Wicked – wickedly good

Well, the film year started with a surprise – a BIG surprise! Wicked was far, Far, FAR better than I expected. I’m arguably a bit of a Wizard of Oz puritan, having played the Munchkin mayor in a girls’ grammar school stage version back in the 1970s, and then, the following decade, the Wicked Witch of the West herself in a quality non-pro production.

So I am rather attached to the ‘original’. Except, what is The Original? I’m also rather fond of the wonderful graphic novel versions of Frank L Baum’s Oz books by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young, which straight away reveals that I am prepared for adaptation and development of source material.

And besides, the iconic 1939 film with Judy Garland was ‘based’ on Baum’s book – it wasn’t a faithful version of it.

But something about the idea of Wicked (what little I had bothered to find out about it) had prevented me ever feeling a desire to see it on stage. Possibly because, by and large, I’m not a fan of many modern shows. Gimme Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Kander and Ebb, Bart and, of course, Sondheim.

However, as the film release neared and the hype built, I realised that Cynthia Erivo was playing Elphaba (The Wicked Witch of the West) – and I seriously rate she as an actor and singer.

The late OH and I caught her first two films at the cinema. They were released in reverse order, so we saw Bad Times at the El Royale (her second film) in early autumn 2018 and were blown away. Hence our going to see what was actually her first film, Widows, a short while later – which we also massively too (it’s got the magnificent Viola Davis too).

Last year, I finally caught up with Harriet, where she starred as anti-slavery icon Harriet Tubman. Whatever faults the film has, her performance is not one of them.

And in 2022, she gave a solo Proms concert – which you can watch here. 

I then discovered that the show had come from the pen of Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman. Another connection. In my time as a theatre critic, I reviewed two of Schwartz’s shows – The Baker’s Wife (penned in 1976, but I saw it in 1989 in the West End) and Children of Eden (1991). Both had very short runs.

 

In the case of the former, I still have the double album soundtrack. It wasn’t helped by director Trevor Nunn casting his wife as the female lead, but it was helped by Alun Armstrong being the male lead. I continue to regard it with real affection.

 

In the case of the latter … one of the worst musicals I’ve ever had the misfortune to see (with the possible exception of a Robin Hood show, theh exact title of which I can’t remember, and which seems to have been erased even from Google entirely).

 

My intrigue levels rose. Perhaps this might be worth seeing?

 

On the basis of the length – well over two-and-a-half hours – and because screenings were being packed, including by fans who apparently wanted to sing along, I decided to wait for it to stream. Well, it’s available to buy or rent on Sky now.

 

Briefly, it’s the first half of the stage show, which gives a back-story to Elphaba. Was she always wicked? How did she become wicked? We get act two in November.

 

I really enjoyed it. It’s lush to look at, with a steampunk aesthetic in places. The music holds up far better than I expected. Erivo is fabulous – and I was really pleasantly impressed with Ariana Grande as Galinda (later, Glinda, The Good Witch), who I essentially was only really aware of because of the Manchester terrorist bombing – that is some vocal range she has!

 

Then, of course, you have Michelle Yeoh and Jeff Goldblum, with Peter Dinklage topping the voice talent credits.

 

The stage musical premiered in 2003. It is astonishingly current in its themes as the world faces a new Trump presidency and we see the increasing rise of the far-right in so many parts of the world. It’s great entertainment – but it also has a really serious message about othering and more, and why we end up with authoritarian regimes,

 

But then I’ve spent years saying that musical theatre can often do what mainstream, populist theatre won’t do in such a sense. Make the attacks on democracy simple and clear to understand. This does it.

 

And all hail Elphaba!

A look at 2024 in films

Since 2024 is now history – and since I watched more films then than in any previous year of my life – it seemed like a good idea to look back on what I appreciated most.

Most were seen in cinemas, but a few here I saw for the first time either on disc or by streaming.

So in no particular order, other than chronology of viewing …

The first big hitter of my viewing year was Poor Things (above). Given that I saw it twice in eight days, that’s probably a clue as to just how much of an impact it – not least for Emma Stone’s wow of a performance.

Next on this ‘best of’ list is The Holdovers (just watched again as part of the actual festive season).

In some ways, such a small film, but it’s a bittersweet heart-warmer, with three cracking performances at the heart of it.

Next up chronologically is Blue Velvet, which I had never seen before – indeed, I’d avoided it largely on the basis of how that iconic scene with Dennis Hopper made it look horrific. But my niece had given me a copy as a present, so I decided to give it a go – and was surprised to find it vastly better than I had been expecting.

Perfect Days (left) is an absolute gem from Wim Wenders, following a toilet cleaner in Tokyo (and thus giving the German auter, with an astonishing performance from Kôji Yakusho.

