Wicked

 

Let's start with "Universal paid 350$m for all the promotion and collaborations they did for this movie, helped in part by the fact that they're Universal. They own NBC and had Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande parade around in green and pink at the Olympics."

 

Which means they had a lot of faith in both parts of this movie - Part 2 is next year, hope you knew that. I know scraps of the lore of Wicked-slash-The Wizard of Oz. A key point is the musical adapts the book but not super closely in the second act.

 So it's redressing the bones of an idea,  that were already redressed in a play. They wan to entice the audience in a way that adapts the story without people feeling unsatisfied.

The biggest criticism is that the lighting doesn't work. I've read Chu's "reasoning" for it and I think it's BS. I think it's a throwback to how you could see and feel the warmth from movies being filmed on film with older movies that they tried to replicate with digital and it didn't work.

The rest is great.

Wonka (2023)

 Sometimes, if I particularly like what I say, I'll copy it to Letterboxd.

But I have to say;

This movie is the most unhinged thing I've seen since 2018. It leans into the live action children's films of old - I don't watch many these days - where they didn't shy away from subjects and made children feel like they were a little more grown-up for watching.

Look at this, it has everything; Illiteracy, slavery, police brutality, several attempts at murder, some kind of overeating fetish, mob mentality, physical slapstick violence...the works!

The songs are okay, I don't feel you needed to autotune Timothee that much. He's not going platinum but his voice is clear, endearing, and fine enough to the point where the autotune was more distracting when it did appear.

 

Letterboxd

Twisters 4DX

 Talk about being behind. Besides this movie, I need to review my notes and post about many movies new and not.

 

Instead, I'll start with the November re-release of Twisters. This makes the 3rd time this movie has been released this year.

 

There's a lot of kerfuffle about people in midwestern (or mideastern)  states feeling ignored, shunned, or insulted by "coastal elites".

I loved that this movie had a short jab at these "elites" briefly before focusing on the people in the heartland, how things can be difficult, and that there is a great deal of diversity in places like Oklahoma. They were treated with respect. It was nice to see until the movie was over, you went into the real world, and you checked how red that entire section of the country went after Nov. 5th 2024.

My sympathy with characters didn't evacuate because of an in real life poisoning of minds, or selling out for cheaper bread. I was more interested in how thoughtfully the science was portrayed, how it didn't shy away from someone buying up the ruins of people's lives to flip to produce plywood-built homes over legacy farms, although we could have used more.

The 4DX was powerful, and the only reason I bothered going; It's a blockbuster in the purest form with some more care and compassion than I expected.

8 A Quiet Place Day One

 

 

It's carried by Lupita, because the narrative doesn't have the strongest punch to really get across its themes.

5 Kung Fu Panda 4

 I'm such a big fan of the first one, but ...

They made this out of a studio mandate and completely stripped the character from it. The alternative fantasy Chinese world is almost ignored now.

The new voices are miscast, and I like the actors a lot.

It's just so lazy and you can tell they moved so far away from the general heart and mindset of the original.

4 Monkey Man

 

 This movie has such a wild history and it's kind of amazing it even got released. Go look it up. It does show in some of the action scenes, but it's not derailing the movie as a whole.

The first 25 minutes are so are purposefully very frantic and busy, but even then it's too frantic and busy. Like I had a headache watching it, it needed to come down from 150% to maybe 120%. I also wish everyone would step back from the camera a few steps.

 After that, it does slow down and take the time to build it's narrative - and it's surrealism. It's very surreal, it's nice to vibe to in those first 25 minutes when you're rewatching.

If it had been any more surreal, it would lose people, but I can see why people think it treads familiar ground, because it expects the cultural identity to elevate it to something unexpected, at least for American audiences.

The ideology is basically "Working together to achieve your individual goals works better, even when that goal is righteous revenge." The idea of revenge is never shamed, which I loved. A lot of people need revenge against them because a lot of people are corrupted and initiate violence against the underclass.

The music and score is spectacular.

Ok now that I've reviewed it you logically and in a levelheaded way, good lord Dev Patel. Jesus. Fuck. Fanning myself throughout this entire thing.

3 Ernest And Celestine

 

This has been on my watch list for 12 years and I finally got to it, and it's really endearing when it's the two of them in a secluded cabin in the winter time just drawing and acting. It's two artists who were outcasts from their respective worlds finding solace in their arts together.

 

The rest of the story is a little trite, surprisingly so for a French animated film. They're usually not super afraid to not talk down to kids like this does, but I think this was based off of a book.

The animation is so fluid and dynamic, I loved watching events lead into other actions for the "action" pieces.