Skip to main content

Mr. Brown Verses Oz the Great and Powerful


 I had high hopes for Sam Raimi's prequel to the beloved 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz. After the letdown that was Raimi's last outing with a block buster-type budget with Spider-Man 3 in 2007, I was hoping this update on the fabled land of Oz before Judy Garland followed the yellow brick road would be a return to form for the mufti-talented genre director. What the audience got was a slightly-better version of Tim Burton's fiasco Alice in Wonderland, minus the shitty 3D conversion rush job. That's not to say Oz the Great and Powerful was a carbon copy of that poorly-executed madhouse. The tile sequence and the opening 10 minutes, shot completely in black and white, is a terrific use of the 3D format and pays a nice tribute to how the '39 film opened, before the filmmakers break new ground and shoot the majority of the film in Technicolor. On a technical level, Raimi delivers a visual knockout: the size, scope, colors, look and feel of the film is tailor made to get the audience lost in the world of Oz. Raimi's use of 3D is also some of the best use of the format i've seen. And the last 30 minutes, where James Franco's Oscar Diggs uses his trade as an illusionist to take back the Emerald City from a manipulative wicked witch, is the closest the movie gets to capturing the fun and the wonder of the original movie. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie never fully lives up to the original, and that can be blamed on Raimi making the same fatal mistake Burton made in 2010 with his retelling of Alice in Wonderland: strong visuals and first-rate production value can't hide an underdeveloped story or strong characters. James Franco as the Man Behind the Curtain, the great and powerful Oz, tries to be a likeable scoundrel as he attempts to find it in himself to be a great man, but he comes off as a straight-up jerk, and it became difficult for me to buy his transformation at film's end because how how Franco portrays him. The rest of the cast - Rachel Weitz as Evanora; Mila Kunis as Theodora; Michelle Williams as Glinda the Good Witch; Zack Braff as Frank the flying monkey - fail to leave an impression the audience the same way the original cast did, and there's no real stamp the actors leave on these beloved characters and their world.  Oz the Great and Powerful is a honest and admirable re-telling of a land somewhere over the rainbow, but beyond the rainbow, it reminds you that you should probably stick with the classic. 

** stars out of ****
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What We Talk About When We Talk About Great Movies: The 10 Best Films of 2014 - Part II

And here's (finally) part two of my list of the best from last year, along with the full list at the bottom. 5. The Wind Rises  - The worst thing I can honestly say about this gorgeous animated feature is that, at 126 minutes, it wasn't long enough. I could get lost in Hayao Miyazaki's final effort for hours and not get bored. The writer-director-animator is a master of whisking us away to new worlds of his own creation, but how fitting that his last masterwork is where we're rooted into the past as Miyazaki tells the story of real-life Jiro Horikoshi as he lives out his dreams of building airplanes, despite them being used for the Imperial Army back in World War II. Every last frame of this film - from Jiro's dreams with fellow designer Giovanni Caproni and his brief romance with Nahoko, to showing the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1932 and his journey to Nazi Germany several years later - is painstakingly beautiful and artfully crafted to within an inch of his...
1 comment
Read more

Spare Me

Sometimes you find something so incredibly stupid and so utterly irresponsible on social media that you have to address it. Last weekend was the Peoples' Summit in Chicago, where a coalition of Sanders supporters and left-wing activists flocked to a three-day event to discuss about where the movement, which started back in 2016 behind then-candidate Bernie Sanders, would and should go in the Trump era, including whether the Democratic Party can be (or should be) saved, or if the time has come to abandon the party and start a new People's party instead. Enter The Young Turks correspondent Nomiki Konst and her thoughts on why the Democratic establishment should accept and embrace independents who don't lean either with the R's or D's in primary battles. "No open primaries for Democratic Party equals voter suppression and racism with young independent voters" @NomikiKonst #PPLSummit — Holly Mosher (@FilmsForChange) June 10, 2017 *Rolls eyes H...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mr. Brown Verses Bland, Weepy Teen Melodrama

Todd in the Shadows once said that he defined the worst hit song of the calendar year as a song being the absence of good. At the time, I didn't really understood what he meant when he chose "Tonight Tonight", by Hot Chelle Rae in 2011 and "Roar", by Katy Perry in 2013. Last night, I finally understood what he meant. Because, I, too, have seen a movie that's the absence of good. Todd meant that a song could make you angry, the beat could drive you insane, the lyrics could be insulting and simply lazy, but, in his eyes, those two aforementioned songs had nothing  going for them. Nothing lyrically, nothing catchy, nothing offensive, nothing that could make you feel insulted, angry or simply seeing red, because there's literally nothing  about it that can make you feel anything. That movie belongs to Bland, Weepy Teen Melodrama , the  latest attempt to suck money out of teen girls ....I mean, young adult novel by Second Rate Nicholas Sparks that became ...
Post a Comment
Read more