Don’t fight the arrival of Wicked and Gladiator II. Accept them, allow them both to wash over you and leave no trace.
When I saw Wicked, at the end of the well-attended matinee screening, an enthusiastic little boy who was there with a big family group yelled out, “Everybody clap!” and the whole audience burst into applause.
I didn’t like the movie, but I liked the boy. So on his behalf, I say bless you all, may you and your little movie-going community enjoy Wicked and clap at the end. May you even carry on and watch Gladiator II in a day-killing double feature, thereby getting a kick out of the phenomenon known as “Glicked,” a seemingly desperate marketing ploy to gin up another hugely profitable “Barbenheimer” experience that united two dissimilar big-budget releases last year: Barbie and Oppenheimer.
It’s been a very hard year, 2024, and we all need a break. It’s been a particularly ghastly year for American movies. I hadn’t realized quite how bad it’s been until I saw Anora last week and felt the tears come to my eyes because it’s such a good movie — and that means the once-thriving American cinema isn’t quite done yet.
In my view, Wicked and Gladiator II aren’t good movies. They’re both big and frenetic and silly and noisy, however, and we’re such a depleted country, we’ll take that as a substitute for good and feel grateful doing it.
And both films even have a vaguely topical quality, with plots about autocratic rulers failing the citizenry. When Elphaba in Wicked intones, “Something bad is happening in Oz,” we know exactly how she feels.
But both movies also foster that familiar, tired feeling we get at the multiplex these days, which might be called sequel sickness or remake fatigue. Wicked and Gladiator II are retreads, made of material so familiar it seems redundant to summarize them. Wicked the movie is the end point in a…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
