Wicked: Part 1

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The disclaimer is this: I saw Wicked (the stage musical) at Fair Park in Dallas some years ago. There was this amazing moment when the power went out due to a spectacular thunderclap, and whoever was playing Elphaba made a perfect in-character joke that I can only remember the feeling of, but not the content. It is a tragedy. But the point is, I know this story, and normally would not do a review.

However, it is the case that Wicked is a story that has substantially built upon the musical’s foundations. Due to pulling more material from the book? I cannot remember it well enough to say, sadly. But all the same, there are things worth talking about between them. And I’m qualified to do it!, since we watched a bootleg copy of a show from the original run, after we got home from the theater last night.

First of all… for being Broadway, man, that was a sparse and boring stage the majority of the time. Of course a movie and a special effects budget is going to surpass a stage, for the visual telling of a story. But like, I look at Hamilton and the staging is just so good that effects and period architecture would feel extraneous. Whereas, and okay being a fantasy setting certainly makes a difference, but the staging in the movie outstripped the Broadway version in every way, so extensively that I feel like I’m kicking Kristin Chenoweth in the voice just by saying so. It’s simply not a fair comparison.

Anyway, I was saying it’s longer, and boy is it longer. This Part One is like 15 minutes longer than the entire show, and it only covers Act One. And I’ll be real, yes, they could have trimmed it back some. But lavish pointless dance numbers aside, almost everything they added provided more and better context. Fiyero meeting Elphaba before he met anyone else? Adding the poppies into the Elphaba and Dr. Dillamond scenes? The backstory on the introduction of Elphaba’s hat? All of these were small but mighty improvements to the story, well out of proportion to the effort involved.

Lastly: Ariana Grande does an amazing job of channeling Chenoweth’s bubbly blondeness, while Cynthia Erivo actually surpasses Idina Menzel, I think, perhaps not in the singing[1], but in the acting. Not that Menzel was in any way bad, but she always looked so happy when she was singing, regardless of the context. Erivo’s stone face rarely cracks, and it means a lot when it does. Because, honestly, what would she have had to be happy about for the majority of her life?

To sum up: unless they somehow dramatically foul up Part 2, this will be the definitive version of the story, just as Judy Garland’s 1939 outing will always be the definitive version of the mirror story. And yes, that’s meant to be high praise.

[1] Although I wouldn’t want to judge that contest

Escape Academy

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This week in “We played it just before it fell off Game Pass, so now you can’t!”, I bring to you Escape Academy. The conceit is, escape rooms, but what if there was a Hogwarts for them? And really… there’s not a lot to talk about here. There is a story, technically, and the graphics are pretty terrible, but what actually matters to your enjoyment of the game is if you want to play escape room puzzles, some of which eventually get pretty tricky.

It has 2 player co-op (nice), 2 player vs (I was not a fan, but it’s not actively bad, and we only tried one mode of many), about 12 levels, and several expansions that weren’t on Game Pass and thus we did not try them, but since now none of it is on Game Pass, arguably the bundle is worthwhile I suppose?

All in all: pretty good if you like co-op games, maybe not much of a much if you don’t?

Cam

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It’s been so long since I last heard my podcast that I no longer remember exactly what the category was that led them to choose Cam. At a guess, modern and doppelganger? But I’m not sure that’s right. (It would really help if I could remember other movies they discussed watching instead, but, here we are. Or I could write most of this review, then listen to the beginning of the podcast episode about this movie to get the answer, but I have another review yet to write, so that seems like a bad idea. So I’ll just shrug and move on.)

So there’s this camgirl, Lola. (Or Alice.) She’s trying to move upward in the ranking on her site, which I think is determined by donations rather than views? Though it’s hard to tell since they correlate. Anyway, her character thumbnail sketch is “cambitious[1], not out to her mom, out to her kid brother, has a devoted following and a few industry friends”. What sets her apart from anyone else is she knows enough about practical effects to do pretty extreme shows that go in directions you would maybe not expect of a porn biography but maybe would expect of a horror flick.

Anyway, that would be the whole movie, except one day she wakes up to find herself on cam, by which I mean the stream is running and she’s onscreen, but she’s also in bed watching it, because whoever is on the stream isn’t actually her. And then the rest of the movie is a genre I like very much, wherein it’s impossible to prove to anyone that you’re really you, because if the system is rigged, the system always wins. Even the people who know you, they’re not inclined to doubt the evidence of their eyes, especially if you’ve been keeping secrets.

Naturally, therefore, I loved the rest of the movie[2]. …right up until the end, where it kind of just sputtered out. Alas.

[1] This is a word I made up, not a term of art. But I can believe it could be, you know?
[2] Except for the scene with the whale, which was more than a bit disturbing.

Close to the Sun

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In the second half of December, right after I started the new Indiana Jones game and got my new PS5 Pro (halfway or more through the 5’s lifecycle), I… played none of those games, because I learned that a Nikola Tesla themed game I had been interested in was leaving Game Pass. Hence, another entry in my ongoing series of timely reviews for games you can no longer just get, as in for “free”.

