Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Wicked (2024)



Wicked is so bad that after watching it I picked up my guitar and instantaneously came up with some black metal riffs as an antidote. I'm a terrible player who can't even keep up the rhythm, but I'm still creating better (if generic) art than this.

There's something really, REALLY wrong with the way this film looks. The kitschy sunrays shining through made me apologize to Kawase because whatever she did in Radiance was much better. The clinical look with digital blurriness does not make a single frame stand out. Some shots are plain and disgustingly ugly, and I've developed a high tolerance for bad cinema, mind you. But one needs to keep their standards.

Hollywood musicals of the 1930s-1950s, as much as I dislike some of them, always had utmost precision in their choreography and Technicolor beauty. Then you had the majesty of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire who were able to sell you their art in one longish take. Yes, I talk about dancers because film is a visual and kinetic art. The camerawork in Wicked is largely uninspired and doesn't let us observe the characters in long takes. Yes, there are a few moments where you could say the takes were somewhat longish (I'm really stretching the definition of longish here), but there's absolute chaos in the choreography of these shots. There's no sense of blocking either. Everybody seems to go in a random direction while the camera sweeps pointlessly. It's that in-the-middle muddle that makes you forget every scene right after you saw it. And there wouldn't be anything wrong with that if it were a fun cookie-cutter film like those American Film Noirs made in the 40s (they made them with their eyes closed but now they can't do it even if they try) or the Hong Kong madness of the 80s & 90s (incidentally, it's cool to see Michelle Yeoh still acting, but it's concerning she picks films so damn bad).

Even if you look at the Somewhere Over the Rainbow scene in The Wizard of Oz, that's just Judy Garland. The camera focuses on her at all times. Yes, they use insert shorts, but that first shot is at least 45 seconds. The framing is thought-over, camera movements subtle but precise. You get the feeling that you're watching a planned scene in the medium of art known as film. And then you have a newer film, Johnnie To's Office, a Brechtian musical with Cheng Siu-Keung's slick cinematography by way of precise camera movements, blocking & framing. It's technically impeccable and To's auteurship is evident, so it's a pleasure to witness.

But Wicked? Sure, we get a once-in-a-blue-moon (pun intended) shot of a silhouette in the limelight dancing next to the castle miniature and all that, but it's not like Paco and the Magical Book doesn't have a hundred shots like that. The difference is Nakashima knows how to utilize digital, kitsch, and artifice while simultaneously tugging at your heartstrings. Meanwhile, Wicked uses CGI monkeys-turn-some flying freaks in yet another failed attempt at nothingness.

When the supposedly incredible "defying gravity" moment came, the camera started rotating around them like in Hitchcock's Vertigo or Fassbinder's Martha but then the damn cut happened way too fast and there was more dialogue. This is the equivalent of cutting back to the male actor's face in a culmination of a porn scene. Fiyero's bisexual faux-bravado notwithstanding, you just don't deny the once-given promise like that. You cannot defy gravity if you're pulling the viewer down the earth every time they start to levitate one inch over the ground. And then, when the actual culmination comes, it's chaotic and nauseating. This has nothing on Kiki's Delivery Service. The overhaul of fugly special effects makes the whole sequence less impressive than the incredible flight scene in Murnau's Faust, a film made almost 100 years before Wicked.

I think the success of films like these is the sign of a culture that wholly lost its sense of aesthetics and good taste. It's not that the mainstream audience has ever had a knack for challenging or artistic cinema. It's that the creators of commercial stuff used to know a thing or two about the art of filmmaking. And if they didn't, they bothered to at least try. Even cheap Hong Kong films full of toilet humor can build an atmosphere using music and light that far surpasses anything in Wicked. But nowadays, the creators just don't care because they know it will sell anyway, so why bother?

But what about the songs and singers? I don't know the original musical stage play. I don't care about getting to know it. I didn't like the songs, but the singers are OK, I guess. I hated the visuals with its obnoxious color grading. The Hollywoodish blandness of Wicked made it one of the worst films I've seen in a while.

In this review, I'd rather talk about other films because I think that whoever reads this will profit much more from getting to know those better films than if I were to just bash this film (which I did anyway because how couldn't I?!).

No tokenism is going to help you if you lack a basic grasp of beauty. And once you wash your film out of color and emotions like that, you have nothing left. This is unacceptable.