Clint Eastwood's Juror #2 is well made, but for its entire running time it feels like a classic Hollywood film, like it could have been made—I mean this quite literally—seventy years ago. Everyone in this is doing serviceable work. But the screenplay is just so cliché.
Juror #2 tries this same dance. The justice system completely fails to solve this case. The cops in the story (they don't actually appear in the film) are lazy; they haven't actually done any detective work to solve the crime, and in fact they let the real killer go free. Instead it falls to other people to go rogue, to break the rules and solve the case through unsanctioned procedures and detective work that the police weren't willing to do themselves.
All of this is fine, really. It's Eastwood's complicated relationship with law enforcement and the justice system, and he stages that in film after film (as long ago as Dirty Harry, honestly). But that doesn't actually make Juror #2 interesting. In fact, for me this movie was no more interesting than an episode of Matlock, and it felt as artificial. Worse yet, the people in this film don't behave like people in the twenty-first century; they behave like the kinds of abstractions we might expect in a film from classic Hollywood, something starring Jimmy Stewart that we might have seen in the mid-1950s.
Halina Reijn's Babygirl is thrilling from start to finish and completely sexy. It’s also incredibly, bracingly smart about sex, consent, eroticism, pleasure, and power.
What a genius screenplay! There’s this brilliant sequence near the end of act three in which the protagonist’s assistant, Esme, gives this corporatized speech about acceptance, radical honesty, trust, and truly listening to one another “as women” or showing our true selves to one another or something like that. This character really believes it too. But Babygirl’s director places it at just a spot where all of its high moral tones are shown to be completely false. This is done in a subtle, extraordinary way in the screenplay, and it’s these kinds of small touches that make Babygirl an extraordinary event.
I haven’t yet mentioned Nicole Kidman but… she tears into this role. This is as brave as she’s ever been and she’s done some powerfully brave work in her career. She is just outstanding.
This is supposed to be a Harris Dickinson double-feature post, so I would be remiss in not mentioning him. He's just great in Babygirl. In a movie that is truly the Nicole Kidman show, he still managed to stand out, and his work in this film is mysterious and troubling, and he's just great.
I also caught Steve McQueen's Blitz (this is on AppleTV+). Dickinson has a small role in this—considering what a star he is, I was genuinely surprised to see him in such a small supporting part. Blitz is good. It’s a kind of old-school, classic London-in-wartime picture where a parent and child are trying to find one another and getting into an odyssey of adventures that flesh out a compelling portrait of London and its residents during the blitz, when the Germans bombed civilian London.
The difference with this version of that story is that it really focuses on Black London and Black-and-white London in a way I’ve never seen before in a movie about this period. This aspect of Blitz really sets it apart and makes it special. In most other ways, though, McQueen's movie just feels quite conventional, and I had trouble shaking the feeling—whether correct or not—that I’ve seen this all before.
The scores for both Babygirl and Blitz are both excellent. And I've been listening to both of them since I saw these movies. They're also both finalists for the Original Score Oscar, but I can't say I expect either of them to emerge with nominations next Thursday.
Better Man is a conventional musical biopic that is made insanely, amazingly unconventional—to the point of being deranged—by the fact that Robbie Williams, the musician in question, is portrayed for the entire length of the film as a chimpanzee. He is a very realistic looking chimpanzee, too!
The musical numbers here are really the highlight. “Rock DJ” is insanely good—both my companion and I looked at each other and said oh this movie is great when that number ended. “She’s the One” is excellent too. In fact, the whole thing really works.
The reason I didn't love this is that Better Man's plot is just so conventional. You've seen this story a hundred times. And this makes its overly long running time—140 minutes—very silly indeed. If the film's plot isn't going to surprise us, it doesn't need to keep going. For me, the chimpanzee gimmick really doesn't run out of steam. It keeps working for the entirety of the movie's length, but the story the movie has to tell is not nearly as cool as the style in which it is told, and for the last twenty minutes of this film, I was impatient for it to end.
