Oz Overload
I recently caught up with Wicked and Wicked: For Good, having waited a whole year for the second part to come out before watching both back-to-back. On top of that, I wanted to revisit The Wizard of Oz beforehand, to best evaluate how the modern prequels connect to the original. And then, not long afterwards, the TIFF Secret Movie Club served up a coincidence: Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, a comedy that loosely mimics the structure of Wizard. Let me briefly catalog my feelings about this set of films.
Gail Daughtry
The title character of this movie is happily engaged to her dude, until they casually discuss the idea of a celebrity sex pass—wherein each member of the couple agree to “allow” an affair if the other happens to meet a chosen celebrity—and then the dude immediately takes it literally and partakes in a fling with his famous crush. Devastated, she sets off to find hers in order to even the score.
I enjoyed the parallels with Wizard, e.g. her quest to find her crush mirrors Dorothy’s quest to find the wizard, and she meets friends along the way, the equivalents of the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion. However, the comedic style leans too far into silliness for my taste, and therefore I didn’t laugh enough to call the movie a success.
Wicked & Wicked: For Good
I think it’s best to pretend that this musical has nothing to do with The Wizard of Oz. Its conceit of subverting the backstories of the original, especially that of the villainous Witch, ends up feeling forced and distracting. Most of the “connections” are left for the second part, which meant that I spent most of its runtime thinking to myself, This doesn’t make sense!
Really, it just comes down to whether you enjoy the songs or not. I thought they were well-performed, but the songwriting didn’t stand out for me. Perhaps musicals are best appreciated live on stage.
The Wizard of Oz
I haven’t watched this in a long time, but have a lot of childhood memories of it. I’ve probably seen bits of it many times on TV, or at school when the teacher was feeling lazy and just wanted to show us a tape.
This time around, giving it my full adult attention, I had a strangely emotional experience watching it. It’s not that anything in the story itself moved me; it was more a feeling of amazement at what they were able to achieve with the limited technology of the time. I tried to put myself in the mind of someone in 1939, watching it in the theatre. They must have been blown away by what they were seeing. It’s rare to feel that way nowadays, when we take advanced visual effects for granted.
True magic.