WICKED FOR GOOD**

WICKED FOR GOOD is the second part of John M. Chu's adaptation of the wildly successful Broadway musical. The action takes place a year after the first part. The genuinely magical Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) has scorned the fraudulent Wizard's offer to share power and is desperately trying to expose his lies.  Meanwhile, her childhood best friend Glinda (Ariana Grande) has fallen in with Madam Morrible's plans for propaganda against Elphaba, while still hoping to broker a reconciliation. Glinda remains in love with the dashingly handsome Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), and Nessarose (Marissa Bode) remains in love with Bok (Ethan Slater). Let's just say that Glinda takes romantic disappointment with more elegance than Nessa.

The problem with splitting the musical into two is that the first half contains the stronger music and all the fun.  This latter half is an almost uninterrupted downer. Oz is descending into authoritarianism policed by flying monkeys.  Almost everybody is romantically disappointed.  Worst of all, we so rarely see Glinda and Elphaba together on screen.  Whenever we do, the movie springs to life, grounded in their love for each other. The only genuine laugh of the film happens when they fight 90 minutes in. The only tears that threaten are when they sing of how the other has changed them "for good" in the final act.  When the film centres their story, and unites them, it is an altogether more engaging beast.  But when they are apart, boy, is it dull and dispiriting. Does anyone really care about Nessa and Bok, or catch any kind of romantic spark between Fiyero and Elphie? As for the Wizard and Morrible, while Jeff Goldblum is having fun indulging himself, I doubt anyone else is amused. And as badass as Michelle Yeoh is, she cannot sing.

So we twist the gears to our finale. If the first film was really Elphie's journey to self-actualisation and belief then this film is Glinda's.  I loved her arc, and the new song about a spoiled girl whose bubble probably should be popped was both beautiful and meaningful. And of course the whole thing is a technical marvel - beautifully costumed and designed.  But I continue to believe that it would have been better as one film with fewer songs and a more complete and balanced narrative arc. 

WICKED FOR GOOD is rated PG and has a running time of 138 minutes. It will be released on November 21st. 

WICKED: PART I***

I came to WICKED: PART I cold. I had not seen the musical, heard any of the songs, and was unspoiled as to plot.  Here is what I discovered:

The movie is Act One of a two act musical that serves as a prequel to THE WIZARD OF OZ.  It begins with the death of the Wicked Witch of the West as announced by the Glinda the Good Witch and then takes us back to their teenage friendship at the unfortunately named Shiz University.  

We learn that the Wicked Witch was actually a thoughtful, earnest, sensitive girl called Elphaba who had been spurned by society because of her green skin and her frighteningly uncontrollable actual magic powers. She dreamed of meeting the Wizard of Oz so that he could grant her a wish.  As Galinda soon realises, that wish is to get rid of her green skin, because as much as Elphaba pretends not to care what people think about her, of course she does.  Thanks to a mix-up, the two teenagers become best friends.  Galinda begins to discover her conscience just as Elphaba discovers that she has a crush on Galinda's dashing and apparently superficial boyfriend Fiyero. They bond over their shared horror at the persecution of animals, who have hitherto lived side-by-side with humans in a Bojack Horseman style world. The film culminates in the girls finally arriving in the Emerald City to meet the Wizard and asking for her heart's desire....

Let's start with the negatives. First of all, the music is not to my taste. The vast majority is derivative, mediocre and eminently skippable. The exceptions are the songs Popular and Defying Gravity, but that's thin gruel for a two hour, forty minute running time. Second of all, the themes of the musical are obvious, ham-fisted and trite.  I feel that I have seen a bazillion movies about how the uniquely talented but superficially different people are excluded and mocked only to use their power for vengeance. X-MEN anyone?  And oh the delicious irony of a film so very inclusive that refuses to cast even one little person as a munchkin.  Third, the plot is just so blatantly obvious. I guessed the plot twist concerning the Wizard and the plot twist concerning Fiyero while watching Act One, and googled post-film to confirm my guesses.

Still, there's a lot to love too, and on the whole I did enjoy watching the film.  The production and costume design are exceptionally good, and I loved the steampunk aesthetic of the world.  Ariana Grande is hilarious as Galinda and Cynthia Erivo (HARRIET) is heartbreaking as Elphaba, and on the rare occasions when they sing together it's just so perfectly harmonious it's joyous. The two actresses evidently fell in love with each other during filming and that reads on screen. When they share a moment on a dance floor it brings tears to our eyes.  They are the reason why the running time flies by so fast and why - despite the largely mediocre score and unsubtle politics - the film is memorable.

WICKED: PART I is rated PG and has a running time of 160 minutes. It is on global release.

This is not a review of DON'T WORRY DARLING

....because my husband and I left the screening after an hour of tedium. He suggested I title this non-review, Worry Darling, but I responded that this would imply a level of engagement and giving a shit that simply wasn't earned.

To be clear, I came into the screening without prejudice, and with some hope of a good time given how much I liked director Olivia Wilde's debut feature, BOOKSMART.  But as the soon as the movie began there was an eery feeling of being trapped in a mash-up of all the fake-world dystopian greatest hits, with all of the style and little to actually say that was new and of note.  A cursory googling of the remainder of the plot reveals that my husband and I had predicted the plot twist and inevitable ending.

I do rather wonder how this movie was greenlit. In a world where STEPFORD WIVES is so commonplace a concept in popular culture - where we've all watched Westworld and Good Life - where we've all seen THE VILLAGE - did anyone stop to ask if Wilde had anything new to say on the subject of men trying to control women in a fake 1950s world?  

