Witney Seibold, Slash Film

In Chu's film, future Wicked Witch Elphaba is an illegitimate child born with green skin and "Carrie"-like telekinetic powers, powers which she uses when the local brats make fun of her color. Elphaba will eventually grow up to be a stalwart and not terribly interesting young woman played by Cynthia Erivo. Erivo is an excellent singer and can certainly belt out the show's bigger numbers with a Broadway baby's aplomb, but her performance otherwise is frustratingly subdued. It's as if she's afraid to show any actual wickedness, anger, joy, or any other emotion beyond intense frustration and mild concern.

The same might be said of Ariana Grande (credited in the film as Ariana Grande-Butera for reasons you can read here), who plays Galinda (the future Glinda). Elphaba meets Galinda at Shiz University, presented as a Hogwarts-like school for witches and warlocks (despite it just being the college for all of Oz) where Elphaba's little sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) has been accepted. Galinda is presented as a vapid, shallow valley-girl-type character, more concerned with fashion and popularity than skill or achievement. Grande, a professional pop star, can likewise hit the high notes, but rarely brings any kind of lifelike expressions to her Beverly-Hills-inflected performance.

Elphaba unwittingly performs a feat of telekinesis in front of Shiz University's headmistress, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), and the young witch is accepted on the spot, not even having applied. Elphaba and Galinda become roommates, and one might expect the two actresses to downshift into cattiness mode as they discover their mutual loathing for one another. Song lyrics assure the audience that loathing is indeed developing, but I see nothing of that on the lead actresses' faces or in their performances.

A lot happens before the main title appears, most importantly a recap of Elphaba’s birth. Attended to by her ursine nanny Dulcibear and a goat obstetrician, Elphaba’s entry into the world is greeted with shock. When her father, Governor Thropp (Andy Nyman), sees the baby’s pea green skin he shrieks, “Take it away!” In a clever moment right out of Carrie, Elphaba demonstrates her instinctual powers even as a newborn when surgical instruments go flying up to the ceiling.

Wicked’s greatest dramatic asset, even more so than Schwartz’s score, is Holzman’s brutally efficient book. In crafting the stage musical, which charts Elphaba’s rise from undergraduate outcast at Shiz University to the Most Wanted Witch in Oz, Holzman and Schwartz identified the exact amount of exposition, backstories, and comic asides that they needed to expand a fantasy world and communicate their characters, cutting every second of excess fluff. On stage, Elphaba finishes belting the roof-raising “The Wizard and I,” in which she dreams of becoming famous and being “de-greenified,” and then immediately steps a few feet stage left to launch into a rageful duet, “What Is This Feeling?,” with Glinda. There’s no transition, no perfunctory dialogue—the show just barrels shrewdly from essential moment to essential moment.

The film, conversely, takes its sweet time, adding longer scenes between every song, including lots of silly banter for Glinda’s reimagined entourage (Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James), even if there’s almost no changes to the plot. On screen, Wicked feels self-consciously elongated whenever it stretches beyond the musical’s exoskeleton, as if the idea of making a lengthy movie predated the plan for what to do with all the extra minutes. The scene in which Glinda reaches out to Elphaba by mirroring her awkward dance moves at a party can be a tearjerker on stage, but the slow-motion treatment here as the dance goes on and on drains it of emotional energy.

Wicked’s frequent patches of sluggishness are particularly frustrating because so much of the film—especially the songs—is glorious. As in In the Heights, Chu excels at timing shots to match the music precisely, treating Schwartz’s music with an invigorating reverence. When Glinda sings the line, “Of course, I’ll rise above it,” the melody leaps up on the word “rise” and the camera pans upward. Since Chu’s stylistic vigor is essentially playful, Wicked shimmers most distinctively in the comic set pieces, especially “What Is This Feeling?,” choreographed with giddily vicious energy. Much of the broader musical staging, like the ensemble’s dizzying leaps across a series of spinning clock faces in “Dancing Through Life,” is stunning.

Between Oz’s stark, bright colors, the sweeping shots of winged monkeys in flight, and soaring gestures toward the iconography of The Wizard of Oz, Alice Brooks’s cinematography can sometimes offer an exhilarating sensory overload. In the opening sequence, undergirded by newly percussive orchestrations, the camera captures an incandescent rainbow before flying over Dorothy and company making their way across the Yellow Brick Road. Wicked was, perhaps, the last great mega-musical, following in the footsteps of less nimble, more somber shows like Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera: Unlike those musicals’ lackluster stage-to-screen adaptations, the world rendered here actually feels huge and wild and full enough to encompass a reality worthy of the largesse suggested on stage.

For devotees looking to see Wicked explode on to the screen, then, Chu’s vision won’t disappoint. Neither will his commitment to ceding several minutes of the film to a series of Broadway cameos that go on for long enough that newcomers to the Wicked-verse may be completely lost. If the utterly campy sequence, which unsubtly pokes fun at a rumored behind-the-scenes feud from 2003, isn’t targeted at casual audiences, the filmmakers are, at least, unapologetic and self-aware in catering to the viewers primed to care the most.