IIIIIII ammmm an appettttttiiiiiiitttttte. Nothing moooooooorrrrrrrrrre.
Eggers’ movie is beautifully designed and very expensive. The sound is awesome, the costumes are lovely, the scenery (which looks to be actually fabricated) is very cool.
Other than that… well, it’s an adaptation of Dracula. Renfield’s there, the count, Von Helsing, Mina Harker, etc. They all go by different names here (just like they did in Murnau's 1922 horror film), and this is a film much more interested in desire, shame, lust, and satiety than Bram Stoker’s novel.
“I am an appetite. Nothing more” was my favorite line in Nosferatu, and I think it sums up what Eggers likes about this story. It's certainly a new approach to the material, one that is invested in our desire for the monster, our own love for the plague, for what terrifies us, for the abject. But I guess I wish I had felt some of that desire instead of simply being told about it or seeing that others experienced it. Maybe this is just me—my companion found the movie very erotic, but none of those feelings transferred to me. So while I know that’s what this Nosferatu is about, I don’t feel like it took me there.
For me, the title Pigen med Nålen immediately conjures the late 18th century Sturm und Drang play by Heinrich Leopold Wagner Die Kindermörderin (The Childmurderess). That brutal drama is about a woman made pregnant by a lover and then abandoned. She is, of course, treated as a whore and shunned from society. In despair, terrible poverty, and hunger, she goes mad and eventually murders her baby by shoving a hatpin into its brain. It's a wild and dynamic play (as are all of the plays from the Sturm und Drang)with an especially gruesome ending.
In other words, is there any way a movie called The Girl with the Needle is going to be about something other than murdered infants?
This movie is very good, but it is a very difficult watch, and I am not sure there is anyone I could recommend it to. Strangely, however, it has picked up rather a lot of traction for the Best International Feature Oscar. It is Denmark's pick for the big award, and it was named a finalist in mid-December. It has also earned itself a Golden Globe nomination and the National Board of Review named it one of the top six foreign films of the year.
The Girl with a Needle is a bleak social-problem film with a deeply troubling score (it's honestly brilliant). It's superbly acted (Trine Dyrholm is especially great), and it's filled with fucked up imagery and curious visual puzzles. I was into it, but this is gothic terror along the lines of last year's El Conde but without the satirical humor.
In the middle of a very busy end-of-year movie blitz I took time out to see The War of the Rohirrim because I can’t say no to Tolkien content—I'm such a Tolkien nerd that I've been making my own Middle Earth Connections puzzles—but this animated film was quite boring.
The War of the Rohirrim follows a very cool story in the history of the Kings of the Mark (in the first appendix to The Return of the King), although the film's version of this story been altered a good deal to invent a heroine who is the new central figure of the story (she doesn't even have a name in the original book). All of that is sort of fine. It's explained by the narrator that this is a version of the tale you won't find in the story books. But then the execution of this reinvention doesn't quite work. The animation is strange—two-dimensional figures running around in three-dimensional scenery—and the focus of the film seems off at all times, as if the screenwriters were trying to work more into the story than needed to be there. To my mind, the screenplay is really the problem here. For me, the emotional moments just didn’t land, and the whole thing felt stilted.
But if you want to do a Middle Earth Connections puzzle, try one of these. I think I've gotten better at it, so X is probably a lot better than I. Maybe start with X:
The End has some pretty wonderful things in it. I was especially interested in the film’s approach to the apocalypse and its real reckoning with the ethics of apocalyptic survival strategies (something akin to the work of Octavia Butler in fiction). And although I initially thought this film’s lessons were a bit smug and obvious, I was really taken by its very, very smart approach to honesty and forgiveness. If things are either only good or bad and we refuse to engage with anything we deem bad or dishonest, we will find ourselves isolated and unloved. This is a wise take.
Still, The End didn’t quite work for me. I loved all the actors, but the characters felt too strange and awkward, and I just couldn’t understand the central “Son” figure and his behavior. I had an impossible time identifying with him despite my desire to and my love for George MacKay.
