The singing is bad in this movie. I have to get this off my chest before I say anything else. Ariana Grande’s singing is of middling, mostly passable quality but the actress who plays the green witch is an atrocious singer. It’s a mystery why she was cast in this part. Truly, there’s no shortage of talented black singers. The African American community has not been known for falling behind in musical talent. If the producers wanted to find a talented black female singer, honestly , that should be easier than finding water in a flood. Yet they chose an actress with no talent. It’s interesting that DEI always promotes the black people who clearly have no place in the roles for which they are promoted. Talented black people, in the meantime, are almost aggressively thrown aside.
As for everything else, the movie is clearly addressed to a much older audience than the one it will get. For adults (who will never watch Wicked of their own free will), it could be an interesting movie. If it weren’t about witches, magic, and the Wizard of Oz, the portrayal of a person who is a bad human being but doesn’t know this about herself and believes she is a victim when she’s simply a trash person could be interesting. The idea that bad people don’t know this about themselves is kind of deepfor a Hollywood movie but it’s not an idea that can be fruitfully explored in a movie for kids. Klara is very advanced, but this part went right over her head.
At 9,5, my daughter is already at the older age of the audience. And the movie’s visual range, together with some elements of the plot, is very inappropriate even for her. Remembering that the viewers are in the ages 4 to 11 category, it’s bizarre that the movie is so adult. There are some frankly lewd scenes. The actors who play first-year college students are all middle-aged, and look old for the age they actually are. There are constantly non-binary men in the background, behaving in ways that are appropriate at a rave but not in normal life. The main plotline is that the green witch is a product of an extramarital affair. My kid doesn’t know yet that children can be born that way. I’ll have to have a conversation about that with her before the second part of the movie drops to the theaters. And I already had to have a talk with her explaining about eating disorders because I can’t leave her under the impression that it’s normal for people to look like Ariana Grande does.
The movie ends up being quite atrociously bad. It feels like the creators of the movie were victimized by a gang of pedophiles in childhood, and as a result, a significant part of their brain remained stunted while other aspects got way over-developed. Whoever wrote the film understands evil on a deep level but feels completely impotent to oppose it in any way. This is also a person who is strangely hypersexualized in unhealthy ways. He’s not a pedo himself. The movie doesn’t read like the creation of a pedo. It definitely does come off like the work of a sad and confused pedo victim.
If anybody else was obligated to watch, please make yourself known and we’ll discuss.
Clarissa's Blog 
Thanks for the heads up, I’d rather watch the original Wizard of Oz than this crap. The movie does sound like it has a lot of inappropriate stuff for what is supposed to be a kids movie and Ariana Grande is at best a mediocre pop singer, you’re right that the actress playing Elphaba isn’t a good singer at all. Thing is she’s a homely black LGBT woman with a shaved head which marks off a lot diversity points, she’s only in the film because she’s openly LGBT and ugly and woke. The only way I’d watch this movie is if I could get some ketamine from my stoner friend and we watched it high, it might make the film not suck
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The original movie is a masterpiece. And the music was actually great.
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I know, I watched it a lot as a kid on TV and have it on DVD. It’s a brilliant colorful film with good performances and great songs, Judy Garland was a legend
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Wicked is a complete retelling of the wizard of Oz from a different point of view. It is supposed to turn upside down our view of the story and swap oppressor and oppressed.
Amanda
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Are we talking about different movies? The one I watched didn’t do that. The green witch is definitely not oppressed in the movie. She’s a right bitch is what she is.
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“believes she is a victim when she’s simply a trash person”
I thought the whole idea of Wicked (the little I know about it) was that the green witch wasn’t really bad, just misunderstood and at times misguided… or are you talking about the Ariana Grande character?
“If the producers wanted to find a talented black female singer”
Why would they want that? A genuinely talented singer is likely to have other options, while a person who’s been promoted beyond their competence level is more likely to stay loyal to those they owe their livelihood to.
This is an old technique in the workplace played by ‘expanders’ (a term from Michael Korda) who like to destroy existing structures and create new ones with themselves at the top. A phalanx of less competent people run interference for them and competent people are methodically hounded out.