Fortunately, neophyte audiences won’t require any extra knowledge to fully appreciate the freshness blooming from the central performances. Erivo blends her film experience and Broadway bona fides to offer an Elphaba that marries the smallest of gestures—a sweet, inward smile before she launches into her hopeful “The Wizard and I,” for example—with the stadium-sized bravado of her “Defying Gravity.” Though the screenplay’s additions flesh out her character superficially—Elphaba pedantically corrects Glinda’s grammar—Erivo offers a slightly snarky sweetness that makes the role feel unusually layered.

Erivo uniquely takes advantage of all the extra runtime to deepen her characterization, carefully exploring Elphaba’s self-loathing (she blames herself for her mother’s death and her sister’s disability) and the past hurt that fuels her burgeoning activist bent. And the presence of a Black actress in the role reinforces how much Wicked is a barely disguised allegory about skin color and the flammable potency of vilifying the Other for political gain. Erivo actually pushes back against the script’s emphasis on Elphaba’s Carrie-like powers that wreak havoc whenever her emotions get the better of her: She makes Elphaba’s overlooked wit and care and intelligence infinitely more interesting than her magical potential.

Aiding in this redefinition of the character, of course, is the actress’s voice. While Elphabas on Broadway have famously added flamboyant vocal riffs to “The Wizard and I” or “Defying Gravity,” they’ve been constrained by certain stylistic limitations about adapting the score. Erivo seems to have freer rein to shape the role around her own gifts. Especially in the tenderly wistful ballad “I’m Not That Girl,” she weaves liquid melismas into the melody, tendrils of Elphaba’s longing that will surely become a new gold standard for interpreting the song.

If Grande’s fluttery Glinda doesn’t equivalently redefine the role, it’s still an astutely funny, splendidly sung performance. Whenever Grande hits especially high soprano notes, Glinda’s on-screen posse breaks out into applause, perhaps a little meta wink at the naysayers who doubted whether Grande had the vocal chops to sing the role. She not only does, but she’s also refreshingly unafraid to make Glinda quite cruel at the start of the film. Most Wicked castings tend to tilt toward one protagonist or the other—it’s Elphaba’s story or it’s Glinda’s, depending on who’s in the roles—but the pairing here provides a lovely balance, with Holzman and Dana Fox’s extended script giving them both, at least, extra room to grow.

"It initially started as a conversation that Amazon initiated, and they said, 'Hey, would you have any interest in Carrie?'" Flanagan told MovieWeb in a recent interview. "And I had to think about it, because my first instinct is always — why? It's been done perfectly by De Palma, it's then been done three other times after the fact. Why do it again?" He explained: "Carrie White is a story about high school violence and bullying, and that feels immediate and important today, unfortunately, even more kind of sharply relevant than I think it was when he wrote it. So there felt like a chance for some true modernization beyond just changing the time period, and to use it to talk about the issues that affect high school kids in America today. You know," elaborated Flanagan, "Carrie White walking through a metal detector is interesting to me. Carrie White with social media. The iconic scene in the locker room is very different when people have phones in their hands. So that was the first germ of an idea, like, there is room for this to actually have a lot to say that's very relevant. And I can't spoil the changes that we made in order to kind of find a story that felt like it needed to be told. But we made some pretty substantial changes."

Flanagan continued: ""When I brought it to Stephen King — because that's the other side of this, if Steve says no, he doesn't want to see it happen, we're not going to do it; I'm not about to do that in that relationship. And so when I mentioned it to him and said, 'What do you think about Carrie for TV?' He said, 'Well, why? Leave her alone . She's good, she's done. I'd rather we focus on other things.' But when I sent him kind of the layout of how I saw it could work, he really liked it," added Flanagan. "And he came back and said, 'Actually, yes, I think this is interesting, and I think this could be really relevant and could be really exciting.' And so that was when I said yeah, we should do this. I can't talk more about it, other than we're in the writers' room. We're having a great time, and I think we're going to tell a story that will be surprising and impactful, very relevant to our modern society and to issues in our country."

"My oldest son is 14 years old," explained Flanagan on a more personal note, "and I look at him as I'm working on this story, and think it's important for his generation. I think there'll be something in there that I hope will be useful to them in this world. But yeah, I'm really glad we're doing it. I'm having a blast." Flanagan concluded: "But it was a surprise to me as well that it emerged as a priority. Because my initial reaction was, why do it? Which, in fairness, I had the same reaction when we first talked about adapting The Turn of the Screw for [The Haunting of] Bly Manor . It's been done dozens of times, that thing is just worn out. Why? Why approach it? And we found an approach that made it feel like, yes, absolutely, this is a story worth telling. So, yeah, I think it's going to be very, very interesting for people, and I think it'll be surprising."

