Get the Ricochet app
Ricochet will work fine in a browser on your mobile devices, but for the best experience please download our app.
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.
Discussion (29)
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
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.
CONTRIBUTOR • CHARTER MEMBER
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
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.
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
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.
CHARTER MEMBER
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
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.
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
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.
You're seeing five of 29 comments. Sign in, or join for just $5 per month, to read them all and add your own.