BLOCKBUSTER MUSICAL MAKES ENTERTAINMENT

A time before the Wizard of OZ was a happier time, if one can believe the existence of betterness than Judy Garland, The Tin Man, The Lion and the Scarecrow endlessly singing whimsically down and around the yellow brick road.

Director Jon M. Chu merges the best of a Broadway musical with the best of Tinseltown imaging for the prequel to Dorothy getting swept up by a tornado in Kansas and winding up in the Land of Oz.

The magical singing of leading costars, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, sets the tone and provides the atmosphere, and gradually pulls the audience into the 3D dreamscape enhanced with AVX theater technology.

Cynthia Erivo plays Elphaba Throp, a young women born with a green skin and spontaneous uncontrolled magical powers. Elphaba is the prequel to the prequel of how the Wicked Witch of the West comes to be wicked. The short answer is that she gets teased a lot growing up and this teasing only becomes more sophisticated when she enters Shiz University.

Ariana Grande plays Galinda Upland, a young woman who wants to learn sorcery. But Galinda’s perky narcissistic tendencies put her in direct competition with Elphaba. Galinda is the prequel to Glinda the Good, who must become a bit nicer before wearing the title.

This one main narrative of how the witches in Oz came to be is filled with song and dance. The storyline is made a bit more complicated than Dorothy’s was in the Wizard of Oz (1939).

Chu intermittently runs background narratives through the main narrative, like the twisting winds of a tornado. One narrative involves an authoritarian plot to remove all the magical animal professors from teaching at the university. Galinda actually joins her classmates in bullying the professors before they are permanently removed from their teaching positions.

Another narrative involves the developing romance between Galinda and a prince from Winkie, played by Jonathan Bailey.

The Wizard of Oz narrative runs blindly in the background until Elphaba gets a special invitation to meet him at Oz. Michelle Yeoh, plays Madame Morrible, a professor of sorcery who has mentored Elphaba in the background. Madame Morrible knows that Oz has room for a particularly talented student, if she can find one for him.

The relationships of the students grow as would typically happen in a competitive academic environment. But no one could guess that Elphaba and Galinda would begin to work together.

Wicked has that majestic sweep of a blockbuster, and also the bursting talent of a long running Broadway musical.

Erivo matches her acting talent with her accomplished singing. And Grande is able to dance and sing in parallel, often in the whimsical spirit of her character being in binary opposition. Galinda is popular but obnoxious at the same time, while Elphaba is unpopular, which compels her through a bit of a challenging rollercoaster of emotions.

Wicked is a fun filled night of entertainment with a 2 h 40 minute runtime, that is well worth the effort.

And then just when enough happiness has occurred, and the realization sets in that time has gone by, Chu introduces the interestingly quirky character, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, played by Jeff Goldbloom. Goldbloom adapts his supporting screen character well for the role as, similar to the Wizard of Oz (1939), the storms slow down enough to allow time for some explaining about what is going on in Tornado Alley and other magical stories from Kansas.

INVISIBLE STRINGS MAGICALLY CREATE CHANGE

Director Francis Ford Coppola captures the gently falling fragments of his consciousness in assembling the fable, Megalopolis (2024).

This metaphysical film figurately and literally transcends time and space. The didactic script relies on symbols and metaphors as much as plot lines and character development to tell the story of America’s decline.

Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman are cast in the film after the two young actors co-starred in the urban dystopia Midnight Cowboy (1969) about two down out players struggling to survive in a ruthless New York City.

In Megalopolis, the much aged players have finally succeeded at the end of their time, but all around them, the city has fallen into disrepair.

Coppola becomes a harbinger for the empire’s downfall, having waited five decades to finally tell the final chapter of the American story now that everything has become so clearly revealed.

Essentially, Americans dressing and acting as if in ancient Roman times preside over the downfall of New York City, I mean the City of New Rome.

Laurence Fishburne provides a voice over while also being cast in the role as the lead character’s aide-de-camp, in a kind of reimagined character composed of all his previous character roles.

The ensemble cast of previous generational and new generational actors make the scenes seamlessly bleed into each other like the revolving lobby doors of a New York City skyscraper. But only one actor gets the opening scenes with omniscient powers.

COPPOLA USES A RICH AESTHETIC TO BIND MANY LAYERS

Adam Driver plays Cesar Catilina, a leading urban architect tasked with building the future of the city. Coppola gives Cesar a few additional powers, like those powers of the director with one all knowing eye looking through the camera, while the other all knowing eye simultaneously reviews the story boards.

Cesar doesn’t have a light saber in his hand. Instead, Cesar has a right angle, levelling ruler with a strange glow about it as the lead architect of the Design Authority.

Coppola accents the film with these self referential acting moments while everyone has already, or will eventually become, unhappy about their individual outcomes. The disaffection grows and grows.

Driver has a moment as William Shakespear’s Hamlet with a famous soliloquy acted out verbatim. And then Driver does another soliloquy a bit more contemporaneously, as part of the current on-screen dystopia.

The film becomes at times a bit like those reimagined Shakespearian plays, but it’s not, because of a lot of Hollywood influences and movie magic behind the fantasy, as well as Coppola’ personal infusion of thought processes.

The film’s motif is more influenced by the fantastical realism of fables and what happens to the magic when those fables get told in Hollywood for the big screen blockbusters.

Cesar has an office in the Chrysler Building far above the battles of good versus evil, while the battles of life and death begin to play out in the City of New Rome.

Shakespearian tropes go by, this way and that way.

Shia LeBeouf plays the son of a city oligarch, Clodio, who denies his struggles with gender dysphoria by suggesting that him dressing in a woman’s toga is a fraternity prank. Clodio eventually dresses as gender neutral to challenge Cesar, his cousin, for political control of the future.

