How's that for a shocking click-bait headline?

But yeah, I saw the recent Wicked movie with some of my family. It was actually pretty good, despite the actresses engaging in needless controversy on the Muskrat site (the lady who plays the Witch/Elphaba apparently didn't like the poster fan-edits on Twitter where they gave her red lips, like in the original play poster, even somehow interpreting it as racism).

...Whatever, that stuff doesn't remotely affect my decision to watch movies at this point, and as for the movie itself, it was a quite impressive, faithful adaptation of the play I actually saw in San Diego back in the late 2000's, and I forgot how catchy a lot of the songs of this particular Broadway Production were. Fun fact: Idina Menzel, who played the Witch/Elphaba in the original run of the Wicked play, went on to be the singer and voice actress of Elsa in Disney's Frozen franchise. Better yet, despite the inevitable gripes from the likes of Critical Drinker and other right-wing drama queens about the diverse casting (compared to the original Wizard of Oz about 90 years ago), it really did feel like an old-fashioned Hollywood musical in the vein of Music Man, Singing in the Rain or Grease, where the director seemed to have acknowledged that the best part of ANY musical was the actual music, dancing choreography and sets, and focused on that instead of spending too much time with story and exposition--although Wicked in particular was always a pretty solid prequel story to The Wizard of Oz.

Of course, this is sort of a review, so I should mention it isn't perfect. I genuinely think Universal could potentially get sued for some false advertising, because I went in convinced I was going to see the entire play in a single movie, only to learn this movie was only "Part 1" and there is going to be at least "Part 2" a few years from now to wrap up the story--essentially, like Beyond the Spider-verse, it seems to only end at "Act 2" and we're going to have to wait a long time just to see the Third and final Act of this simple story. As someone who still waits in vain for a Mega Man Legends 3 or a Shenmue where Ryo Hazuki final gets to at least land a single punch on Lan Di, I've grown to absolute DESPISE cliffhangers in stories, but again, the director seemed to have wisely focused more on "musical vibes" than the story, and I found myself not caring too much by the end that I was getting an incomplete movie, as the amusing, old-school dancing and set-pieces sufficiently distracted me from that fact.

That's all I have for my "cons" list, really, a minor gripe that ultimately didn't turn out to be a huge issue at all, definitely one of the better Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptations in the 21st century, along with The Greatest Showman, Les Miserables, and, um...I REALLY wanted to like Disney's Into the Woods, just because it was so morbid compared to what you would expect from the House of Mouse, and a rather lovely Taylor Swift as I think Rapunzel, and even Chris Pine in that particular movie making me question whether I am as "straight" as I think I am. But I digress...

The casting is also the absolute best I've seen in a long while--basically the polar opposite of that Borderlands movie, unlike that movie everyone in Wicked seemed BORN to play that specific role. For example, it may be eyebrow-raising to see Ariana Grande get ANY role considering some of her controversies, let alone a lead role as Galinda/Glinda the Good Witch, but who better to play a vain, petty, virtue-signaling attention seeker like Glinda than someone who is a vain, petty, virtue-signaling attention-seeker in real life? Also I'm biased because I've always had a bit of a crush on Ariana Grande since she played that squeaky-voiced character in the TeenNick show, Victorious--of all the painfully-awkward Cuban Americans she had to date for a while, why did it have to be Pete Davidson and not me?? Ahem...

But yeah, pleasantly surprised by this movie, puts its likely $200 million+ budget to good use for once, but hopefully I'll regain some of my testosterone levels back once the Sonic 3 Movie comes out and I watch it. Keanu Reeves as Shadow the Hedgehog, YEEEEAAAUUUHHH!