Wicked

A kind of remake of Clueless (1995) but without the charm (Grande works hard but is too unsubtle a caricature and cannot compare with Silverstone), set at a boys-in-skirts girls-in-pants university (the ages of the actors playing the three main undergrads being, by the way, 31, 36 and 37) and focused on validating “difference” and rejecting femininity (the ubiquity of pink is the main signal, à la Barbie, 2023), the irony being that the film only really comes alive when the “superficial” handsome love interest arrives and sings about dancing through life (and no actual romance is allowed to blossom, it seems, at least in this part, Elphaba of course asking the girl to accompany her to Oz for a bit of girl-bonding, rather than the boy in whom she is ostensibly interested and who is ostensibly interested in her). From there the film becomes a kind of allegory about Nazism in which magical Oz proves to be akin to Germany in the 1930s, presumably intended as a cautionary tale for the kids, warning them about the threat of fascism’s return, all of this wrapped, of course, in a highly manufactured package devised with all the technological whizz-bangery of the twenty-first century computerised culture industry. In short, there is something really quite odd about the whole thing. As green-themed songs go, none of these come close to comparing, either in terms of melody or in terms of emotion, with Kermit the Frog singing Joe Raposo’s beautiful, melancholy “Bein’ Green” – let alone with Ray Charles singing it.