Even the look of the film is derivative. There's nothing in the way the characters are dressed that costume designer Janie Bryant didn't do better in Mad Men. And as for Wilde's choice of framing and camera shots, this all felt overly stylised but not to a constant theme - as if she were throwing together every outlandish idea without a real directorial vision of what she was trying to achieve. Worst of all there was no slow build of tension and unease, as in Jordan Peele's superb GET OUT. For a film that wants us to hate a misogynistic husband for telling his horrified wife to stop being hysterical, this movie is hysterical from about 7 minutes in.

In front of the lens, Florence Pugh is a rare talent and carries this film such as we saw it. Harry Styles is basically Harry Styles as her husband. One wonders if they wrote in that he was British because he couldn't be arsed - or simply - literally - just didn't have the acting talent - to do an American accent. The only performance that felt raw and moving was that of Kiki Lane as the profoundly and rightly disturbed Margaret, but we saw precious little of her, as reported on her social media. 

DON'T WORRY DARLING is rated R and has a running time of 123 minutes. The film played Venice 2022 and is on release in cinemas.

PAN

PAN is a really badly conceived and constructed film that has flashes of wit but by far not enough to compensate for the hour and a half of boredom it inflicts upon the viewer.  The director is Joe Wright, whose movies tend to be very high concept, over-worked and under-emotional for my taste.  And the writer, Jason Fuchs, seems to have way too much concept and far too little original thought. (Rather ominously he is also scripting the forthcoming WONDER WOMAN movie.)

So what's it all about? The movie is an entirely redundant Peter Pan sequel. Or rather it feels like the first half of one.  Peter is a young orphan left with some rather sadistic nuns in a gloomily lit world war two London of food rationing and German bombs. One night he is captured by a flying pirate ship captained by Hugh Jackman's camp but angsty Blackbeard and taken to the spice mines of kessel, sorry, the pixie-dust mines of Neverland. Enslaved, Peter makes friends with a character that's half Indiana Jones- half Han Solo called, wait for it, James Hook (Garrett Hedlund)!  We know Peter is going to lead a slave revolution because, hey, he can fly and his mum's called Mary! So together Hook and his sidekick Smee he nicks a ship and flies to fairyland with his new friend Tigerlily (Rooney Mara). She's a kickass girl and clearly the writers are trying for some kind of Han-Leia relationship with the rogueish Hook, complete with a last minute rescue reminiscent of A NEW HOPE. Anyways, there's then some Moria-ish stuff about fairy writing and a key and some Harry Potterish stuff about a childhood crush gone wrong and you end up just wondering why Blackbeard didn't just kill Peter when he had the chance.

PAN has a running time of 111 minutes and is rated PG. The movie is on global release.

FAIR GAME

True story. Valerie Plame was a CIA operative, building networks to fight terror in the Middle East. Her husband, Joe Wilson, was a pugnacious ex-diplomat, and mediocre businessman.  When the Bush administration misquoted his research, and used it as casus belli for a "pre-emptive" war in Iraq, Wilson went public, explosively. In an act of miscalculated vengeance, Dick Cheney's aide, Scooter Libby, outed Wilson's wife as a CIA agent, exposing her network in the process.  Plame and Wilson had their reputations slandered in the press, suffered the stress of intrusive paparazzi, but ultimately history will see them as on the side of truth. Scooter Libby went to prison for obstructing justice but Bush soon commuted his sentence. And, of course, on the larger issue, the war in Iraq, it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle.

FAIR GAME is a new feature film based on this political and family drama, directed and shot by Doug Liman (MR AND MRS SMITH, THE BOURNE IDENTITY) and written by John-Henry and Jez Butterworth (THE LAST LEGION).  The movie drips in earnest good intentions. It wants us to be utterly repulsed by the dinner-party ignorance in Washington; by the brazen exploitation of Plame by the Bush administration; and the manipulation of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraqi war. It wants us to share in Joe Wilson's outrage and see his journey as one of vindication - from puffed-up has-been to inspirational public speaker. It wants us to admire Valerie Plame's loyalty, and sympathise with her disillusionment.

I think the problem with the film is that for those of use who share its political stance, none of this is new, and for those who don't - well, they are hardly going to pay to watch it. I was shocked at the time, but too much time has passed - too much nefarious wrangling has been exposed - for the shock factor to still exist. And as for the mechanics of cooking up a war, there is no better exposition than Armando Iannucci's IN THE LOOP.  And, suffice it to say, IN THE LOOP managed to be unbelievably entertaining, while at the same time expository. In contrast, FAIR GAME where it's mission very heavily indeed.  All that is not to say that the film isn't handsomely acted and technically well-made. It just fails to spark up.

FAIR GAME played Cannes 2010 where it lost to OF GODS AND MEN for the Palme D'Or.  FAIR GAME was released in 2010 in Italy, Norway, Belgium, France, Canada, Finland, Spain, Sweden, the USA, Bulgaria, Greece, Israel, the Netherlands, Thailand, Australia, Germany, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Austria, Taiwan, Portugal, Denmark, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia and the UAE. It was released earlier in 2011 in Iceland, India, Egypt, Croatia, Singapore, New Zealand, Estonia, Indonesia, Ireland and Latvia. It is currently on release in Serbia, the UK and Brazil. It opens later in March in Brazil and Mexico. It opens in May in Argentina and Poland; in June in Chile, Kazakhstan, Russia and Uruguay; and it opens on July 14th in Ukraine.