As with Downfall, one viewing is enough, but Zone of Interest is a really important work that probes the attitudes of Nazis toward the industrial murder of the Holocaust.

By complete contrast, I also watched My Neighbour Totoro for the first time (my third Ghibli after The Boy and the Heron on Boxing Day the previous year). It is an utter joy. Indeed, I saw it again, later in the year, at a cinema during an anniversary re-release.

A similar catch-up viewing came with Mädchen in Uniform, an extraordinary piece of Weimar cinema, where Prussianism meets lesbianism in a girls’ school. It was a fascinating discovery for LGBT+ History Month.

Another personal discovery came with Rashomon, having only ever previously seen Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.

April brought the charm of Robot Dreams (left), the subtle, affecting and sensitive Monster, and the stranger than strange Evil Does Not Exist – the most enigmatic ending of all time? – all of which have stuck with me since.

Summer saw the taut sexiness of Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, Crossing, Georgian-Swedish writer and director Levan Akin’s tale of a retired Georgian teacher who travels to Istanbul in search of her missing trans niece and, in complete contrast, Kensuke’s Kingdom, the hand-drawn adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s book.

Another piece of catch-up cinema that really grabbed me was A Taste of Honey, with Dora Bryan in majestic form as the horrifying mother and Rita Tushingham extraordinary on her screen debut.

Finally, my film viewing year was effectively bookended by another cinema outing that I repeated in short order, with Conclave (left), a cracking piece of entertainment, aimed squarely at an older audience, and one that has been very successful.

I made it past the 100 films in a year for the first time ever  – after re-totting and double-checking between a personal list and the Letterboxd app, it came in at 103.

It’s interesting to see how many of my choices have appeared in some of the lists I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks or so. Obviously, a lot of this is down to personal taste etc, but I was surprised that Monster didn't seem to be getting any mentioned – only to discover that was initially released in 2023 and appeared on a number of top 10 lists at the end of that year.

I also feel quite chuffed at the variety of films – not only in this list, but in my list for the whole year. I feel I’ve really taking my viewing habits to new levels. So here's to 2025’s viewing! 

Inspiring call for LGBTQI people to be authentic

Admittedly I started it in December, but New Year’s Day found me with the mental space to read 230 of its 287 pages, so filing this as the first read of the year really does count.

Life as a Unicorn – Amrou Al-Khadi’s memoir, first published in 2019, is the story of a non-binary, gay, British-Iraqi writer, actor, drag artist and filmmaker, and their struggles to find a way to live as their authentic self.

 

While their parents are not fundamentalist Muslims – in the sense that (much, if not all) Western media likes to portray Muslims – they still inherited a belief from quite early in their childhood that their queerness was going to send them to a fiery hell.

And what signs they gave off in terms of that queerness, their parents policed heavily.

 

Indeed, there are elements of this where Amrou’s story is like reading that of any dissenter in a dictatorial society, where they are being observed and reported at every turn.

 

How they eventually come through this is inspirational and deeply moving.

 

As a white, essentially middle-class English person, I clearly cannot appreciate the racist elements of Amrou’s experience, but there’s a huge amount from the homophobic aspects of their story that I felt that I could relate to (I was blubbing at the end) and also to the religious aspects, given my background.

 

For those who don’t already now, my father was an ordained, evangelical Methodist clergyman, who was homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, antisemitic, misogynistic … and just about every other kind of phobia that suited a white, English exceptionalist, cis, straight, male Christian (even though he’d come from an essentially Cornish peasant background).

 

I have thought for some time that, if I had ever come out to my parents, I would have been exposed to some form of conversion therapy. Indeed, I arguably was – being taken, in my early teens, to four evangelical ‘crusade’ meetings within a couple of weeks, with the explicit intention of being ‘converted’ – ‘born again’. And of course, it happened. The emotional blackmail of it was too much to eventually resist.

 

Life as a Unicorn is ultimately a wonderfully uplifting read about how to live as your own, authentic self. The section about marine life is staggeringly informative – I learned so much!

 

Al-Khadi is also absolutely spot on about the patriarchy, throughout the world and across cultures. It’s not just misogynistic, but also homophobic and transphobic. It’s no coincidence that we see the far right in Britain and the US, from Badenoch to Trump, engaging in ‘culture wars’ and taking particular aim at trans people and drag culture.

Inside Out 2 is another joy

A bit of a film-watchy day to mark the end of the year, and the opportunity to catch up on Inside Out 2. I’d only seen the first film in August, but it resonated, so I was always going to watch the sequel.

Riley is now 13 and guess what – puberty! So new emotions – led by anxiety and including embarrassment – step in to try to take over her new teenage life.

 

Really sweet, but also full of things that even I, as a 62-year-old can recognise. Th cringe was huge.

