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Is ‘Wicked’ the Best Oz Adaptation Since ‘The Wizard of Oz’?
MGM’s 1939 masterpiece is just too good.
L. Frank Baum had been an actor, theater manager, frontier store owner, newspaperman, traveling salesman, and editor of a magazine about shop-window decorations before publishing a collection of stories based on Mother Goose rhymes at age 41 in 1897. Not only does the actor playing Jack Pumpkinhead wear an expressionless mask that resembles the plastic jack-o’-lantern buckets used by trick-or-treaters (and might actually be one), his dialogue is muffled and echoey, as if Mahon ran out of time to overdub it with a clearer recording or, more likely, never intended to in the first place. Bigger problems include Sidney Lumet’s failure to make the film feel cinematic even while shooting on location at several New York landmarks, and Joel Schumacher’s screenplay, which he filled with bits of wisdom borrowed from the est movement, the self-help seminars/endurance tests that became trendy in the ’70s.
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