"Wicked For Good"
We took ourselves out to the local cineplex two weeks ago to see the long awaited, much hyped conclusion to the film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical "Wicked". I will state right off the bat that I liked the movie and will give it a high rating. It is beautiful and colorful to look at, and the performances of the leads, Ariana Gande and Cynthia Erivo, are both terrific.
Oh, and Jeff Goldblum plays the Wizard. I love Goldblum, but he has reached the point in his career where he pretty much plays "Jeff Goldblum" in every movie, TV show, commercial, or talk show guest appearance that he makes, and he'll never top his performance as Michael in "The Big Chill".
To watch this one has two prerequisites. One, you had to see "Wicked Part One" when it came out last year, or stream it before you go see this one. It is not a stand alone movie. Two, you have to have seen, or at least know all about the 1939 classic movie, "The Wizard of Oz". How "Wicked For Good" ties together the tale of Dorothy Gale from Kansas is a great part of the story of "Wicked".
So "Wicked For Good" gets Three Stars from The Grandstander, but....
There's always a "but", isn't there?
From the time the "Wicked Part One" was released last year, one question nagged at me: Why take a musical play that lasts for about two-and-a-half hours and make a movie version that lasts over five hours, and then tell us that the movie will be in two parts that will be released a year apart from each other? The fact that that audiences were only made aware of this fact about a week before the release of Part One in 2024 makes the burr under the saddle particularly irritating. Or maybe it's just me, and no one else cares about something that just screams that "this is a shameless money grab".
Yet, here I was, at the theater box office two Novembers in a row getting sucked right into the whole deal:
"The Only One Left" by Riley Sager
In 1983, Kit McDeere, age 31 and a registered caregiver, takes a position at an isolated cliffside mansion in Maine called Hope's End. She will be in charge of seeing to the needs of Lenora Hope, a mute and paralyzed 71 year old woman who has been confined in this gloomy mansion for 54 years and has not been seen in public since 1929. It was at that time, just a month before the great Stock Market Cash, that Lenora' parents and sister, Virginia, were brutally murdered. Lenora was the chief suspect, "the only one left", but evidence was insufficient to ever bring her to trial, and she has been seen as "the killer" in the court of public opinion, and a Lizzie Borden-type legend has sprung up about her in the past fifty-four years among the local residents of the area. The fact that she is confined to a gothic mansion only adds to her notorious legend.
Kit, who has some sketchy baggage of her own to lug around, enters a gloomy home that consists of Mrs. Baker, a stern woman who runs the household, Jessie, a young girl who serves as the cleaning woman of the house, Archie, the cook who has been at Hope's End since the before the murders took place, Carter, the hunk of a groundkeeper, and, of course, Lenora, who can only communicate by answering yes-and-no questions by tapping her left hand. However, Kit discovers that Lenora CAN communicate if she, Kit, places Lenora's left hand on the keyboard of an ancient typewriter, and she soon discovers that Lenora DOES want to tell her story. Thus begins an odd and somewhat symbiotic relationship between Kit and Lenora. Along the way, another murder takes place and soon the whole story unravels
I really liked this book. I could sit down and and start reading and gobble up fifty, seventy-five, or a hundred pages at a time in a seeming blink of an eye. I never saw the "twist" in the story that Sager springs upon us, and when putting any thought into it, it really is kind of implausible, but I guess this is why they call it "fiction", and he did give us a very satisfying coda to the book that takes place thirty years after the events in the story take place.
I give it Three Grandstander Stars, and I will be checking out some of Sager's other novels for my future reading pleasure.