 

Is Joy right … or is Anxiety right?

 

A great screenplay from Pete Doctor, Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley, with Doctor also at the director’s helm, this is a really good sequel (there may be a third film), which illustrates the mental and emotional difficulties facing young people.

Beautifully realised and with a great voice cast, it’s well worth watching.

The Miracle Club – flawed, but worth a view

It’s 1967 in a working-class area of Dublin. Lily and Eileen join up with the much younger Dolly to appear in a Catholic church talent contest as singing trio The Miracles, with the hope of winning a trip to Lourdes.

Eileen has a lump on her breast, Dolly’s young son is non-verbal (we don’t know why), and Lily has simply always wanted to visit.

When they win, all the trio’s husbands try to stop them going, with Dolly’s even saying she needn’t come back if she does go.

The contest takes place after the death of their friend Maureen, and Lily and Eileen are shocked when Chrissy – Maureen’s estranged daughter, who has been in the US for 40 years – actually arrives for the funeral. Tension and bitterness are clear from the outset, and that increases when Chrissy decides to make the pilgrimage with them.

Released last year, The Miracle Club features the last performance from Maggie Smith, who plays Lily.

The script by Jimmy Smallhorne, Timothy Prager and Joshua D Maurer is pretty slender, with plenty of clichés – not least the general uselessness of the husbands around the house and their expectations of what their wives should do.

It is also sketchy in terms of character building – particularly of Chrissy. We learn almost nothing of what her life in Boston over four decades has entailed, yet she seems reasonably well off and clearly has an element of medical knowledge/training.

There are themes of friendship, guilt, grief, reconciliation (a miracle?), together with attitudes toward women and their bodies – including from women themselves.

Thankfully, at a tight 90 minutes, director Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s film doesn’t outstay its welcome – and is an enjoyable watch, thanks largely to the performances, which mean it never descends into mawkish sentimentality (arguably indeed, there is a quiet anger to be found), benefits from some dry humour and is genuinely moving in a number of places.

Alongside the magnificent Smith, Eileen is played with relish by fellow Oscar-winner Kathy Bates, while Golden Globe and Emmy winner (and Oscar and Tony Award nominee) Laura Linney makes the very best job possible of the thin material she had for Chrissy.

As said, the script is not particularly kind to her. She has to do an awful lot of ‘eye acting’, but she does it very, very well indeed.

Agnes O’Casey holds her own as Dolly alongside such legendary talents and a mention for Mark O’Halloran as Father Byrne.

The Miracle Club manages to be sweet and tart at the same time, even with its limitations. It’s currently streaming in the UK on Amazon Prime and is worth 90 minutes of your time.

It's a cracking film, Gromit

Today was time to catch up with Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, the new stop motion adventure of the inventor and his faithful (if frequently exasperated) hound from Aardman Animations, directed by the legend that is Nick Park, together this time with Merlin Crossingham.

A sequel to the duo’s second outing – the Oscar-winning The Wrong Trousers in 1993 – it sees the return of penguin arch villain Feathers McGraw, who (spoiler alert) has not been rehabilitated by his time inside the local zoo/prison.

In the meantime, Wallace has come up with an AI garden gnome, Norbot – initially with the intention of it helping Gromit in his beloved garden. But as with all of Wallace’s inventions, what starts out with the best intentions has a tendency to go awry.

And as Wallace becomes ever more enamoured of his new creation, Gromit’s nose is pushed out of joint – reminiscent of The Wrong Trousers – when the perpetually broke inventor unwittingly accepted Feathers as a lodger.

With a screenplay by Mark Burton, Vengeance Most Fowl is a 79-minute delight, jam-packed with gags – watch out for a brilliant visual reference to an iconic Bond villain, but there are many, many more.

It also gently points out the problems that modern technology can create – so apt that the film itself is hand-made animation and not CGI.

The northernness of it all is a joy – there’s even a local newspaper article on the Lancashire references in it.

Ben Whitehead proves wonderful as the ‘new’ voice of Wallace. He’s voiced Wallace in games and stuff before, but this was his first major time in the role for a film since the original voice of the inventor Peter Sallis retired in 2010.

Reece Shearsmith is suitably creepy as Norbot, while Peter Kaye reprises his voice role as over-promoted but not very bright copper Albert Mackintosh, who first appeared in Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Lauren Patel is very good as PC Mukherjee, who – even new out of training – seems to have a much better idea of proper coppering.

All in all, this is an absolute delight. No wonder it’s already picking up award nominations. And personally, I’ll be watching again, because there is no way I can have seen and registered all the gags! I suggest you get started now.

PS: A special mention for the mainstream critic who notes (in an otherwise very positive review) that: "only a pedant would complain that penguins aren’t "fowl" as such" ... well no. But Feathers uses a red rubber glove on his head to disguise himself as a chicken. And guess what ... chickens are fowl.