Close to the Sun tells an extremely alternate history of the 1890s, where Tesla was successful enough with his electricity plans to corner that market worldwide, and then he built an enormous scientific research vessel, to which the main character has been invited by her sister. When the reporter sister arrives (as opposed to the scientist sister, you see), she discovers that nobody is home, but there’s a giant quarantine sign[1] and a lot of damage and weird shimmering images of people walking around.

Thus commences the barely not a walking sim exploration of the ship, to find and rescue her sister, figure out what went wrong, and ultimately escape, one hopes. As a game, it was I think only okay except for my interest in the whole Tesla / Edison thing, which elevated it somewhat. The four characters were all pretty good, the mysteries were mostly compelling, the ending was, I will say, “rushed”. All in all: decent and short enough to not crazy overstay its welcome, but marred by a truly awful save system that meant if for any reason I did not finish a chapter, I would have to start it over. So, be prepared to play for a while at a time whether you like it or not, since the XBox’s quick resume system is a complete failure on this game in particular as well as the lack of good saving I already mentioned.

In further conclusion, maybe it’s better as a game than I’m giving it credit for, and mostly the technical issues are why my estimation rounded downward a bit.

[1] I cannot explain precisely why, but it was particularly affecting to me that the quarantine sign was painted over the exit to the internal docks, in case anyone wanted to leave, but with no hint of any warning to anyone coming in.

Moana 2

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Exciting milestone: we successfully took the kids out to see a movie! The boy was entranced from start to finish, and only had one or two moments of “nope this is too scary I need to yell ‘stop!'”, which is tolerable in the scheme of things, especially for a kid-friendly showing with nobody else in the theater. Likewise, the girl was entranced, but not so much that she wasn’t also mobile. However, the furthest away she got was two seats down and on the floor peeking through the next row’s seats. Which, again, entirely tolerable under the circumstances.

Anyway, the movie we saw was Moana 2, as the original is a pretty big hit in the house. I don’t know whether these movies are based on any specific Pacific Islander legends, or a mish-mash of them, or made up from whole cloth to look authentic to people who are willing to shell out money to Disney. (Probably the second one?) What I do know is a) they are convincing and b) they definitely have that quality of good fairy tales and mythologies where you want to know what will happen next and it doesn’t turn out the way you’d expect.

But what I’m really here to talk about is the music, and there this movie was disappointing, albeit not in the way you might expect. Yes, obviously, whoever they hired to do the lyrics did not live up to Lin Manuel Miranda. Yes, obviously, the song they put at the end of the credits is the song that in the movie most closely evokes the main song of the first movie. (But honestly, it’s a little too much like Into the Unknown from Frozen II for my taste.) There was maybe only one song I did think I’d be excited to hear when the kids are listening to the Disney music station on Sirius for years to come, honestly. But none of that is my point.

My point is, usually Disney movie sequels are aggressively mid, so you’re allowed to not care much about what the music even sounds like in the first place. But Moana 2 is not only actually pretty decent (except for the music), but it’s also clearly setting up a trilogy. And if I have to care about the movie, then why couldn’t it have had either comparably good music or else not been a musical in the first place?

Knowing the answer to both forks of that question does me absolutely no good.

La noche de Walpurgis

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It’s so weird that I nearly watched a movie named Walpurgisnacht. I have some regrets, now, about how it was sold to the English-speaking world instead.

My horror podcasts’s requirements this time were 1970s as the setting and werewolf as the monster. Thusly, I have now watched The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, which is…. well, honestly, it was very silly, is what it was. See, these chicks named Elvira and Genevieve are looking for the grave of a vampire countess, but they find a guy that we-the-audience just learned in the opening scene of the movie is a werewolf who was good and dead, until the coroner removed the silver bullets from his body. So now he’s back to living in a castle with his crazy and more than a little non-consensual lesbian-grabby sister, but it turns out he’s also looking for this vampire woman, because she’s supposed to have a silver cross that he wants, for reasons of his own[1].

Later, a sequence of events loosely based on Dracula plays out, and later still the werewolf and the vampire woman have a versus, if you know what I mean, and I think you would have if I hadn’t used this particular phrasing to describe whether you do. Honestly, it’s all very boring and I’m not sure I can figure out how the podcast people will fill an hour of air time on the topic.

There’s basically nothing to recommend here[2], unless you are a long time fan of the series of movies in which this werewolf character appears, and are also a completionist.

[1] I will never tire of that ambiguously-badguy phrase.
[2] I wonder how much of my disdain for the movie is based on it being 4×3 aspect ratio and unrestored. At a guess: more than zero, less than would be relevant to turn things around.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

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Although I notably skipped a recent one (so far), I have played the vast majority of Zelda games that were not originally released for Gameboys. As such, it is not surprising that I wanted to play the new one. In fact, funny story, my wife bought it for me for our anniversary which messed up my having bought it for her for Christmas. Either way, she has other things going on, so I played it first.

