Will it include that weirdo performance/ritual where the tiger (lion?) rapes a member of the audience on the stage whilst the rest of the crowd looks on? Sadly, that’s one of the few bits of the book I remember. Better to have been 100% forgettable. I never bothered with the musical. Will the movie retain the underlying Catholic themes and ideas explored in the book?
ETA: A search on the “Books” board reveals I found Wicked both interesting and amusing. Having listened to it rather than having read it could be part of why I remember so little about the story.
I am aware, sort of, of what "Wicked" is. My sister-in-law is obsessed with it, and I know that the phrase "Defy gravity" is associated with it, and it's trying to be all clever and make it that the Wicked Witch in Wizard of Oz is actually a misunderstood heroine and the real villain is either the Good Witch or the Wizard of Oz.
And now there is a movie adaptation, because of course there is, musical plays always are so successful on the screen, and never ever become objects of ridicule and mockery.
First of all, it looks like the same old priorities with Hollywood. The witch is being played by a black woman, but green, and she has that wide-eyed earnestness that seems to be a substitute for acting and character writing, when they just figure their job is done with the casting. This is clearly an adult, acting like a child. Nobody does not look silly as a green version of themselves. Not Mila Kunis, not Tatiana Maslany, not Mark Ruffalo, not even really Majel Barrett. Maybe, a little bit, Zoe Saldana.
They also have a couple of other characters in whiteface, who are clearly not white, because one of them is Michelle Yeoh, who is too good for this shit. The other one seems to be Glinda. The trailer opens with someone who sounds like Jeff Goldblum saying that the best way to unite people is to give them a common enemy. In the middle, the Wicked Witch says something about something inside of her taking over and making bad things happen, and Michelle Yeoh tells her that controlling her emotions will make her powerful. It ends with the Witch saying that the Wizard should be afraid of her and she smashes a window and dives out, to presumably astound us with her power of flight, because that's not a thing we have known she could do for nearly 90 years.
Now let's talk about those lines. The Wicked Witch was not a common enemy used to rally any groups together. She terrorized the Munchkins, briefly, after her sister was killed, and the Munchkins, the colonized victims of her imperialism, celebrated her death. Are you going to tell the indigenous people of Munchkinland that they don't know what they are talking about and are just being fooled by Ozian propaganda? Anyway, our awesomely powerful heroine got assassinated by a child, a pair of impractically constructed golems and a sapient but cowardly animal, and had an army to protect her. There was no mass uprising or unity behind her downfall. She did bad shit. She supported her evil and much hotter (I assume Oz the Great and Powerful is not canon) sister in oppressing the Munchkins, made repeated attempts against the life of a child and violated the sovereignty of the Emerald City by demanding said child's extradition. And despite the great inner power that half the green characters on screen seem to have, was hilariously outplayed by a powerless con artist. This is movie is basically going to be either Maleficent for idiots who let songs gloss over incompetent writing, or just stupid Wheel-of-Time-esque girlpower fan fiction hatchet job on the source material, which is used solely as a source of recognizable ideas to strip mine in lieu of creating characters or settings of one's own. But they gave roles to minority women, which is the really important thing, I guess.
*NM*