Conclave is top-class, grown-up entertainment

Conclave, adapted from Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, is possibly not the sort of film I would usually think of watching – though I enjoyed The Two Popes when I streamed it in February. I might not have any faith left myself, but given my heavily religious background (very evangelical Methodist) I can still understand and appreciate Biblical debate, and almost inevitably find myself retaining an interest in religion in general.

I only really became aware of this film when seeing the trailer last week and, finding some of the rave reviews it’s been getting (including from the likes of Mark Kermode), decided to give it a go.

It opens with Cardinal-Dean Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) hurrying toward the Vatican to oversee arrangements after the pope has died. Aside from mourning his religiously progressive leader, it means that Lawrence will now have to organise and oversee the conclave of the world’s Catholic cardinals that elects the next pope.

The cardinals have been readying themselves for this – positioning themselves for possible election and campaigning among the rest of their number. The primary contenders are Aldo Cardinal Bellini, an American liberal (Stanley Tucci); Joseph Cardinal Tremblay, a Canadian moderate (John Lithgow); Goffredo Cardinal Tedesco, a right-wing Italian who wants the Mass to be said in Latin again (Sergio Castellitto); and Joshua Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), a popular Nigerian candidate with conservative social views.

But on the eve of the conclave, one Vincent Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) arrives in the Vatican – a Mexican archbishop apparently appointed by the late pope without anyone else knowing – and working as the cardinal of Kabul in Afghanistan. Suspicions are raised.

There were already whispers about the pope’s last hours and final meeting, and Benitez’s presence only adds to the suggestions of conspiracy and dodgy doings.

The scheming between the candidates and their supporters is barely hidden – though it involves noir whispered talks in quiet corners and comments that only a cardinal that didn't want to be pope would be a suitable one. But who doesn't, at some level, harbour the ambition?

In terms of the performances, it is a wonderful ensemble cast – and that absolutely includes not only all the actors named above, but also Isabella Rossellini as senior nun Sister Agnes, who gets to deliver a truth bomb that is magnificent – and conclude it with a gesture that has seen audiences laughing at screenings (not just the one I attended).

Edward Berger’s film is pretty much perfect as a piece of grown-up entertainment. It’s intelligent. It’s quite easy to see that the world of the Catholic church presented here could also be the corporate or political worlds, so this is not ‘about’ religion. It’s about ambition, power and the gaining and use of that by human beings who, even at their best, are not perfect.

I’ve tended to avoid films of much over 90 minutes in the last year: this comes in at two hours, but Berger’s direction means this doesn’t feel close to that. The pacing is spot on for the tension. Peter Straughan’s screenplay from Harris’s novel is superb: dryly witty, never condescending. It feels so timely, given what the world is seeing today in terms of regressive politics.

Similarly, Volker Bertelmann’s soundtrack is spot on. Stéphane Fontaine’s cinematography is a joy. The mostly muted colours – creamy marble, greys and whites – set against cardinal red – are stark. Some scenes have a feeling of having been choregraphed to almost Busby Berkley levels – cardinals in the rain with their uniform white umbrellas, shot from above, is just one, while the ceremonial aspects and rituals are superb, treated with complete seriousness and respect, yet also revealing the performance and theatre at the centre of church life.

A little personal note here for context (well, I did start this post with one!).

Until I stopped attending church altogether in my mid-twenties, I had drifted away from evangelical Methodism and toward high Anglicanism. I appreciated the theatricality, performance and ritual of services. And I continue to very much appreciate religious music – not the Gospel songs of Billy Graham-style crusade rallies, which haunt me unpleasantly, but works such as the requiems of Mozart, Fauré and Britten.

But let's get back to the review.

If I have any slight complaint, it's that the character of Tedesco is perhaps made to be overly obviously awful. He stands in the refectory vaping, yet refuses to stand for prayers in the Sistine Chapel – just two shows of contempt for most of his brother cardinals, despite he himself being the one that wants 'tradition' brought back. But perhaps that's being over sensitive when we live in a world full of real pantomime villains who are actually very dangerous.

As Lawrence, Fiennes is outstanding. For all the very carefully played camp of the film in general (it's a balancing act Berger gets spot on), his is a stunningly subtle performance. Acting with the eyes, as it were, is an absolute art and he is as good at it as Anthony Hopkins. His own inner struggle so often needs no words to be crystal clear. If he isn’t in the Oscar noms next spring, there’ll be something wrong with the film world.

And the ending – true to the book – is done with real class, even though it may not be quite what some would expect, given its extraordinary topicality.

I cannot recommend it highly enough. Seriously superior entertainment, with an actual ethical heart and message.