A year on, it feels legitimate to consider Jon M. Chu’s Wicked: Part One a barnstorming success. Not content with defying gravity at the box office, the film proved popular through the awards season and spawned the cultural moment that was Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande’s space-held press tour. Part two, subtitled For Good, dances through on a slightly tougher sell. It’s the stage musical’s less beloved second half, complete with notoriously weaker songs and haphazard attempt to crowbar the original Baum circle into Macguire’s square.
Was it the story that drew punters en masse to last year’s It Ends With Us or that story? Justin Baldoni’s emotional excoriation of abuse on screen or Blake Lively’s allegations of the same off it. One suspects the latter, Either way, the serviceable Colleen Hoover adaptation proved so barnstorming a success that more could not help but follow. What it is to have a sizeable back catalogue. Stephen King for a BookTok fandom. Regretting You lands first out of the blocks, from The Fault in Our Stars’ Josh Boone. Lacking the gravitational pull of star feuds, Regretting You must earn its chips entirely on merit. A pity, then, that it is little more than a tepid soap opera unto which soup is ladled from a shallow emotional pool into chasms of implausibility.
Phil Johnston’s new take on The Twits – the first in a slate of animations from the now Netflix owned Roald Dahl Story Company – is revolting. Seriously so. If only that were a compliment. It should be. Dahl’s original was, after all, supremely revolving. In the very best way. Wormy spaghetti, gristly beards, warts and frogs, all packed into a brisk ninety-five pages. Perhaps, revolving is, then, the wrong word. Unwatchable. That’ll cut it.
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