate one thing.

And that's the concentrated subtlety of Cynthias Erivo's performance. While the rest of the movie is "twinkling and cavorting" she earns every slight tilt of the head, wry pull of the mouth, and doesn't waste anything. And she acts through her songs, so even through context, you know exactly what she's singing about—from everybody else, a lot of the lyrics get lost in the jumble. And when she tornadoes through a power-ballad, it shakes the theater-speakers and pummels the heart-strings. I dropped a tear or two during that "Defying Gravity" finale, and that's probably a little threatening to the character.

 

But, it made me want to see Part 2—and not just for the sake of the economy. I have to admit, it did cast a spell.

* The book, of course, didn't have to hew to any visual conception. The stage-musical leaned heavily into the 1939 movie version of things.

Asteroid City

Meep! Meep!

or

Margot Robbie's in the Tupperware

 

“Asteroid City does not exist. It is an imaginary drama created expressly for the purposes of this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication."

Well, of course they are! It's a Wes Anderson movie!

 

Early on, with Anderson's movies—back before they got really stylistic with consistent lateral camera moves and a severe one-point perspective, and looked like they could have happened in the "real world"—there was a depth to the subject matter that was undeniable. That has remained to this day, even while the visual look of the films have become more juvenile and seem to be contained in toy-like play-sets that defy good construction practices or even three-dimensionality. Characters became types moving around in play-houses that seem to be defiantly artificial...like shooting in a western town that were deliberately shown to be propped up stage settings and mere facades. Most directors try to expand their horizons along with their budgets and to take pains to make things more realistic and less like pre-planned photographed dramatizations. Not Wes Anderson.

Hitchcock said of Spielberg that he was "the first one of us who doesn't see the proscenium arch" noting that Spielberg grew up with film, rather than the stage. But, Anderson is going a different direction. He WANTS you to see the proscenium arch, and will go out of his way...with a child-like glee...to make sure it's noticed and appreciated to be artificial. His new film, Asteroid City is one more step in that direction as it's story looks like it takes place in one of Maurice Noble's desert landscapes in the Road-runner cartoons.*

But, that's one aspect of Anderson's film (he usually has at least two he's presenting in his movies). Usually, he's as stringent in his story through-line as he is with a tracking shot (his The French Dispatch, with its a handful of stories, being an exception). This one, he's made a layered story, through several simulated media—television, stage, and film—each one has its place in the film and each one is subject to being violated, one by the other.

Now, Asteroid City tells the story of what happens when a bunch of "super-genius" kids arrive with their families at the titular city—famed for its vicinity to  the "Arid Springs Meteorite" impact crater—for the "Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet" convention put on by "The Larkings Foundation" and the U.S. Military under its United States Military-Science Research and Experimentation Division. They're to be given awards for their inventions—it should be noted that those inventions (jet-packs, destructo-rays, projecting on the Moon) were not viable in the setting of 1955, but would be just the sorts of things kids would want to invent. Each family have their issues and quirks, and they become unwitting witnesses to a major event in the history of mankind.

So, that's the plot. But, it's not the whole movie. We begin—in black-and-white and a square Academy ratio—with a television program (of the arts-programming "Omnibus" variety) where the host (Bryan Cranston) intones that they are presenting a special production of a play by famed playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) called "Asteroid City" and after a brief episode where Earp meets actor Jones Hall (Jason Schwartzman), we begin with a wide-screen version of the play in the colors of a faded post-card you'd find in a rack at a tourist trap.

Augie Steenbeck (played by Jones Hall played by Jason Schwartzman)—photographer—arrives (barely) at 'Roid City with his three daughters Andromeda, Pandora, and Casseiopeia as well as his son Woodrow (Jake Ryan), who is participating in the awards contest. Augie was a war photographer, still has shrapnel in his head, and takes his station wagon in to be serviced (by mechanic Matt Dillon)—it having given up the ghost miles down the road. It's decided that they will stay in town for the convention, rather than stay with Augie's father-in-law, Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks).