Pablo Larraín is doing his usual Pablo Larraín thing here. For my money, Maria is not nearly as good as Spencer, but it's a good deal better than Jackie (not that that would be difficult).
On the one hand Maria is overwrought and melodramatic and excessive. It frequently feels theatrical and false, calling attention to itself as a performance or dramatization. But on the other hand, all of the masks in Maria feel true and deep and desperate.
In many ways, although this is a film about a diva who was never not on stage, never not faking it, Larraín gets to something honest and sensitive. Just because the tears had to be manufactured doesn’t mean they don’t come from real grief.
The art direction is gorgeous in this, and the makeup is exquisite. Jolie is luminous and every bit the movie star. I was also in love with Pierfrancesco Favino (he’s always good, but he is the real heart of Maria, and he teaches us how to love her).
I love August Wilson's play—in fact, I just re-read it last month—but this film did not work for me. I guess I feel like the direction made a hash of what the story is about. I understand that The Piano Lesson is a ghost story, one where history is literally in the room with us, but for director Malcolm Washington that meant haunted house tropes of water running along the floor, flickering light bulbs, apparitions floating down wells, and scary music. Maybe this could have been ok, but the haunted-house approach seems to have been the only part of the story that Washington brought clarity to. The rest of the movie felt very confused to me, as if even the stuff in the play that isn’t about haunting is somehow also merely second fiddle to the horror-movie techniques he’s enjoying. So Berniece's bath sequence becomes a vaguely tense and troubling scenario rather than a sexy/romantic one, and even the watermelons feel loaded with scary ghost-meanings.
For most of the movie Washington is committed to his haunted-house, horror-film angle. And yet… all of a sudden we’re out at the nightclub and the movie version of The Piano Lesson becomes something else altogether—a wild dance party. And when we’re down in Louisiana the film’s style shifts yet again—a kind of strobe-lit wash of weird colors juxtaposed with faux-haunting CGI that isn't in accord with the same haunted-house language in the Pittsburgh scenes. It's four different movies, and this makes a bit of a mess of August Wilson's play.
I liked John David Washington’s Boy Willie. He’s pretty marvelous, but then I love him in everything, honestly. And of course Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Potts are solid in supporting roles. But the director just couldn’t choose a tone, and I think the film really suffers for it.
1. What did you do in 2024 that you'd never done before?
I learned to shuck oysters. I edited my first journal articles—a taste of editing that will continue into 2025. Won Lord of the Rings bar trivia on a first date with a guy.
As I look back on this year, I'm feeling like I spent most of it focused on work. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean I have to answer this question by saying I didn't have a lot of experiences that were brand new to me.
2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
My new years resolutions for 2024 were to cook more vegetarian food. I succeeded at this. I also had high hopes that I would work less (failed at this one) and that I would stay current with all seasons of Drag Race (succeeded at this one). I also had a goal of reading more books than usual (I hit my usual GoodReads goal of 125 but didn't do better than that) and reading my friends books in particular (I did do better at this in 2024, but I will do even better in 2025).
Next year, I really really want to make a deal with myself that I will do less work for my employer, that I will work out more regularly, and that I will spend more time traveling and visiting friends.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
My friends Daniel and Alex had a son named Adrian.
4. Did anyone close to you die?
No one close to me died this year. My mom passed in 2023, and her absence in my life is still something I feel pretty acutely. As a matter of fact, today I went to the store to shop for groceries for Xmas dinner and this would almost always have been something mom and I did together. We did this together for years—more than a decade—and it felt very strange not to have her here with me. I think about her a lot.
5. What countries did you visit?
None.
6. What would you like to have in 2025 that you lacked in 2024?
I have so much! This is a difficult question.
Bigger muscles. 😁
7. What dates from 2024 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Manuscript deadlines: July 31 and December 15 were my most important deadlines this year. But also some really crazy shit went down on the first day of classes of Fall 2024. I won't soon forget that day (maybe I'll say more about that down below, or maybe you'll just have to get the tea from me in person).
