Oz the Kind of OK

I had a black and white TV as a kid.  My first memory of actually watching something on television was my brother and sister and I gathered around the tiny screen watching Superman with Christopher Reeve.  My second television memory is of watching The Wizard of Oz.  You know that awesome moment when Dorothy leaves Kansas and suddenly everything is in technicolor?  I didn’t even know the movie had color at all until I was twelve or thirteen.

I remember liking the movie and then moving on.  The same was NOT the case when I saw Return to Oz some time later.  That movie still fucking haunts me – the huge Wheelers and the Deadly Desert that turned people to sand, the head changing witch, and the evil Nome King.  You know, the movie that opens with Dorothy being sent to receive ELECTROSHOCK THERAPY, and finished with the “evil doctor” dying in a fire.  Literally.  The movie also starred the awesome Fairuza Balk before she grew up and gave me many confused feelings by dressing as a sexy cat in the Island of Doctor Moreau.

Return to Oz left a very lasting impression upon me.  To this day I enjoy bright fantasy with a twist of deep darkness.  I love the idea of the fallen kingdom, the shattered dynasty, and the deep things that live under the earth.  The Deadly Desert has played a role in many rpgs that I’ve run, as has the base concept of Mombi the Witch.  But these movies came out years and years ago, so why am I talking about them now?

Well, this weekend I went to see Oz the Great and Powerful.  After walking out, I thought to myself, “That was extremely . . . a movie.”  Coming from as powerful a franchise as the Oz books and movies, thinking that the movie was pretty humdrum was disappointing to me.  I’ve really been looking forward to this film since I saw the first preview.

The thing is, the film did a lot of things RIGHT.  The effects were beautiful.  The black and white to color transition was excellently reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz.  The transformation of the Wicked Witch of the West was awesome, and their treatment of her after the transformation was quite well done. I feel like I SHOULD have liked the movie much more than I did.  So why was I left just feeling kind of blah about it?

1.  James Franco.  Man, I love James Franco.  He was awesome in Freaks and Geeks.  But he is terribad as Oz.  The way Oz is written in the film is as a nearly heartless dick always looking out for his own interest, with the exception of his involvement with the woman he cares about.  Franco just can’t pull off that kind of douchery.  He tends to look more high than mean.

2.  Hanging on to the original Wizard of Oz style.  This in and of itself didn’t need to be a bad thing.  However, along with the feel of the original movie, they held onto the stilted dialogue and delivery of films of that era, which just doesn’t ring true to audiences anymore.

3.  Knuck.  Man, I really don’t like this actor, or at least the roles written for him.  The character of Knuck seems straight out of a Wayans brothers movie, and is completely out of sync with the rest of the film, which is a shame since he’s one of two actors of color in the whole shebang.  Tony Cox seems to have some genuine talent as an actor, so I really hope he’s able to break the terrible typecasting with which he’s been cursed.

4.  Complete ignorance of the social commentary and works surrounding Oz.  The Oz books and first film were pretty landmark pieces of fiction for featuring a girl as the main (and capable) protagonist.  Dorothy solved problems by being bold and building bridges between people and groups.  In the original Wizard of Oz she discovered that the main male source of power in the world was just a flim-flam man behind a curtain, and went out and stopped the Wicked Witch anyway.  The book and musical Wicked delves into this concept even more intimately, reworking the world of Oz into an explicitly feminist tale.  Oz the Great and Powerful completely disregards all of these themes.  The three women in positions of power that we see are either evil, naive but waiting for an excuse to be evil, or incapable of using their tremendous power to effectively save their people.  The movie seems to say that any man, even a dickwad con-man like Oz, is more capable of saving the world or ruling over its people than a woman.  I don’t think that’s what the filmmakers intended, but they sure as hell didn’t bother to actually find out a damn thing about the spirit of equality and feminism that Oz has picked up culturally.

5.  No spark.  I’m not sure how else to define this.  There just wasn’t any real passion to the movie.  It didn’t grab me, it didn’t enchant me.  I just kind of sat there and thought “That looks pretty.”  If you can think that something looks pretty instead of just existing in a space where you FEEL that something is pretty without needing to think about it, the art and kung fu are weak.

 I really really wish this movie had been better.  It had a lot of the right pieces in the right spots, but in the end, it just didn’t have the magic.