You stupid, horrible bully.

Matilda (Live Musical) – 3.5/5

Matilda (Original Movie) – 3/5

Matilda (Netflix Version of Musical) — 2/5

Wow!! What a fun way to experience art!!! It's exciting to see so many versions of a thing, if only to see clearly the individual decisions that make that thing work and which then make another thing not work, though the things are fundamentally the same. Each actress that plays Matilda holds the world on their shoulder, turning it cutesy or heroic or a little bit sociopathic. And within all the various cover versions, you can see there is something great here. The cheapness of the original Matilda matches the chaos energy of the original Willy Wonka. The pure kinetic energy of the live musical's songs and humor and stage design along with thematic changes that push it towards something with meaning. And the uh I actually have nothing good to say about the Netflix version except it so thoroughly frustrated me that it could not see what it had in hand and so I spent a lot of time thinking about the movie and rewatching scenes and having this conversation with myself? Fuck it's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory sleek premium joyless garbage. I so desperately want to grab all three versions and mush them into something that more closely resembles the original Willy Wonka. Eliminate the teacher. Embrace the chaos of childhood and those little fucking sociopaths. Free itself from its source material to become something new; something better.