Over a pivotal three-minute sequence in his studio, we follow the meticulous mechanics of Thomas’s process: he develops the photos in the darkroom and arranges them into a fragmented storyboard. The film’s image then shifts to the photographs themselves, constructing a slideshow narrative that begins with two lovers embracing, moves to the man noticing the camera, and ends with the woman standing beside a body. The possible murder is only revealed through a series of (eponymous) blow-ups, forcing both Thomas and the viewer to interpret the truth from increasingly grainy visual fragments.

As the slideshow rolls, Antonioni also inserts the ambient sound of trees and wind to the scene—sound that doesn’t belong in Thomas’s studio but rather seems diegetic to the photographic record itself. This auditory addition complicates the relationship between the “real” and its photographic representation, questioning the reliability of Thomas’ memory and instead suggesting an intrusion of his imagination.

Despite the fact that it is over fifty years old, I will not be spoiling the film, but will nevertheless note that this conception of the recorded and truth is echoed in its final scene. As Thomas watches a group of mimes play with an imaginary tennis ball, he begins following the arc of their movements and, eventually, hears the ball’s faint bounce for himself. In that sense, truth is for Antonioni less an objective fact than a consensual illusion—a lie upon which we all agree in order to make sense of an uncertain reality—with its photographic record perhaps as mutable as perception itself.

By the mid-70s, as new intelligence technologies emerged, themes of privacy and surveillance came into the focus of (particularly American) filmmakers. Alongside films like Klute and The Parallax View, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation shifts its focal apparatus from image to sound, questioning the capacity of clandestine audio recording in the search for truth. The protagonist, Harry Caul, is an expert surveillance technician, obsessed with uncovering the content of a recorded conversation yet troubled by his inability to fully understand the intentions behind what he hears.

The pivotal construction sequence is, in Coppola’s film, entirely auditory (though the audience can see flashes of the recorded scene itself). As Harry listens to fragments of the titular conversation between two people in a busy plaza—isolating words, phrases, and tonal shifts as he tweaks the audio—those occasional glimpses of the visual, presumably imagined, suggest that his record is incomplete. Harry’s surveillance, while technologically advanced, only reveals as much as his own paranoia-clouded interpretative lens permits.

This dynamic between recorded sound and its interpretation becomes central to the film’s meaning. The Conversation paints surveillance technology as both enabling and restricting: it uncovers details but inevitably imposes their observer’s anxieties and biases. While the challenge of recording in Blow-Up is centred in the ephemerality of life and consequent elusiveness of truth, the struggle of The Conversation is an internal one, rooted in the limitations of human perception (regardless of technological development).

With Blow Out, released in the wake of Watergate and the political disillusionment of the 1980s, Brian De Palma unites image and sound, referencing both Blow-Up and The Conversation (along with occasional nods to the infamous Zapruder film). His protagonist, Jack, is a sound technician who accidentally tapes a political assassination. In this film, the “construction” scene sees Jack synchronising his audio-tape with photographic footage, finally creating a coherent and indisputable record of truth.

The meaning of De Palma’s film, however, lies in its insistence that undeniable truth can nevertheless be denied. In the darkly ironic finale, Jack is symbolically silenced beneath a spectacle of fireworks and patriotic pomp, and as he listens to the scream of a victim he could not save—now a crucial sound effect in a cheap thriller he is working on—Blow Out closes with a devastating commentary on the American ethos, which prizes appearance over substance. The film’s bleak vision, illustrated by its protagonist’s impotence in the face of public deception, suggests that even the most carefully assembled record of truth is not enough to guarantee justice.

In the progression from Blow-Up through The Conversation to Blow Out, the depiction of respective recording technologies reflects changing attitudes toward truth. For Antonioni, truth is a mutable construct we collectively agree to accept; for Coppola, it is the imagined end-goal which drives paranoia, susceptible to individual misinterpretation; and for De Palma, truth is rendered futile in the face of a political apparatus that manipulates reality for its own ends. The three films join together to reveal how technology, rather than bringing us closer to an objective reality, shapes our understanding and acceptance of truth—a truth that ultimately remains as elusive as the devices used to record it.

In the full 18-minute discussion, centered around Kenny's book, The World is Yours: The Story of ‘Scarface’, Mitchell tells Kenny that he appreciates the way that the people involved in the making of Scarface really seemed to open up to him in a new way, because Kenny approached them as artists, asking them to discuss their connection to the art of the film. Kenny discusses how it took a long time to get Michelle Pfeiffer to agree to be interviewed for the book, and how her perspective on things really surprised him. Mitchell also notes how Kenny writes about the physicality of Pacino's performances as Tony Montana and Carlito Brigante, etc., and how Kenny makes the case for De Palma as an actor's director. Listen to the conversation in full by clicking the image above.