Quietly Watching

  Camp Rock 3 opens on a problem most bands would kill for. Connect 3, the Jonas Brothers back in character as Shane, Nate, and Jason Gray, are about to launch a reunion tour, and they have no one to open for them. So they do the only sensible thing three pop stars would do: they drive back to the summer camp where they got their start and hold auditions. It is a silly premise, and the movie knows it. What surprised me is how honest that silliness turns out to be. If you grew up on the 2008 original, that honesty is the whole appeal. This is a movie about a famous band coming back not to take the stage again, but to find whoever gets it next. Once you notice that, it is hard to watch it as anything else. It helps to remember how big the first one was. Camp Rock premiered in 2008 as a Disney Channel event, in the same summer the Jonas Brothers were about the biggest act on the channel, and it turned a teenage Demi Lovato into a star. For a certain age group, "This Is Me" is mu...

  Wicked: For Good arrived on Netflix this week, and it comes with a strange scorecard. Audiences adore it, giving it a 97 percent rating that runs even higher than the first film. Critics were noticeably cooler, landing it at 71 percent after the near-universal praise that greeted part one. That is a wide gap for the same franchise, the same cast, the same director, released a year apart. The easy read is that the sequel simply is not as good. I think the truer read is that nobody split the story down the middle of its quality. They split it down the middle of its structure, and part two got the harder half. The Musical Was Always Front-Loaded Anyone who has seen the stage show knows this instinctively. The first act of Wicked is the one people leave humming. "Popular" is there. "Defying Gravity" is there, the number that sends audiences into intermission levitating. The second act has always been the trickier stretch, the part where the plot has to connect all the...