it’s as if jon chu’s style were a sublimation of all rob marshall’s best instincts (who knew he had any) without any (eh, most) of the bad ones.

i don’t really care what people who learned what a film colourist was from a side-by-side twitter comparison of freaky friday and its sequel have to say abt lighting. most movies look like this now, grow up. it doesnt even look all that bad. also, i think its a good choice on chu’s part to make Oz as garish as possible. reinforces what he’s saying abt the smoke and mirrors of fascist kitsch vis-a-vis the reflection in the production design (floral decor everywhere) of galinda’s gaudy pinkness against elphaba’s deeper, natural green—pink feels like a corrupting and unnatural colour every time we see it, distracting and excessive.

also, genius for ariana to play galinda as a borderline sociopath. the friendship angle never really made sense to me in the stage musical and here their dynamic is far more fleshed out. galinda is only friends with elphie bc of her guilt and latent ambition. she is a really disturbing cypher, with a blank stare like ryan o’neal’s in barry lyndon, simultaneously hungry and ambivalent. she is definitely a good person in the sense that she does good things for other people, but all of it self-serving, and in every shot of her you can see the irrepressible narcissism and concomitant shame she constantly feels, not only for not being good enough but also at not really knowing how to be genuinely good. will aitken says of dirk bogarde in death in venice that he’s able to communicate a plethora of emotions in one stare, and the same is true of ariana. like bogarde as aschenbach, ariana renders galinda as utterly loathsome yet ultimately sympathetic—somebody who, on paper, doesnt commit anything sinful, but desperately wants to and remains passive enough to let random twists of fate bring her close enough to doing so. you’re not doing anything bad, but you might as well be. ariana portrays galinda as a gross but relatable mixture of complacency, shame, ambition, and niceness. when she cries sending elphie off into the skies, it’s not bc she’ll miss her, it’s bc she knows she is craven and a bad friend. nice people are the worst people ever.

the main thing that strains credulity in this movie is that bowen yang would ever be popular. i really hope he and ariana stop being friends. he and that other girl who played galinda’s cronies are terrible actors and their obviously improvised dialogue is as bad as any of the snl skits bowen writes. zero charm, zero laughs. insufferable.