Perhaps most importantly I was promoted to associate professor and granted tenure on August 8. They draw this out for a very long time: I heard last December that my file would be forwarded to the president of the university. Then I got notified in February or March that I would be granted tenure once my fall contract started. So people would congratulate me on tenure and I would always reply that I didn't actually have tenure yet. I became mildly obsessed with the delay related to this, worried constantly that Florida's neo-fascist politics would somehow disrupt things. In any case, August 8 came and went, and now I'm an associate professor.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? A book contract for my dissertation book, The Violate Man. It has been such a long time coming for this manuscript. I've been working on it (on and off) for maybe 15 years now, and I think the manuscript is in great shape. It has an editor who loves it. And it is filled with important and interesting case studies.
It was also an enormous achievement to publish my special section in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism on "Drag vs. the Law". This is an area of research in which I've become very invested, and it was exciting to be able to publish my colleagues' writing about drag and how it has interacted with and intersected with the law.
I was also really pleased to have an article in Shakespeare Bulletin this year: "'Against Interpretation': Actor-Driven Shakespeare and a Love for Scholarship". It's a fun piece, I think, and it allowed me to do some very interesting research on the American Shakespeare Center, a theatre company in Central Virginia of which I am very fond.
9. What was your biggest failure?
Sometimes I'm really not a very good friend. My introversion takes over and I need time to myself to reboot and recharge, and this can lead me to be antisocial, to neglect my best long-distance friendships, and to hurt other people's feelings in the process. I hate when this happens, and I'm always very sorry, but I think perhaps this trait is getting worse as I get older.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
I really didn't. I seem to be doing alright!
11. What was the best thing you bought?
A new 14-cup Cuisinart food processor. It's so cool. I got it on sale on Black Friday at a reasonable price, but I think it's probably worth the full price.
12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
My friend Michelle Carriger won the Barnard Hewitt award this year for her book Theatricality of the Closet! I was also so excited to see Andrew Rincón's play I Wanna Fuck like Romeo and Juliet nominated for a Lambda award. (Actually, shout out to the judges for the theatre portion of the Lambda Literary Awards—the plays are bad almost every year, but this year they were almost uniformly excellent!)
13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Florida voters, American voters, Republicans in congress, Democrats in congress, genocide apologists. It has been an appalling, depressing year, honestly.
14. Which charitable organizations did you give to?
I also donated money to help some students in need and some former students making their first independent films.
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Dune: Part Two
Vacationing on St. George Island with Meredith and Jason in May.
Visiting Caleb and Diana in North Carolina a little later in May.
The American Society for Theatre Research conference in Seattle in November.
16. What song will always remind you of 2024?
This isn't a 2024 song, but after Gavin Creel passed away this year, I listened to him sing "What Can You Lose" on a loop for days. I have always loved the way he sang that song, and I've always loved the song.
"No One Else", "Dust and Ashes", and other songs from Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, which FSU did as our Spring musical in 2024. I worked as the show's dramaturge and saw it dozens of times, and our students—really our whole School—did an amazing job with this show. (Here's the dramaturgical material I produced for the students.)
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder? Happier.
b) thinner or fatter? Fatter.
c) richer or poorer? Richer.
18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Reading Early Modern drama with Michelle, Joe, Donovan, and Walter.
19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Teaching classes to graduate students who either hadn't done the reading or simply decided not to show up to class.
20. How did you spend the Winter holidays?
I am in California for a little over a week, seeing family and friends and trying to get in a little rest, as well. I've already gone on a hike in Griffith Park with my friend John, baked three different batches of cookies, eaten dumplings like five times, and taken a little pilgrimage to my childhood home (which looks completely different!). Also, I need you all to know that even the cheap Mexican food in any small suburb of Los Angeles is exponentiallybetter than the Mexican food where I live in Florida or anywhere else I've lived. I know "nobody walks in LA" but when I'm in Los Angeles I also like to walk, especially in some of these beautiful California parks.
