leebutler Uncategorized

Wicked: For Good (2025) – …Good

Released: 20th November
Seen: 3rd December

Last year, after an incredibly long development process, we finally got the film adaptation of the Broadway megahit Wicked and it was easily one of the best films of the year. It was a sensation, a top ten highest-grossing film for 2024, winner of two Oscars, nominated for a total of 10 which made it the second most-nominated film of the evening (tied with The Brutalist). It lived up to pretty much every expectation that people had for this adaptation and even surpassed a few of them. In the aftermath it turned Cynthia Erivo into a household name, reminded everyone that Ariana Grande is a genuinely fantastic actress outside of her pop career and is probably the final straw that got Jonathan Bailey the sexiest man alive title that he so richly deserved. It was, and will forever be considered, a masterpiece… and it was only presenting the first act of the musical. 

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leebutler Editorial

Oscar Predictions – 2025

Every year on this blog I talk about the Oscar nominees and the potential winners in each category. It’s the reason this blog exists and it’s a fun thing to do around this time of year, even when (thanks to a real-world job that takes a lot of my time) I’ve missed a few of the bigger films that got a bunch of nominations. I still can look at some of the bigger trends and have a guess about how the ceremony is going to go… it also doesn’t help that, as usual, some of these films are incredibly hard to find in Australia in a way that I can legally see them at a convenient time. So, here are my predictions for what will win, what should win and the wild card choice that might sneak in at the last minute.

Besides, if the members of the Academy can vote for movies to win the award without ever watching them, I can predict what they’re going to do without seeing everything.

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leebutler Editorial

Best Performances of 2024

Every year it’s remarkable how much a good performance can salvage a film. Your film can be a boring waste of time but a single great performance can make it worth watching. Every year film nerds love guessing who is going to be given the awards for Acting, those of us into horror are often left disappointed because our faves don’t win, but lists like this let us throw a tiny bit of praise out into the void and so that’s what we’re going to do here.

In normal years this list would be 20 entries long but this isn’t a normal year, I didn’t see my normal amount of films so this is only going to be 10 entries long but god damn are these some memorable entries. 1 entry per film, no honourable mentions this time, here we go.

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leebutler Editorial

The Best and Worst of 2024

2024 was something of a strange year for me personally when it came to this blog. Due to me actually getting a regular job there was a lot less time to see movies and write reviews (normally I’ve been seeing about 100+ films but this year the count is just a little over 40). Weirdly this is also the year this blog has had the most views which is a bit of a mixed bag. Hopefully next year I’ll be able to see a more normal number of films and provide a better set of end-of-year lists but this year I have to work with a much lower number. 

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leebutler Fantasy, Musical, Review, Romance

Wicked: Part One (2024) – Green With Envy

Released: 1st August
Seen: 24th November

On October 30th 2003, the Gershwin Theatre presented the opening night performance of a little musical about a woman with green skin battling adversity and learning her true power through friendship with a hyperactive floating Barbie… that show was Wicked and to this day that show has captured audiences around the world. As of writing this sentence, it’s the second highest-grossing Broadway musical of all time, the fourth longest-running show in Broadway history and has been toured around the world so many times that it would be impossible to calculate just how many people have seen the show. It is a genre-defining artwork, one that has been talked about being turned into a movie since approximately 47 seconds after a movie producer heard Idina Menzel sing Defying Gravity for the first time and knew that this show needed to be captured on film… it’s taken them 20 years, it’s not the cast that they expected to get and it’s split a 2-hour-long stage show into two movies of 2+ hours each, but it looks like they absolutely nailed it.

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