Oz, The Great and Powerful

Leather pants.  Leather pants are great.  I can't wear them myself, not without a shoe horn and about half a bottle of extra strength Gold Bond. Still, leather pants have done wonders for many others.  They gave Eddie Murphy a unique, sexy look for his Raw tour back in the 80s.  They gave stoned Venice Beach hotties one more reason to throw themselves at a young Jim Morrison as he crooned at the Whiskey A-Go-Go.  And, most recently, they kept yours truly from leaving the theatre as the rest of the audience oooed and ahhed at the crappy visuals and clunky storytelling of Oz, The Great and Powerful.  Thank you, Mila Kunis, and whatever cow gave their its hide for your wonderfully form-fitting pantaloons.

Oz, The Great and Powerful is a messy film.  It's the kind of movie where one can picture the money men and special interest groups sitting at a round table and planning it out.  "Hey, prequels are really in right now."  "Yeah, and people like that musical, Wicked."  "And Alice and Wonderland made a buttload of cash, even though it was a technicolor pile of shit."  "Hey, what about Wizard of Oz? People love that movie!"  These conversations ran through my head as the story went awry and the comedy fell flat.  Oz is the most recent addition to a genre of film I call “Bar-Code cinema.”  It feels more like product than artistic endeavor.  A similar conversation could have been had in regard to the new Mega-Stuff Oreos.  "Hey, people like Oreos." "Yeah, and they're really fat." "Let's put more cream in the middle!"  Hey, I'm not going to lie.  I buy about one package a week.  They are delicious.  Only 90 calories per cookie.

It's a shame that this product, and all the blame for its creation, will be laid in the lap of Sam Raimi.  From all accounts, Raimi is an enormous fan of the original film as well as the Baum series.  Raimi can be an amazing director, when he is in his element.  The Evil Dead series includes some of the most important horror films of the 80s and 90s and still influences the genre today.  Those films were are beautiful examples of artistic freedom.  The goo flies, the heads roll, the chainsaw.. . .  Well it does really awesome stuff.

In Oz, Raimi only rarely struts his stuff.  In one memorable sequence, Oz (played by the medicated James Franco) is whisked away to the magical land by a large tornado.  His hot air balloon is bombarded by debris and, in a nicely choreographed vignette,  he dodges some very sharp, very scary pieces of shrapnel.  That's the Raimi we all know and love. In another sequence, we see our heroes through the eyes of some very nasty monsters.  Raimi employs some wonderful fisheye lenses and filters to funny and frightening effect.  These scenes and the occasional whip pan, extreme zoom, and canted angle are his only visible auteurist touches.

Oz's star James Franco also feels very out of place.  Franco does best when he's cracking jokes and winking at the camera.  His performance in Pineapple Express is one of the greatest comedic performances in recent years.  He doesn't fare as well in dramatic roles. Sure, he was nice in Milk, but I always feel like he's getting ready to crack up and ruin the take.  He feels like a higher-paid Jimmy Fallon.  There are a few instances where I even noticed him breaking character and trying not to giggle.  This is charming in some instances, but it often pushed me out of the story.  I haven't seen an actor so out of place since Harvey Keitel donned a red fro wig and exclaimed with New York accent, "You're worse than them. You're a Jew killing Jews."  Man.

Raimi and Franco are not aided by the script, which feels much too modern for Oz.    The humor and timing feel very much 2013, when this is supposed to take place in 1905, before the 1939 Wizard of Oz.  This is a problem I have with many prequels.  The humor and action don't fit with the tone of the original films. The costumes and sets may look the same, but the vibe is completely off.  Before he travels to Oz, our protagonist splits his time between performing magic tricks and skeezing on women. It is a running joke that he's pretty much a sexual predator.  This type of humor may fit in a Jonah Hill film, but it feels oddly out of place here.  Add a sarcastic monkey voiced by Zach Braff and, ugh.

Finally, the film just feels cheap.  I saw it in IMAX 3D, which can sometimes add great dimension and depth to a film.  Here, the high definition image just served to highlight the lack of definition in the costumes and sets.  The costume department looks like they won a shopping spree at Jo Ann Fabrics and went to town with the felt and sequins.  My Mom made me a better Batman costume back in 1989, using the same materials.

The visual effects also feel uninspired.  They don't look bad, but they don't really inspire wonder.   One of the highlights of the film is when we see Oz use his prestidigitation and illusionist tricks to convince everyone that he truly is a great and powerful wizard. We see the man behind the curtain, using every one of the items in his bag of tricks.  It would seem appropriate, then, if Raimi dipped his hand into his old bag of tricks and used some old fashioned movie magic.  Make-up, trick photography, double exposure.  Instead Oz's illusionist show is just one more computer-generated image and, thus, inspires not much more wonder that the rest of this film.  I'm sorry, Sam, but please go back to horror and leave this kind of fare to Tim Burton, who's too far gone to save.