Wicked

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande

I will admit that I was not predisposed to enjoy Jon M. Chu's film version of Wicked, but I will cop to finding the end product to be watchable. I found Gregory Maguire's source novel to be a interesting twist on the Baum universe. The musical, however, I consider a slog, chiefly due to Stephen Schwartz's pedestrian score. The teacher in charge of the glee club at my children's school was a fan and, thus, I was forced to hear numbers from it annually for about a decade. The tunes never have won me over. Schwartz displayed little melodic range in Godspell, but the rah-rah energy of that score and youthful vigor of the cast made for a palatable evening when I saw it on the stage in 1973 or so. Besides Wicked, Schwartz followed up Godspell with Pippin and a number of dreary songs for DreamWorks animation features. I'm not going to enumerate his flops. The number of memorable tunes he has written are scant. Of the tunes for Wicked, the only one I can remember is "Popular" and that is probably due to its ubiquity.     

I'm also not a big fan of director Jon M. Chu's work, though I will admit that his fondness for bold color schemes makes him a pretty good fit for this film. That said, the enormity of this production does not make it a good opportunity for the personal vision projects that this aging auteurist craves. The film bogs down in its expositional and transitional scenes. The choreography of the dance sequences is mediocre and Chu's camera placement for these sequences is worse. Wicked, especially because of its boarding school sequences, resembles the lesser Harry Potter films in that it seems an advertisement for a future theme park rather than a fitting setting for a fantastical story. Chu, like Chris Columbus before him, shoots the sets nicely, but at the expense of his players. The supporting players are fairly anonymous because of this with the exception of Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard. Michelle Yeoh and Peter Dinklage's attempts to vocalize are mercifully brief.

So what the heck did you like about this film, Biff. Chiefly, the casting of Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. They warble nicely and have a better chemistry together than with their potential romantic interests. Ms. Grande is a particularly good choice for the vain and bubble headed Glinda. I also liked the inclusion of Wicked alumni Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel in the show within a show sequence that gives us some backstory. A nice touch for fans of Wicked. I'm not one, but this film version could have been a lot worse.       

The Best of Val Kilmer

1959-2025

                                        "There are a thousand ways to play any role"    

                                                                                                                                   1)     Tombstone                      George P. Cosmatos, etc.                          1993

 2)     Heat                                    Michael Mann                                          1995

 3)     Kiss Kiss Bang Bang                   Shane Black                                  2005

 4)     Top Secret!                                 Abrams - Zucker                              1984

 5)     Alexander                                      Oliver Stone                                  2004

 6)     True Romance                                Tony Scott                                   1993

 7)     The Doors                                      Oliver Stone                                 1994

 8)     Red Planet                                   Anthony Hoffman                          2000

 9)     The Salton Sea                                D. J. Caruso                                2002

10)    Wonderland                                    James Cox                                  2003

It is remarkable, beginning with his debut in Top Secret!, how many of Kilmer's top-billed films were flops or financial disappointments. Even in an industry notorious for its worship of mammon, though, the respect for his obvious gifts meant that he never lacked work. Not that he made it easy on himself, as he himself copped to in a loopy memoir entitled I'm Your Huckleberry. Certainly. his on set contretemps with directors, especially with Joel Schumacher on Batman Forever, hurt his reputation in the industry. His filmography after 2005 is dotted with almost as much direct to video dreck as those of Nicolas Cage and Bruce Willis. 

Still, even in such mindless entertainments as Red Planet and Kill The Irishman, Kilmer could provide astonishing moments. He did not have the career of a Tom Cruise, but he is a much better actor than that empty vessel. I also enjoyed Kilmer's work in Real Genius, Willow, Kill Me Again, The Ghost and the Darkness, The Saint, At First Sight (in which he plays a blind masseur...), Spartan, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, The Snowman, and both Top Gun films. 

What Did the Lady Forget?

Michiko Kuwano

Yasujirō Ozu's What Did the Lady Forget?, from 1937, is a slight and short, yet engrossing domestic comedy. Komiya is a mild-mannered medical professor who is hen-pecked by his wife, Tokiko. Their domestic routine is upended by the appearance of their niece, Setsuko (Michiko Kuwano), who is visiting from Osaka. Setsuko's behavior and appearance, she wears Western style clothes while smoking and drinking openly, is an affront to the more traditional femininity displayed by the housewives in Tokiko's bourgeoise circle. They live a life of circumscribed routine that Setsuko finds stifling. She gets Komiya to loosen up a bit, he agrees to take her to a geisha house, and assert himself more in his relationship with his wife. Tokiko, for her part, responds positively to her more self-assured husband and domestic tranquility and equilibrium are regained.  

If that summary was all there was to What Did the Lady Forget?, then it wouldn't be all that different from most other domestic comedies of the 1930s, be they made in Japan or Hollywood. However, the exactitude of Ozu's camera placement and mise-en-scene is breathtaking. Scattered amongst the bric a brac on the screen, we see and hear repeated signs of Western influence upon Japan: baseball, Marlene Dietrich, Johnny Walker, Vat 69, Frederic March, William Powell, etc. Ozu also perks up this fairly staid  and set bound affair with little doodles of life as it is lived: lingering over a boy throwing a ball at a wall or Komiya playfully balancing a newspaper. 

What really sets this film apart is Ozu's inventive use of the of the fields of view within the frame. Almost every shot utilizes the foreground, middle ground, and background. The virtuosity displayed is not an end in itself, but is used to comment on the action. When Setsuko stumbles through the house after a drunken revel, from background to foreground in a fixed shot, she is literally and figuratively upsetting the domestic order. A later shot from the same angle, of the lights going off in the house, celebrates the repair of that domestic order. When his characters go out of doors, Ozu's tracking shots express the exhilaration of people moving freely.

Some of the acting is constrained by conventional nature of the story. Komiya's meekness and Tokiko's dourness are overly typed. That makes Michiko's transgressive performance as Setsuko seem all the more like a breath of fresh air. It is obvious that Ozu was entranced by this refreshing new type of woman, though the scenario suggests she might just have to knuckle under when she accepts the proposal of her suitor. The ruptures that modernity would cause to traditional Japanese society would be further explored by Ozu in his post-war work, but What Did the Lady Forget? is a harbinger of things to come. Sadly, Ms. Kuwano's contributions to Japanese cinema would be cut short. She would die from the complications of an ectopic pregnancy in 1946. She was only 31.