One year later and we're back in Oz this weekend. If you grew tired of waiting, there are more options: a Brendan Fraser-led dramedy, a stirring Marathi-language love story and a documentary about a documentary.
Wicked: For Good
In theaters Friday
The yellow brick road is under construction as we rejoin our favorite green and pink Ozian witches. Elphaba, exiled after defying both gravity and the fraud who calls himself a Wizard, is creating as much havoc as she can with just a broom. Glinda, meanwhile, is spreading Wizardly propaganda and "obsessulating" over the motorized pink bubble she's been given to make her appear magical. They both have issues with the blowhard Wizard, who is pushing fake news, and is also, let's say, dictatorious, or maybe, fascistified. Things are darker in Oz this time. If you've somehow missed the backstory to this backstory, Wicked — first a novel, then a Broadway musical — was conceived as a prequel for adults to the events depicted in The Wizard of Oz.
It was nothing if not complicated, both morally and plot-wise — origin stories for the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow were mostly brushed in after the central witch frenemies were well established. But that meant filmmaker Jon M. Chu had a problem when the Broadway hit became two movies. The story's early part about growing up has songs that are popular, gravity-defying. The later part, though, is about wising up — about consequences, the politics of oppression. It kinda doesn't sing. So for this movie, Stephen Schwartz wrote a new tune for Ariana Grande about Glinda's life in a bubble — and for Cynthia Erivo's Elphaba, he penned a musical nod to the original Wizard of Oz called "No Place Like Home."
And they're fine — fabulously sung, even if they seem just as aimed at original-song Oscar nominations as at filling plot holes. They just can't make this prequel-sequel feel any less dutiful or by the numbers — rehashing bits of the 1939 movie classic, shoehorning in animals who no longer talk, when all you really want is that song that gives Wicked: For Good its title.
After way too long, the song arrives — powerhouse voices singing about friendship and doing good when good is hard. And for fans, that might make the long, five-hour, two-movie trek feel worth it. Not for me. I was hoping for at least entrancillating.
Rental Family
In theaters Friday
In director Hikari's sentimental dramedy, Brendan Fraser plays Phillip, an American actor in Tokyo who lands an unusual gig with a Japanese "rental family" agency — playing stand-in roles in the lives of strangers. His disorienting first assignment is "sad white guy" at a funeral, where he's startled to see the "corpse" sit up in his coffin to watch himself being mourned. Phillip's better prepared when he's hired to play the groom in a sham marriage that will free a young woman from her restrictive family. After initial trepidation, he celebrates the success of the ruse by spending the night with a sex worker (presumably for the benefit of audience members unaware that transactional relationships are time-honored).
In longer-term engagements — playing an inquisitive journalist so a movie star with dementia will feel he's still remembered, and playing dad to a vulnerable 11-year-old girl — he gets emotionally involved with the folks he's deceiving, and they with him. Phillip's eyes well with tears as the manipulative nature of his relationships become problematic, but the filmmaker isn't nearly as interested in exploring the ramifications as he is in manipulating us.
Cactus Pears (Sabar Bonda)
In limited theaters starting Friday
Anand is a 30-something gay city dweller who's been caring for his dying father in Delhi, and who dreads traveling with his mother to their ancestral home in the countryside for ten days of ritual mourning. But once there, Anand reconnects with a childhood friend, also gay, and the two bond over their shared difficulties with families who want to know why they've not taken brides and settled down. Loosely based on filmmaker Rohan Parashuram Kanawade's own experience when his father died, the Marathi-language film offers a laconic but decently stirring portrait of men who struggle with lower-caste social restraints and familial obligations, and who ultimately find solace in each other.
Zodiac Killer Project
In limited theaters starting Friday
With financing and contract negotiations underway, Charlie Shackleton was already scouting locations and storyboarding a documentary when he learned he was being denied the rights to retired California patrolman Lyndon Lafferty's book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up. Having gone that far, he couldn't bear to let it go, so he made a film about the film he would have made, and ends up sending up the whole true crime documentary genre in the process. Wry, precise, earnest, bemused, the filmmaker is forthright about the evocative but manipulative clichés he's employing — cigarette butt-filled ashtrays, reenactments filmed in soft focus from behind, the swinging interrogation light ("why is it always swinging"). He also points out the shortcuts he's taking ("this is actually a library, not a police station"). The resulting film is amusing, pointed, and gets to the very heart of what makes these documentaries so compelling.
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