Oz: The Weak and Spineless

[Mal12345]

See Mike and Jay's review at - http://redlettermedia.com/half-in-the-bag-oz-the-great-and-powerful-and-return-to-oz/

One begins to wonder if movie-bashing is just another way of selling out to the mindless masses.

I have no firm view on this movie yet; and nobody is pretending that it is anything more than weak-plotted, eyeball-gouging entertainment. It is not The Wizard of Oz, but not disappointing either. The actors and actresses are paid the same whether they do a great job or a mediocre one, so they choose to do a mediocre job. The most recent Oz installment is obviously made for children, and thankfully or regretfully not as dark as many children movies of the recent past. When my youngest step-kid was 4 she could not handle The Wizard of Oz past the entrance of the wicked witch of the west. Children's movies of the past were somewhat like fairy tales of yore: they did not spare children the darker side of life but were used to frighten children into behaving. Today's sterilized, padded-wall society places children in a strait-jacket of psychological and physical comfort. And by this we are all weakened.

 

[Lark]

Children's movies of the past were somewhat like fairy tales of yore: they did not spare children the darker side of life but were used to frighten children into behaving. Today's sterilized, padded-wall society places children in a strait-jacket of psychological and physical comfort. And by this we are all weakened.

That is interesting and undoubtedly correct, I've read the stories of hans christian anderson and the brothers grimm, along with other sources and they can be pretty frightening. I remember Ray Bradbury giving interviews a long time ago saying that he read childrens stories of years ago to inspire his modern day science fiction theatre writing because people didnt remember them or that they had been revised and made safe but in their original format were teaching tales and scary with it.

I do think that bashing movies and comparing them to classics is an all to easy way to review, the audience is all important and they are all profit driven ventures, to a certain extent they always have been and a lot of art movies that seek to break that mold are either bleak or boring or fail some other way.

There's a hell of a lot of confusion now created by the clever revisionism of tales, I'm not in turn bashing Wicked here, which I wasnt able to find as interesting as the original source material but the breaking of many of the genre's typical content norms has not always made it easy to produce anything adaptable to a short entertainment film.

 

[sleuthiness]

"It is not The Wizard of Oz" isn't saying anything.

The emulsions on the cinema film are a little more clever, the publicity machine's a thousand times better, but the narrative format, the organization of material, development of characters is almost exactly the same as D.W. Griffith's during the turn of the 20th century.

Dead men pull strings that affect hundreds upon hundreds of millions on all levels, so calling out people who critique Transformers for a living nullifies any argument you might have. Instead, I suggest you show your future stepchildren how to slit a farm animal's throat.

Mal, also please discuss why I am here and how glad I am that I haven't heard anyone snorting coke in the downstairs restroom this month.

 

[Quinlan]

Children's movies of the past were somewhat like fairy tales of yore: they did not spare children the darker side of life but were used to frighten children into behaving.

Tell me about it, I still have nightmares about Dot and the Kangaroo (youtube it some time, bunyips, murderous aborigines, evil dingos, disturbingly blunt traumatic unresolved ending, it had it all).

80s kids movies were fucked up.

 

[Quinlan]

Had to look it up.

I mean FFS can't go to bed now...

 

[Mal12345]

"It is not The Wizard of Oz" isn't saying anything.

The emulsions on the cinema film are a little more clever, the publicity machine's a thousand times better, but the narrative format, the organization of material, development of characters is almost exactly the same as D.W. Griffith's during the turn of the 20th century.

Dead men pull strings that affect hundreds upon hundreds of millions on all levels, so calling out people who critique Transformers for a living nullifies any argument you might have. Instead, I suggest you show your future stepchildren how to slit a farm animal's throat.

Mal, also please discuss why I am here and how glad I am that I haven't heard anyone snorting coke in the downstairs restroom this month.

I liked the original Glinda's bubble, the new ones are just soap bubbles.



The original looks real, I can identify with the landscape and so it helps draw me into the story. The new Oz movie looks like a real person walking through a cartoon landscape, which is what it is. And any camera motion on the screen looked incredibly blurry, it made me want to squint.