Also, they like the spectacle of the cowed as they heap praise on the untalented, the same phenomenon as hailing “Lia” Thomas as female athlete of the year…. It’s a dominance tactic.
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No, I mean the green witch. She tries to steal her best friend’s boyfriend. The best friend (Arianna Grande) is endlessly kind, sweet and accepting towards her but this horrible person makes a fool of her in her face as she flirts with the boyfriend.
The green witch is ostensibly driven by the desire to help animals but the first time she does magic, she ends up causing torture to animals. This is symbolic of her deep-seated wickedness. She thinks she wants to do good but the result is always bad because she’s bad. This is made clear from the start where she shares (in a very badly performed song) that her only motivation is hubris. She wants the entire country to come together to talk about her. She achieves that in the end where everybody gathers to celebrate her death.
The hereditary aspect of the story is interesting. The green witch is born to a cheating woman. She herself becomes a cheater in her very first romantic adventure.
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“she shares (in a very badly performed song) that her only motivation is hubris”
A convention of musicals is that the protagonist is introduced with a song that expresses their goal (called an “I wish” or “I want” song).
So I looked at the clip of the movie version and a (very bad video quality) of the originator of the role (Idina Menzel).
What I noticed:
Menzel’s version is a bit unhinged emotionally and it’s clear the character is a mess inside. She’s literally carrying baggage for most of it! Her fantasy of losing her green color sees her leave the baggage (briefly) behind. There’s also a brief interaction with others that makes it clear that the song is at least partly a teen revenge fantasy (she’ll show them!). She also projects vulnerability so the foreshadowing of the song “so happy I could melt” makes her cluelessness sad. I can believe the character is ultimately meant to be sympathetic as it’s clear what she wants: acceptance that she’s never had.
The movie version… is just…. flat. The character is cheerfully monologuing and then striding through the countryside as if this was the godamn sound of effin’ music… There’s no…. tension in either the actress’s body language or voice. She also has an annoying habit of devoicing some unstressed words so they more or less disappear… I don’t know if this is her choice, the director’s or the autotune fizzing out. There’s no vulnerability or real emotional pull… flat. So a discerning viewer gets the self-aggrandizement without any mitigating depth of character so she’s not so sympathetic because all she wants is attention for qualities she doesn’t have.
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That’s precisely it. The singing is flat. So is the character. I have no idea if this was intended to make an impression of a wicked person not knowing how crap she is but that’s what it ended up being. And I think that’s good because it makes the movie at least somewhat interesting.
Without this, it would be a movie about an unfairly persecuted victim of racisty oppression, and who needs another movie about that?
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“have no idea if this was intended to make an impression of a wicked person not knowing how crap she is”
I have no idea what the moviemakers were trying to do… but Menzel’s performance (again the first to perform the role) doesn’t suggest a wicked person, but rather a sympathetic but immature and flawed young person who’s suffered from being different but who wants to do good without really knowing how.
And the racial casting distorts the story… she’s not the victim of any group-based prejudice but instead faces rejection for an individual quality.
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The actress playing the green witch is pushing 40, and it’s not the kind of 40 that looks youthful. She makes an impression of a solidly middle aged person, which is what she is.
This reminds me of a Russian rendering of Anna Karenina where the director cast his post-menopausal wife to play Anna, and the rest of the characters were equally advanced in age to prevent her from standing out too much.
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“green witch is pushing 40, and it’s not the kind of 40 that looks youthful”
The actress who played the character in the original Broadway production was 32 at the time but that kind of age discrepancy is easier to carry off in the theater than on screen and she was capable of body language that suggested youth.
And movie green witch’s general affect is kind of… unpleasant? I’m trying to imagine what musical roles she’d be good at and… not doing well. If she could do opera, her demeanor suggests she’d be great as Ortrud in Lohengrin (a terrible person who thinks of herself as the injured party – a pagan who despises Christians for being weak).
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Oh, ew.
Read the book, many long years ago. It was amusing. But I don’t do musicals, so had missed the whole broadway/movie phenomenon.
looked up some recordings of the Idina Menzel broadway version as well as the movie version, just to have something to compare.
Ack.