21. Did you fall in love in 2024?
I did not.
22. How many one-night stands?
Only a few. I really need to get better at this. I wonder what is wrong with me. Maybe I secretly believe I am unattractive and unlovable. This is probably it.
23. What was your favorite TV program?
I watched way more TV than usual this year. For research purposes, I watched Baby Reindeer and I May Destroy You. For fun I watched season two of The Lord of the Rings: the Rings of Power, which was... not good. But I am not really sure if it's objectively not good or if I just don't like TV. I find television so annoying. It all just takes so long. Everything is so unnecessarily drawn out. I tried to watch The Decameron because I love Amar Chadha-Patel and because I thought Karan Gill was so handsome in I May Destroy You, and also because I just love the actual Decameron, but I couldn't get into it.
And then I kept my New Year's resolution to stay current with all seasons of Drag Race. This also meant catching up with earlier seasons so I would have all the background I needed and know all the returning queens on the All Stars seasons. So...
I watched Drag Race México season 1, Drag Race España season 3, Drag Race España All Stars, Drag Race France season 2, Drag Race Belgique season 2, RuPaul's Drag Race: UK vs the World season 2 (with the most absurd upset), RuPaul's Drag Race season 16 (with the best upset), Drag Race Brasil season 1, Drag Race Germany season 1, RuPaul's Drag Race Down Under season 3, Drag Race France season 3, Canada's Drag Race season 4, RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars season 9 (big no to this winner), Canada's Drag Race: Canada vs. the World season 2 (these vs. the world seasons are the fuckin' worst), Drag Race México, season 2, RuPaul's Drag Race UK season 5, Drag Race Philippines season 3, RuPaul's Drag Race Global All Stars (probably one of the worst seasons ever), RuPaul's Drag Race UK season 6, Drag Race España season 4, Drag Race Thailand season 3, and Drag Race Down Under season 4 (why does this still exist?). Overall I would say this was too much drag race, but it won't happen again. Even if I stay current again, I wont have to watch past seasons to catch up. And anyway, I really wanted to catch up on the past seasons, and now there are only three past seasons I haven't seen (and does The Switch even count?).
OK wait. One more TV thing. I also watched My Secret Agent Husband on the DramaBox app. It is an absolutely ridiculous show that was filmed to be watched in the aspect ratio of an iPhone. It was gay and very stupid, and I had a great time. I can't recommend it, of course, but... I kind of want to watch it again.
24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
No. I don't think so.
25. What was the best book you read?
Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard. This is a classic, of course, and it's a classic for a reason. It's wonderful. I also adored Henry James's The Wings of the Dove.
For nonfiction, I really fell in love with Avgi Saketopoulou's Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, Kareem Khubchandani's Decolonize Drag, La Paperon's A Third University Is Possible,and Tina Post's Deadpan: the Aesthetics of Black Inexpression.
I also loved a whole bunch of plays that were new to me: Emma Wipperman's Joan of Arkansas, Rajiv Joseph's Describe the Night, Jaclyn Backhaus's You on the Moors Now,Sabrina Mahfouz's A History of Water in the Middle East, Harrison David Rivers' The Bandaged Place, and Nazareth Hassan's Untitled. (1-5).
I started seriously listening to Ryuichi Sakamoto in 2024—not just his film music. I love his stuff.
27. What was the best piece of theatre you saw?
I drove down to Tampa in August to see Dan Caffrey's play The Amphibians at Think Tank Theatre. I had a great time at this play. I also really loved our production of Great Comet and I'm very proud of that.
28. What did you want and get?
Tenure, a publishing agreement for The Violate Man, nudes in my DMs, and so much tinned fish (I've become completely obsessed with tinned fish and I now buy regularly from four different companies).
29. What did you want and not get?
A crop of limes from my lime trees. I really need to work on my gardening and cultivation this year. I started trying in 2024 but kind of failed. Maybe in 2025!
