Three Movies Recently Watched

During the last few weeks I did something I've rarely done in recent memory: watch three full-length currently-running feature-length movies.  They were, in order of viewing: Red One, Wicked and Carry-On.  Red One is a largely tongue-in-cheek comedy...with a mushy subplot...about Santa Claus being kidnapped and two unlikely allies, portrayed by Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, teaming up to solve the mystery and rescue good ol' St. Nick.  It's loaded with computer-generated imagery, as I'm afraid movies these days tend to be.  The action is in your face and abrupt...but that's also the case with the other two films I saw.  Wicked is a revisionist prequel to L. Frank Baum's classic Wizard of Oz...it tells the story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, and reframes her image as being a thoughtful, compelling young woman, as opposed to the shallow and narcissistic "Good Witch" Glinda.  That movie, based on the Broadway run adapted from Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel, hit me like a spoof of South Park's spoof of High School Musical: a little too heavy on the song-and-dance, thank you.  It's also just Part One, so another Wicked is on its merry way.  And the last movie I saw...all of them with Melissa and the middle one with Rebecca...was Carry-On, an edge-of-your-seat action flick about a TSA checker at the LA airport who is blackmailed at his post during the Christmas season to allow a sinister piece of luggage to pass through unchecked.  It was well-made and suspenseful, but I couldn't help but see its premise as a blatant ripoff of the 2002 thriller Phone Booth.  I managed to get through all three movies intact, but felt that each of them was guilty of sensory overload...I couldn't help feeling somehow manipulated, even with the cutesy Red One.  But I guess that's how movies are made today...