Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

For whatever reason (perhaps deservedly so), 1939’s The Wizard of Oz has attained a kind of untouchable status, casting a large shadow over any project attempting to approach any adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s work.  But after Disney made a pretty penny revisiting Alice in Wonderland with Tim Burton, now they’ve let Sam Raimi take a crack with Oz the Great and Powerful.

And it’s better than I was expecting.

James Franco stars as the eponymous Oscar Diggs, a selfish traveling magician who is transported from Kansas to the magical land of Oz by way of – what else? – a tornado.  Once his hot-air balloon lands, Oscar (known as “Oz”) meets a trio of witches – Theodora (Mila Kunis), Evanora (Rachel Weisz), and Glinda (Michelle Williams) – who contend that he is the subject of a prophecy concerning the fate of Oz.  Trouble is, Oscar’s no wizard, even if his flying monkey and china doll companions believe he is...

It may be that I just had low expectations for a prequel to the aforementioned Wizard, but I found myself rather enchanted by Oz the Great and Powerful.  Raimi goes a long way to redeeming himself for Spider-Man 3 (redemption he had begun with 2009’s Drag Me to Hell), and the movie is clearly the creation of someone enamored with the art of filmmaking itself.  Of course, I’m a bit of a sucker for this kind of meta-film, but it’s particularly clever when, for example, we learn that behind the curtain lies a movie camera.

After learning that Robert Downey Jr. was under consideration for the role of Oscar, I was disappointed that it came down to James Franco, but Franco actually does a pretty good job with Oscar, capturing the bogus charisma and accompanying self-doubt that the character inhabits.  I can’t tell if Franco’s clueless perma-smile is the result of good casting or good acting, but it works in the context of the film.  He’s also an effective gateway character, his obliviousness helping us get acclimated to Oz and any dramatic ironies therein.

The witches are perhaps better cast, more interesting because of how recognizable they are from the 1939 movie.  I can’t tell if we’re meant to recognize Theodora and Evanora on sight (so it might be spoiling to say what each one does), but Kunis and Weisz are quite good as two very different kinds of witches.  But I say it’s Williams who steals the show as Glinda, adhering closely to Billie Burke’s iconic performance while adding some of the good-girl-snark that’s become popular these days (see also Peppy in The Artist). 

Younger fans will likely adore Finley the flying monkey (Zach Braff) and the China Doll (Joey King), but for me the standout feature of the film is the way that it pays tribute to some of the 1939 film’s formal attributes without retreading them.  For instance, in a shot that I wish wasn’t spoiled by the trailers, Oscar’s arrival in Oz is marked by a transition from 4:3 fullscreen to 2.35:1 widescreen.  It’s a great way to recapture the magic of 1939’s shift from sepia-tone to color for an audience already ultra-accustomed to that kind of twist (but don’t worry, you still bet a color change, too).  The film also plays up the dual-casting from the 1939 film, with Williams, Braff, and King making appearances in Kansas and Oz; it perpetuates the surreal quality of Oz while also inviting interpretation as to the reality of what’s going on.

It’s to Raimi’s credit that these formal nods never feel like obligatory deferential references.  Instead, they pay homage to the long legacy of Baum’s work while reinventing and/or reintroducing the Land of Oz to a new audience.  All told, Oz the Great and Powerful is quite good.

Oz the Great and Powerful is rated PG “for sequences of action and scary images, and brief mild language.”  This movie is quite tame, appropriate for most audiences; the flying baboons are a bit ooky, and maybe the Wicked Witch might creep some out when she appears, but all in all this is a pretty wholesome flick.

Monday at the Movies - December 10, 2012

Welcome to Week Forty-Four of “Monday at the Movies.”  This week, we’ll take a look at a few films that grapple with mental illness – perfect timing for those of us enduring the slings and arrows of finals week.

American Psycho (2000) – Either this movie is more fun than it ought to be, or there’s something seriously wrong with me.  Before he was Batman, Christian Bale was Patrick Bateman, yuppie investment banker by day and vicious serial killer by night.  Mary Harron’s infinitesimally gentler adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s downright brutal novel is, simply put, a hoot.  Bateman is insane, no question, and his deeds are despicable, but Bale’s trademark fascinating immersion in the role is riotous to watch, vacillating wildly between pent-up emotionlessness and manic indulgence in his homicidal tendencies.  And as a social satire of 1980s New York, American Psycho is positively brilliant, exposing the excesses and pettiness of such a superficial society without moralizing.  Instead of preaching, the film makes its satire entertaining by encouraging us to laugh at it; the deadpan seriousness with which Bateman examines a business card belies both his internalized rage and the ludicrous attention given to such minutiae.  The standout feature of this film is its ambiguity, which enchants rather than maddens the viewer; a mesmerizing interrogation scene with Willem Dafoe forces the viewer to question who knows what, an uncertainty played to the hilt by Dafoe in three different takes.  By the end, the film pays off on its repetition of the trope of mistaken identity, asking us whether any of these people really “exist” in a tangible form.  What’s not uncertain is how much fun the film manages to be, with an engrossing and star-making performance from its lead, who charms even as he twists the knife.

