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Something Wicked This way Comes
Apologies to Ray Bradbury but I think that phrase may be used a lot in the coming weeks and year. Mrs. Pessimist and I, staunch anti-contrarians as we are, go to the movies more now than we have in many years. So we saw the first preview for Wicked, The Movie, close to a year ago, and I told everyone that that looked like the worst movie ever made. Recently we watched the more recent preview, and although it attempted to provide more backstory, it still looked like the worst movie ever made. At dinner the other night, as I tried to describe how awful it looked, my friend, Ed, who is a retired school teacher, went through the history of updating the original Wizard of Oz into the Broadway play and the back story of the witches which my wife and I enjoyed when we saw it on Broadway. Ed’s analysis of the story was that the wicked witch of the West was actually a transgendered lesbian and we all should relish that reinterpretation. He stated this with a very straight face. He asked me if I had ever had to confront transgender lesbianism when I was a pediatrician and, dumbfounded, I had to admit I had not.
When I was a pediatrician in the 1980s, transgender lesbianism was nowhere to be found in any syllabus.
That was a long time ago, but it feels like just yesterday.
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If a pediatrician had to deal with “transgender lesbianism” I expect it would be the mother, not the child. Although these days things have definitely been engaging in a race-to-the-bottom.
Wicked may be woke, but it’s far from going broke. It opened to $115 million in the US, managing to hit that number with awfully few straight males in the audience. Give them credit for that. They have a target audience, it’s not me, and I shrug.
But what Wicked isn’t is “the next Barbie”, a big hit with ideological usefulness. Its fans hoped for an opening week more in the $160+ mil range. They don’t have nearly the thermonuclear hit they hoped for. Still, culturally speaking, they’ve got a fission weapon.
I expect that style of lesbian-ism is just like some colors you see in the paint store: it just doesn’t occur in nature.
Bradbury pinched it from Shakespeare, but if you are going to appropriate, go big or go home.
I usually like musicals, but I’m generally hostile to stories reimagined from the viewpoint of the villain. The only song I recall hearing from this is “Popular,” and that is not enough to get me to go to the theater. So I’ma gonna pass.
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever opened two weekends ago and made about $15 million during the opening weekend. That was enough to keep it distributed widely and over this Christmas season will make it profitable. It will be a movie that every family will want to watch every year. Wicked seems to me to be a movie that no one would want to share with their children.
If a musical about wizards and witches is not suitable for children then we have entered a very dark place.
That said, the original Wizard of Oz is the first movie I have a memory of and those flying monkeys gave me nightmares for years. I can’t believe my parents took me to that.
You had me until the last. I suggest that it takes tremendous skill and good will to make a story about wizards and witches suitable for children. The topic is naturally dark, and only an adult mind is equipped to address the whole of it without damage.
Those monkeys got to every kid that way. Every modern cultural reference to flying monkeys entered the zeitgeist right there.
We just saw a preview for “Wicked” late last night. We both discussed how it was so completely AI-infused that it would be hard to feel any empathy for the AI humans in the tale.
Neither of us care for auto tuning of singers and musical instruments. But now that a brave new world of people with impossibly stylized bodies, against a backdrop of material objects that never have wrinkles or shadows is busily involved in the re-making of normalcy, we feel defeated.
Something Wicked This Way Comes, indeed.
We children anxiously awaited the annual airing of Oz on Thanksgiving each year.
Is there more than one kind of lesbianism? How is transgendered lesbianism different from the regular kind of lesbianism?
On second thought, I probably don’t want to know the answers. It’s all nasty.
You may not be interested in transgendered lesbianism…
But transgendered lesbianism is interested in you
Wicked has Jeff Goldblum, so maybe he carried the movie. I think it might have already had a bit of a following based on the Wicked musical. However, I’ll admit that the musical business is probably way too small to carry heavy weight in the movie theaters.
There was also “The Wiz” from 1978. It was part of the all Afro-movement where all the characters are black. Even the green wicked witch. More 70s funk music is featured.
One of the Worst-Best movies ever made had to be the cult classic “Big Trouble in Little China Town”. Kurt Russel made that movie, without him I’m not sure it could survive at all. It was completely ridiculous. I thought how did that even get made? But it was the 80s and had certain entertainment value. And the Kurt Russel vibe.
Transgender lesbian? Is that like a lesbian in man’s body?
Saw the musical in Chicago in 2006, enjoyed it. The soundtrack album with Kristen Chenowith and Idina Menzel is really good.
But the whole stage show [including intermission] is only 5 minutes longer than this movie that’s only the first half.
It’s the first of two parts? Now I’m definitely not bothering.
I like that phrase AI-infused. That describes the movie perfectly. It is not just pathetically woke but it is artificial to its very core.
So was your friend Ed’s interpretation of the witch from today’s movie or the original story? I saw the preview too and thought it looks nothing like the original and the witch appears to be going to OZ with Dorothy as one of the good guys – that is not right. It was also a big feature at today’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, with the woman who plays the witch giving host Hoda a big bouquet since it’s her last year hosting.
The witch is an evil character in this great original film and I had nightmares as a kid…….
I’d just like to point out that the first episode of the great show “Charmed” (the original, not the later awful “reboot”) was titled “Something Wicca This Way Comes.”
Oh, and:
What do the different colors mean (if you know)?
Actually I don’t. Any “color key” didn’t come with it.
I thought that was a rather great movie. Maybe the fact that I’d had several beers before watching it helped.
It came across early on as being preposterously over the top. Sort of a spoof of the very serious gritty movie genre that produced a film like “China Town.” (Not that CT wasn’t terrific.)
Off topic, but curiosity is getting the best of me: Were the squirrel and raccoon who’d been killed by the over reach of NY agency personnel been commemorated in a float? There has been petitions regarding having a float for their memory.
Floats need private sponsors. It’s hard to think of a company whose image would benefit. Maybe PETA. Or Jay Ward Productions (producers of Rocky and Bullwinkle).
I figured out Big Trouble right away, and I laughed all the way through it. The story told from the sidekick’s perspective! But it was a new story, albeit in a known genre, not an old story being jerked around for the purpose of the narrative.
Never saw one in the ER in 30 years of practice.
I remember when ” I’m a lesbian trapped in a mans body “was a Rush Limbaugh joke.
Now it’s apparently a viable option.
I saw the play on Broadway and enjoyed it, I listened to Critical Thinker, who didn’t pan it but pointed out the movie is only the first half of the play so is set for a sequel. I talked to a woman who mentioned it wasn’t the movie she had no interest in seeing, it was the nasty bald black women with the nose ring. Same here.
And if you want to see a new version of Snow White, see the one with Brett Cooper.