Echoes of Wisdom is notable for being the first Zelda game with a playable character that is not Link.[1] It is further notable for being the first game titled “The Legend of Zelda” with a playable character named, y’know, Zelda.[2] See, there are these rifts that appear in Hyrule on a fairly regular basis, and people and things get trapped in them, but later they close up by themselves and the people and things return. Only, lately, there are a lot more and they aren’t closing up, and the king’s daughter has just fallen into one and been captured by someone pretty familiar-looking to long time fans of the series, and then rescued by someone also pretty familiar-looking to long time fans of the series, only she gets out of the rift as a result of the rescue, but he is left trapped.

Not long after these events, Princess Zelda is accused of causing the rifts, for reasons that make sense in-game but would be pretty spoilery, and she teams up with a little yellow ball to save Hyrule, since this Link kid that everyone is talking about has vanished. Somehow. Also, the little yellow ball can help her make copies of things, and then use those copies to help her make her way through a failing world. Examples of things she can copy include beds, tables, crates, pots, and those little jiggly green things that you farmed for XP back in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, which I mention mainly because of how much more accurately named it is that any other game in the series that isn’t this one.

Anyway: it’s by and large a Zelda game, you know? You wander the land looking for collectibles and fairies and rupees and upgrade items, and you enter ruined temples to find keys and boss monsters and heart containers, and eventually you fight, well, I won’t tell you who you fight, but I bet you have guesses.

I have some ambivalent feelings about the manner in which Zelda deals with all the fights and things, in part because other Zeldae have been more proactive. But I think my doubts are mostly unfounded. At the end of the day (the little blue power bar aside), Zelda is not Link, and having her not take a direct hand is almost certainly the more correct way to set her up as a playable character.

In conclusion, I’ve played well into the 90th percentile of what the game has to offer and I’ll probably try to wrap up a few more loose ends before I move on to the new Indiana Jones game, and I can say without question that it’s a lot of fun. It reminds me of A Link to the Past in many ways, and all of them positive. Well worth the time! And largely kidsafe too, which isn’t nothing.

[1] At least, I’m pretty sure that’s true.
[2] This, on the other hand, I’m 100% certain of.

Smile (2022)

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Based on the year of release[1], I wonder if this was a late in the game victim of Covid? I ask this question because the first time I learned there was a movie called Smile was when I saw the previews for Smile 2 in the theater earlier this year. Which is weird; I don’t often completely miss the existence of horror movies. (Of course, maybe I missed it because of how few previews I see anymore, too,)

Anyway, the setup for the movie is as follows. There’s this ER psychiatrist who is asked to handle a newly intaken woman who has had a really bad few days since she watched one of her professors beat himself to death with a hammer. Over the course of their conversation, the patient claims to be entirely sane but hunted, and describes the nature of the hunt. Then she suffers a really spectacularly dramatic seizure, after which she stands up, smiles widely, and slits her own throat. Then, the movie’s title card appears.

The remainder of the film follows our psychiatrist as she gradually begins to break down, while the viewer is left to wonder whether anything is actually happening beyond her own deteriorating mental health. I mean, other things happen too. But mostly trauma, and trauma response, and a shameful lack of empathy from the majority of the characters. As a psychological horror movie, it really is outstanding, and all the moreso horrific as you come to the dawning realization that, yep, this is what would happen. Way more adversaries than helpers in the world, you know? Alas.

[1] In fact, there is a second horror movie named Smile that came out in 2022. I cannot do much about this, except never watch it I suppose, because how then would I differentiate?

Dragon Haven

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Longer ago than I’m happy about[1], I read the first Rain Wilds book, continuing Robin Hobb’s Elderlings Fantasy Universe. At the time, I thought it served mostly as a book-long prelude and character introduction for a forthcoming trilogy, plus maybe the first two chapters of the actual first book. On the one hand, I sort of stand by that. On the other, having read this book, I could easily consider it the concluding chapter of a duology instead.

At the beginning of the book, the dragon keepers[2] are on the move up an acidic river, learning to care for their dragons, hunt for them, and otherwise keep them alive and in good spirits and on the trail of fabled Kelsingra, where everything will finally be okay, both for the dragons and their keepers alike, not to mention for most of the other characters tagging along for the trip.

So I will say I definitely didn’t know particulars. Will all of the characters survive? Will they maintain their relationships and friendships? Will the dragons turn on them? Will the acid get stronger the further you go upriver, and eventually melt the flesh from everyone’s bones? Those answers would be spoilers. As, perhaps, is the certain conclusion that by the end of the book they will reach their destination[3]. But that one is on the author, not on me. After all, I didn’t write a second book in a four book series and name it Dragon Haven.

You know, though. It occurs to me, what with everything being tied up in a neat bow by the end of the book, and yet there are two books left? This is still Robin Hobb. I, uh, I have some real concerns for what might go wrong between where things stand now and wherever they will go next.

[1] This is an indictment of my speed more than of my alternative choices
[2] It is of note to me that the first book is named Dragon Keeper, singular. Are we talking solely about Thymara? She’s the only viewpoint character who is an official keeper of dragons, throughout that book. Or is it just that the other books are all going to be singular as well, so it had to match? (Or is Sintara a dragon, keeping her human? I guess that’s also possible.)
[3] Will it be the same destination they set out for, though?