30. What was your favorite film of this year?
So far it's Andrea Arnold's Bird.
However, I have around sixty-five movies on my unseen-movies list for 2024. I'll probably see thirty-five of those at least, so my top ten will definitely change.
Right now, though, my favorite films of the year are:
Bird
Challengers
Close Your Eyes
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
A Real Pain
Flow
20,000 Species of Bees
Dune: Part Two
The movies I'm most excited for as of this writing are Babygirl, The Brutalist, Hard Truths, How to Make Millions before Grandma Dies, I'm Still Here, A Traveler's Needs,and Vermiglio
31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 43. It was the usual night for my movie club, so we watched that week's movie—a deeply fucked up Tsui Hark movie called Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind—and then the folks from the club had a cocktail with me at a local bar that's open late. It was low key and nice.
32. What new recipes did you make this year?
I've been making a lot of hummus and other bean dip situations. I have two hummus recipes I make all the time now, one of which involves infused oil with cinnamon and ginger and cilantro and chiles, and the other of which involves fried spiced lamb neck-meat. I also started posting these more frequently as reels on Instagram.
33. What were your cocktail obsessions?
I'm still drinking a lot of Old Barrels and Manhattans. But I made a lot of Puka Punches this year when my friend Chari was staying with me over the summer.
34. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Different election results. I cannot believe we have to live through another four years of this.
35. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2024?
Shorts, white socks, white sneakers.
Dress shirt, dress pants, tie, boots.
36. What kept you sane?
Working out. Happy hour at Savour, 1903, or Charlie Park. Hanging out with Meredith and Jason. Phone calls with Jason Tate.
37. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Amar Chadha-Patel
38. What political issue stirred you the most?
Ongoing genocide in Palestine. The ongoing refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. The resurgence of fascism in the United States.
39. Whom did you miss?
Justin and Elizabeth and Ashley and Danny and Wahima.
Tate, Matt, Walter and Jeanne, Katie, Jude and Steph, Chris.
Catie (although we sure did FaceTime after Maggie Smith passed so we could cry together).
Yasser, Katie, Jonathan, and Viktor.
Honestly, lots of folks. I have so many people I love spread out all over.
40. Who was the best new person you met?
This is cheating because I met her in 2023, but I started hanging out with Jen Gillette this year and she's just so great. My new colleagues Jasmine and Madeleine are also amazing.
41. Tell us a valuable life-lesson you learned in 2024:
I feel like the thing I'm learning the most about this year is forgiveness. You have to be able to forgive if you want to preserve relationships with people, because people do stupid, terrible, ridiculous things, but people are not perfect. People are careless and foolish and they actually need forgiveness. This is a lesson for a teacher, of course, because it's important that I try to treat students generously and forgive them for their occasional frequent foolishness. But I've been thinking about it more and more in personal relationships too. And the thing is, people don't deserve forgiveness. That's sort of the point. It's a gift: a way to move on from the past and try to put faith in a person's future behavior—and a future together.
42. Share an important quotation from 2024:
In this year's 53rd State Occasional, edited by Lucas Baisch and Emma Horwitz, they asked their contributors to talk about what they're obsessed with. Kate Kremer wrote something that I can't stop thinking about:
"A friend wants me to protect myself from my daughter's incursions. She wants to protect my daughter from my overweening (under-weaning) indulgence. She's afraid I might not give her the proper training-by-example in matters of bodily autonomy. My feelings are complex: I want my daughter to attend to my feelings, but I don't want her to stop attending to her own particular pleasures. Complicity comes from the late Latin complex, "allied", from the Latin complicare, "fold together",and I guess I am obsessed with my own complicity. I'm disturbed by the misalignment between how I feel—which is fine, durably fine—and the violence done each day in my name."
This hit me not only because of what she is thinking about—how our own day-to-day feelings are completely at odds with the ways we are complicit in genocide, torture, incarceration, and other state violence—but also because I have been working on editing something about consent and its limits for the journal, and so I've been thinking so much about autonomy, consent, and the ways we are interconnected with one another and vulnerable and open to one another. The possibilities of our own vulnerability and openness might have something to teach us about complicity... I'm going to keep thinking about this.