Stanley is concerned about this, but he's more distressed that Augie hasn't told the kids that Augie's wife/his daughter died two weeks ago, and don't you think it's about time to do that? So Augie stoically tells the kids—"Are we orphans now?" "No, I'm still alive."—which affects them all deeply, despite Woodrow being steeped in all things science and the three daughters, embracing mysticism seeing themselves as witches (well, two witches and one vampire). To allow the kids to grieve, Augie lets the kids bury their mother's ashes (contained in a Tupperware container) temporarily in the car-park until their grandfather can arrive to take them to his home for a more proper burial.

Also there for the awards ceremony is actress Midge Campbell (played by Mercedes Ford, played by Scarlett Johansson), who is studying her lines for a new play and develops a curious relationship with Augie—seeing as their neighbors and all. Like the majority of the actor/characters, they are demonstratively undemonstrative, and—if I may use the word again—"stoic." These are, after all, adults in the 1950's, having lived through a ghastly world war, only to see it emerge with advances in technology and weaponry that dwarf, and could ultimately consume them. The many small inconveniences of living in a desert tourist trap not to far away from a nuclear test-site, leave them unfazed.

It is only when a cosmic event happens that is ultimately beyond their understanding that things change. Asteroid City, due to that happenstance is shut down and quarantined, leaving the temporary residents stranded. But, true to their nature—or perhaps the nature that Conrad Earp has given them—they react more to the minor annoyances that the quarantine imposes, rather than the perspective shock that its cause should have created.

Seems a bit like real life, doesn't it?

Anderson and consigliere Roman Coppola were writing this in 2020, so the COVID quarantine may not have been the genesis for the project, but filming during COVID restrictions certainly did, necessitating the recasting of Bill Murray when he came down with the plague. Still, when the outrage in real life is over the inconvenience of wearing masks rather than the loss of more than a million souls (you can't make this stuff up!), one can infer that it was on the creative minds.

Six feet apart?

But, there is one attitude shift present from the happenstance; Anderson abandons his persistent horizon-bisecting in the frame for something else—overhead shots looking down on the players. Oh, everything still has that one-point perspective, but from above with no horizon in sight, putting (in camera-terms) the people on screen at a disadvantage, making them smaller, vulnerable, putting them in their place—at least from the perspective of an observing extra-terrestrial. It's a bit jarring, but completely apt. It's the only evidence of a new perspective in the movie.

So, I found it fascinating, but then, I always look forward to Anderson's films. They may not come to an all-encompassing conclusion, but instead take on the mantle of a childish inquiry without answers. They make me feel a little younger, where playfulness was everyday, and not in those moments in between crises. They embrace innocence, but leave plenty of room for cynicism and mild bemusement, rather than a-musement. And the cultural touchstones he invokes are pretty sophisticated, even if he's not being sophisticated about them. I'm all in for that.

 

I hope he never grows up and loses it.

And Asteroid City is the perfect come-back for all those scary A-I generated parodies of "visionary director" Wes Anderson that are flooding YouTube now ad nauseum. Whatever the "brave new world" of AI generates, Anderson will always top it. I find that reassuring.

 * Anderson even throws in an occasional stop-motion road-runner just so we get the point.

"Wow"

 

Some more shots from Asteroid City, just because they amuse me... 

Jurassic World: Dominion

It Comes Down to Animating Old Fossils

or

"It's Always Darkest Just Before Eternal Nothingness..."
 

Oh, they have been hyping Jurassic World: Dominion to the point where one doesn't have to see the movie to feel harassed by dinosaurs. There's a glut of advertising tie-ins, a "look-back" television special (which I admit I watched), and I'm sure there's a breakfast cereal ready to hit shelves ("T-Chex!").

 

If there is, I'm sure it will be rather stale.

 

This is the sixth "Jurassic Park" film in the franchise, the third in the "Jurassic World" sub-set, which, when written and published by Michael Crichton, seemed like the flimsiest of his high concept novels. The whole thing started as a 1983 screenplay about a lone geneticist creating a dinosaur with disastrous Frankensteinian results. But, Crichton couldn't crack the reason "why" a geneticist would do such a thing. He decided that the only reason to do it would be for entertainment purposes, so he spliced Americans' fascination with theme parks* with kids' fascination with dinosaurs, and (of course!) the thing was a massive best-seller. 

 

And a hit movie; Universal Pictures only agreed to Steven Spielberg's passion project Schindler's List (which they "knew" would not make money) if he first agreed to make Jurassic Park (which they knew would), and both films garnered the studio tons of money and awards. Spielberg even waived his own rule to not make sequels when he directed The Lost World years later. He is an Executive Producer on all the films.