Mayor Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito, will not lose out to a street brawl, though. Nathalie Emmanuel plays his daughter, Julia, who also happens to be in love with Cesar. Julia must first win over Cesar her way before swaying her father to side with them.

The father-daughter pairing plays out well among the power politics of civilization.

The families controlling the city are slowly losing their interconnectedness and becoming less and less powerful as disenfranchised fragments, while a younger generation waits not so idly by for an opportunity to succeed.

Emmanuel shows how Julia simultaneously knows this and does not know this, but she is ultimately herself swayed by good to overcome the moral vices.

Those players faulter who attempt to succeed by betraying each other, while loyalty to family prevails.

Coppola uses a rich aesthetic to bind many intellectual layers, like the petals of a flower held together with a lot of fragility.

Roman Catholic themes of confession, crucifixion and resurrection make the script turn this way and that. Driver must at one point bring his omniscient character back from the dead as a way of breaking free from the life and death struggle ever present within human civilization.

The storyline is initially difficult to follow until everyone attends the circus as part of a much more elaborate carnival, during which the individual characters become better revealed and their interconnectedness more obvious.

Coppola suggests, with this fable, that humanity must selflessly participate in a time of great individual and civic sacrifice in the hope that humanity may be able to save civilization from itself.

CAMERA CAPTURES SEVERAL PICTURE PERFECT MOVIE MOMENTS ALONG THE FRONTIER

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The way the west was won was a long arduous journey filled with adventure and quite often death or, in the least, the risk of encountering great danger.

Director Kevin Costner brings together that spirit of those adventurers seeking to settle along the frontier from just about everywhere.

The first installment of this epic four part western story begins when Indigenous tribes still defended the lands in which towns were being built one by one in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Sienna Miller stars as one of the survivors of an Apache attack on a new community, half built out of tents along the river.

The story immediately has more death and vengeful hate in the script than love. But Frances Kittredge and her daughter, Elizabeth, played by Georgia MacPhail, move on with the protection of Union Soldiers.

The score drives many scenes as well as the picturesque landscapes and cinematography. Certain scenes are picture perfect with landscape, score and characters finding a magical synthesis in front of the camera.

Costner follows several unconnected narratives that may eventually join in Chapter 2 of the American Saga, as everyone involved seem to be heading to a new swath of land being advertised for settlement in Utah, the camera being lured by the marketing bills for Horizon.

Costner illustrates his knowledge of filmmaking by accelerating time and space at the end of the narrative in an effort to compel the audience to return for Chapter 2 at least.

But how everyone got there is more of an object lesson on how settling the Western Frontier, moving further and further west from places like Kansas, was a long journey involving hard work and confrontations with sordid unsavory characters who people in the wagon train might meet at any given juncture.

Exasperation is created at the slow pace of progress and with how what gains had been made on any given day could be wiped out in a heartbeat.

The director does not introduce Hayes Ellison, played by Costner, into the script until an hour into the 3 hr 1 m runtime for this first installment. When Hayes arrives in one of those picture perfect movie moments, the camera leaves the impression that everything will now begin to make sense.

Costner does create a kind of lawman, John Wayne character, but the storyline leads to yet another independent narrative, and another story of hardship and survival in a small town along the Western Frontier.

Abbey Lee plays Marigold, a lonesome lost sole being pushed about and ridiculed in a small town, as she waits for the right person to arrive that will take her away from everything, including the personal humiliation of living in nowhere.

Marigold picks out Hayes as the most handsome, stunning cowboy to arrive in town out of  the newest group of riders to arrive. The exchange that brings Marigold and Hayes together creates a bit of relief, with the possibility that happier times are near. But the rawness of the West intervenes again and changes the destiny of everyone involved.

The competing interests of different groups of settlers is thrown into the narrative that runs parallel with a narrative about disaffection within the indigenous tribe, and their own shared difficulty identifying the wrongdoers among them.

One narrative broken off from the opening scenes, in which a new settlement is destroyed by an indigenous war party, has a group of cowboys continuing to search for the Apache party that killed men, women and children and burnt the town to the ground, but the search inevitably just seeks revenge against any indigenous peoples in their path.

This rising conflict foreshadows the Indian Wars that would continue on well passed the years that followed the Civil War.

A second narrative that branches off from the opening scene sequence involves Miller and Sam Worthington, as a Union Army Officer, as well as Danny Huston, as Colonel Albert Houghton.

The characters in this second narrative seem to be growing together as a community while in the deep background the Civil War has begun and the union soldiers in town get shipped off to the fighting, with heroic tales in their heads of eventually returning in honor. If only the soldiers knew then, what the audience knows now.

Chapter 1 does not really ever come together as a stand alone film. Instead, Costner only introduces everyone and the competing interests that seem to be destined to intersect in Chapter 2, which is scheduled to be released later this summer, on August 16, 2024.

But two more chapters are planned that, given the pace of the first chapter, may ultimately be necessary to more fully explain how the Western Frontier was settled.

Costner as star seems to personify Costner as director, a kind of slow methodical omniscient character, well aware of the dangers that may arise in the ensuing scene sequences.

There are many characters to work through, with the camera creating portraits of the Western Frontier from time to time, almost taken from the first black and white photographs created on silver plate.

The film would have done a bit better though, shortened by about 30 minutes for the theatrical release, without cutting any story lines, and by simply editing the scenes closer together into more of a montage.

Costner shows at the end that he knows how to do this, almost providing too much acceleration toward Chapter 2, leaving the impression that Chapter 1 was more of an object lesson in the slow grinding life, full of moral and ethical pitfalls.