Honestly, I don't understand why Aaron Taylor-Johnson's abs aren't on the poster. They're definitely the most important feature of J.C. Chandor's Kraven the Hunter.
While we're talking about it, this is the strangest J.C. Chandor movie. It has a cast like a normal J.C. Chandor movie—ATJ, Alessandro Nivola, Russell Crowe, Fred Hechinger, Ariana DeBose, Christopher Abbott—and they're all pretty great. But then this is a superhero action movie extravaganza slash family drama and not serious at all. In fact, the chief problems with Kraven the Hunter are with the script. The dialogue is terrible, and some of the acting does not make it any better.
But, the action is great and the visual effects are pretty excellent. When Kraven the Hunter is doing action, it's doing a good job. This movie is rated R, and so the fights are bloody and very violent. But this is also very silly even though it wishes to be taken quite seriously at times.
Listen, the thing is, it's just not that bad. I think the critiques of this are unfair. It's a fine Marvel movie. It has a couple good monsters, and it has a fun lead. And other Marvel movies are just as dumb.
I'm sorry to report, but Moana 2 is not good. The plot is deeply confused and it borders on utterly nonsensical. The animation keeps changing, too, which is weird. Whenever the characters are wet they look like they’ve been animated completely differently (maybe this is a technology thing; maybe it is a skill thing; but what it looks like is that Disney just didn't invest quite enough money into Moana 2).
There also just some truly insane sequences involving typical gross-out humor with nasty fluids (kids love these kinds of jokes for some reason), weird theatrical animated sequences that I didn’t understand at all (there’s a strangely surreal musical number in which Maui cheers Moana up, and they are in a completely different world for some reason), and there are animate coconuts who seem evil but are good and know a great deal about poisons? I have no idea. At one point I leaned over to my companion and asked What is happening?
This thing moves along with the logic of an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants or maybe I mean a Minions sequel. Much worse: the songs are forgettable. I never thought I'd say this, but I miss Lin-Manuel Miranda. Does this mean I'm going to actually enjoy Mufasa: the Lion King?
Wicked: Part I is successful on all fronts. The first time Cynthia Erivo sang in this I let out a little cheer.
It’s so nice to hear a Hollywood musical sung well (Michelle Yeoh excepted—who gave her this part?)! This is something I complain about nearly every time I see a Hollywood musical (The Prom is one of the most egregious recent outings in this vein). But Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo sing very well, and it's just so good to hear a song in a movie well sung. In fact, I also liked that this movie never pretends not to be a musical like some Rob Marshall piece of junk or the truly absurd Color Purple from last year. This movie starts us off with a musical number and never lets up. It knows what it is and it sets us up to get it quickly
Wicked: Part I also looks great, it’s choreographed well, Paul Tazewell’s costumes are gorgeous, and it’s quite funny. The whole thing just works. To be honest, I didn’t even really notice that this movie is as long as it is (I only got slightly bored when we were being welcomed to Oz by Emerald City street theatre and the cameos from Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth kept going); this movie really moves very well, and it's almost always visually interesting.
But also... this is Wicked. For me, this means that there's really a rather hard ceiling on how good it could actually be. It's a series of winking in-jokes that were cutesy in Gregory Maguire's original novel and which I've always found really trite in the Stephen Schwartz musical. I'm also just, like, not a teenage girl. And I recognize that this film isn't really aimed at me. It is to John Chu's credit that his film doesn't try to be more than that. It leans into its material and does that to its absolute best. This is precisely what he should have done. And that more or less means it's only ever going to be middlebrow. (I might as well tell you that last year I ranked Wonka very similarly to how I rank Wicked this year.)
PS. Stacy Wolf was right about Wicked, and it’s very easy to see why it’s so available for lesbian and other queer identifications.