But, that's all pre-history. What's this one about? Well, it's all about ecological catastrophe. The filmmakers have brought back the character of Lewis Dodgson (now played by Campbell Scott), head of the rival genetics company BioSyn who has hired geneticist Dr. Wu (BD Wong again), who has engineered a super locust that decimate crops that are not grown with BioSyn seeds, thus cornering the market on food production and threatening a world shortage unless his products are not used. The Jurassic Park island of Isla Nublar was destroyed due to volcanic eruptions, but Lost World's Isla Sorna (or "Site B"), where the engineering work was done is still a preserve for some of the creatures. Dinosaurs are now migrating throughout the Earth, which would seem like a big deal. Raptor whisperer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) live in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, carrying for Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), the cloned daughter of an InGen executive. The surviving member of three trained raptors, Blue, is also living in the Sierra Nevadas.

 

Got all that?

BioSyn has been very busy, not just planning a world food crisis, but also trying to track Maisie and Blue's child Beta (wait, I didn't say that Blue reproduced?) to bring back to their Alpian HQ for study. Meanwhile, there seems to be a black market for capturing the animals—something that Dearing is involved in trying to stop. That's when Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) starts to become interested in those locusts and their ties with BioSyn. She recruits Alan Grant (Sam Neill), who is always glad to see her, for a little tour of the BioSyn plant to see what's going on. And guess who's working for BioSyn now: chaos theorist Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum)!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Grady and Dearing discover that Maisie and Beta have been clone-napped by BioSyn and they set off to get them back, using contacts from the CIA. They track them to Malta—where there is evidently a big black-market—and meet up with a pilot Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise), who had seen Maisie being transferred to a flight to Italy. So...everybody's going to the same place!

So...everybody's going to the same place and there will be dinosaurs there. You can guess the rest of the movie. Dinosaurs and humans do not mix unless it's in a dinosaurs stomach, so there's going to be a lot of threatened mastication going on. And a lot of running and hiding, and even more distracting dinosaurs with flares. In fact, there are so many of those, they could have just done it in one instance with a single J.J. Abrams movie. 

But, except for running around and hiding from dinosaurs, that's the rest of movie. The entire set-up has been explained and there's really nothing left to do. The trouble is the movie is set up like a bad Bond movie with a minimum of plot that merely threads action sequences. And, unfortunately, the stunt coordinator and second unit director is Dan Bradley (he's not listed in the movie on IMDB but his name is in the credits), who scurries through action sequences with quick shots that they barely register.

How's the cast? Well, Dern, Howard, and Goldblum do the best work—they also have the best lines—and Wise does some nicely laconic work as an Indiana Jones type. But, Pratt seems slightly disengaged as if he was thinking about the next project he's doing. And Neill is always a welcome presence, but his character has relatively little to do, so he goes in for that Harrison Ford-style mugging that was done in Return of the Jedi, just so he's got something to do.

But, the main attraction for the movie is usually the dinosaurs—and with the characters going by the numbers in this one, they have to be—and even there, this movie isn't all that impressive. Oh, the CGI wizardry has advanced so far from its origins in the original that you can practically see a brontosaurus' uvula for all the detail they put into it now. But, the CGI versions have less credibility than the puppets and animatronics—although a couple of triceratops babies look a little dodgy, too. There is no sense of wonder anymore, or sense of awe, especially as the 'saurs are moving so fast that they have less sense of mass...or threat.

As a result, Michael Giacchino's score has very few places for John Williams' celebratory, awe-filled theme for Jurassic Park—just a couple of snippets here and there—and that tells you all you need to know about the movie: fast and transitory, not pausing enough to take anything in, or dwell on it. The ideas have all been mined, so it just jumps from danger sequence to danger sequence.

Perhaps it's time to take a break, not make any of these for awhile, and, in the meantime, take some of Michael Crichton's DNA and recreate him, just so we can get some new ideas. 

 

A sequence that was supposed to open Jurassic Park: Dominion but was cut for time.
Do you think anybody would be interested in a Director's Cut?

 

* Crichton had used the same theme of parks in his directorial debut, Westworld.