Menzel reminds me why I don’t do musicals: the vocal style is so fake and icky. I don’t doubt it’s a high level of technical proficiency, it just doesn’t ring my bells.
The new movie version is autotuned to death, and un-listenable. If they had to machine-tune the actress *that much* I’m guessing she can’t sing at all.
I hate autotune with the fire of a thousand suns. It is killing recorded music.
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“I don’t do musicals: the vocal style is so fake and icky”
Yeah I really don’t like the belting style combined with high notes… very few vocalists can maintain that for long (extended use of chest voice hollows out the middle voice needed for negotiation the passaggio)
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I never thought about the tech considerations of singing for the stage, and how that would affect style. That explains a lot. It’s weird though– I can appreciate opera, which is highly stylized and technical, but the style for musicals is repellant. Performative emoting. It’s like… I can handle real, raw emotion, and I can navigate highly stylized emotion for storytelling purposes (opera, Chinese opera, silent movies…), but that whole gray zone in between where people are trying to fake real emotions… that’s very uncomfortable and I want to punch somebody. Probably some unexplored childhood thing going on there, but let’s call it an autistic quirk 😉
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“The new movie version is autotuned to death”
Okay, I was curious and checked out an excerpt or two on youtube…..
The singing (from both leads) sounds every bit as realistic as the film looks….
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I don’t even know what autotune is because my knowledge of the music scene is nil. But both N and I agreed that the singing was torture for our ears.
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It’s because it doesn’t even sound human. They’ve had the actors sing the songs, and then digitally manipulated them to remove any squeaks and warbles, and nail them to the correct notes. And, predictably… it sounds like a machine reading music.
If you want a layman’s explanation of how that works, this guy has a good one:
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I agree, Autotune is evil and a scourge to music. Anyone can use Autotune and sound like a perfect robot which is why so many singers sound alike.
Whenever I hear older music before Autotune, I’m struck how many singers had distinctive singing voices and sometimes they’d make a mistake but it was unique and made them sound human. A lot of modern pop music doesn’t even sound like it came from a human, it might as well be from robots
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“the singing was torture for our ears”
Autotune turns human vocals into AI slop….
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Is the movie version very different from the stage version?
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I only saw the movie. I had no idea there was any other version.
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The broadway version is one of my favorites. I haven’t seen the movie, but a couple of my friends have said it’s treated differently enough that it comes across as a watered-down version of the original musical.
I have also read the book the musical was based on. It’s good, but very much not a kids book. It’s a fair bit darker than the musical.
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Yeah, having only read the book, I was very confused by the idea of it being made into a movie for children! 😬
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I’ve only seen the stage version. I probably won’t bother with the movie.
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I don’t think Wicked is meant for children. It’s odd anyone would bring a child to this movie – was it actually marked to children? I only ever heard adults talking about being excited to see it. The source material is written for adults
of course it isn’t unusual for Hollywood to insert inappropriate content into films geared towards younger audiences.
Amanda
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It’s definitely not meant for adults. It starts with munchkins dancing and Glinda appear in a chariot made out of a bubble. This is torture for an adult that one only accepts to please a child.
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The family and I had a whale of a time when we saw it–visuals, performances, the ever-timely point about how anyone can be the Oz animals given the right (or wrong) circumstances–great stuff. We didn’t discuss anything heavy after viewing, but we all left happy and sated.
When I saw it on Broadway some years back (not with original cast), I thought it would have made a great straight play, as the songs didn’t engage me so much (except for “Popular,” which is an enjoyable goof). My other theatre memory connected with the musical was the merch: one could buy pink tights with “Popular” printed across the butt, and a top with “Defying Gravity” printed across the chest. Ah, Show Business…
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I agree, the songs were not remarkable. I watched recently, yet not a single tune stuck with me. The whole thing would be shorter and more dynamic without the songs.
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“The whole thing would be shorter and more dynamic without the songs”
Not exactly an endorsement…. like saying “I saw this performance of Tristan and Isolde but without the music… whole thing just flew by!”
The songs I’ve heard from it don’t impress me (the big supposed-to-be show-stopper ‘Defying Gravity’ just misses, partly because of the weird Broadway belt register they have to sing in).
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