Black Swan (2010) – Black Swan is in many ways the dark side of American Psycho’s white swan.  Darren Aronofsky’s balance of ballet and mental illness explores in very disturbing and unflinching ways the consequences of the quest for perfection.  Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her role as Nina Sayers, a ballerina whose starring role in Swan Lake is slowly driving her insane; she suspects her understudy Lily (Mila Kunis) of sabotaging her work, though recurrent hallucinations make it difficult for her to discern reality from delusion.  Barbara Hershey has an underappreciated role as Nina’s controlling mother, a former ballerina and perhaps the source of her daughter’s difficulties.  Where American Psycho treated its protagonist’s insanity as exuberantly entertaining, Nina’s descent into madness is distressing and almost uncomfortable to watch; the fast-and-loose representation of reality unsettles the viewer as mirrors misbehave and strangers bear Nina’s face for fleeting frames.  Portman’s Academy Award was well-deserved, as she embodies well Nina’s fears and anxieties by giving the character a full sense of life such that we know her even before we see her dance.  Yet, even though the film is unsettling and uncomfortable, there is something poetically beautiful about it, an aesthetic exquisiteness created by the combination of Aronofsky’s deliberately arranged shots and Clint Mansell’s reworking of Tchaikovsky’s music.  There’s certainly a comparison to be made here with Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, which deals with similar themes, but Black Swan is more metaphorical and more beautiful, one of 2010’s best films, to be sure.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  With the release of The Dark Knight Rises on DVD, look for an Armchair Review sometime in the near future!

Monday at the Movies - July 30, 2012

Welcome to Week Twenty-Eight of “Monday at the Movies.”  A few romantic comedies on tap this week, plus a film so disturbing I feel uncomfortable saying I enjoyed it.

A Clockwork Orange (1971) – A long, long time ago, I directed readers to an essay by David Bordwell in which he draws the distinction between an excellent film and a film that is to one’s liking.  I invoke Bordwell here because I think he might be the key to my take on Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange; it’s a great film, certainly, excellent by technical standards and one of Kubrick’s more accomplished films, but it’s entirely different to “like” on a purely evaluative level.  For one, its protagonist Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell in the epitome of a career-making performance) is a brutal sadist who spends his evenings raping and engaging in “ultra-violence.”  Perhaps worse, Kubrick’s filmmaking attempts to get us to sympathize with – and even like – Alex, a disconcerting premise once you realize what’s afoot.  I’m probably in the minority on this one, but I usually find Kubrick a bit... boring; Dr. Strangelove is, I admit, genius, but I’ve never been able to watch 2001 or The Shining in one sitting because they seem plodding and aimless – which may be the point, perhaps, but they’re just not “to my liking.”  (The first hour of Full Metal Jacket, though, is brilliant.)  But here Kubrick displays his ability to keep a scene moving even if the camera is stationary, and though much of the film is repulsive on a moral level, it’s transfixing on an aesthetic one, helped in no small part by the quirky yet unspeakably evil performance McDowell turns in.

Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) – I’m on record as not being the world’s biggest Steve Carell fan, and Crazy, Stupid, Love does very little to swing me in the other direction.  Which is not to say that the film isn’t enjoyable – halfway far from it.  I say halfway because there are really two movies going on in Crazy, Stupid, Love (one, it seems for each unnecessary comma in the title):  in one, divorcee Steve Carell tries life without his wife Julianne Moore, while in the other his womanizing wingman Ryan Gosling reforms his ways after meeting girl-of-his-dreams Emma Stone.  As is usually the case with these kinds of films, it’s the latter plot, the supporting one, that succeeds far more than the former.  The problem, perhaps, is that Carell is too real as a man who’s had his heart ripped out; just when the supposed comedy is getting to the funny bits, Carell mopes into frame with his sad-sack character to remind us just how miserable he is.  It’s a shame, because Gosling and Stone are so talented and so charismatic together that one wishes for a movie revolving solely around them.  As a consequence of being so schizophrenic, the film’s message is a mixed one – is love possible or not?  Or is it merely difficult but worthwhile?  If the latter, tell me something I don’t know.  Aside from the Gosling/Stone scenes, I will credit the film with a rather clever third act twist, something I didn’t know to see coming.

Friends with Benefits (2011) – Remember that time that the two leads from Black Swan starred in separate movies about casual sex?  I certainly do, but after seeing Natalie Portman in No Strings Attached (with an uninspiring Ashton Kutcher as her co-lead) I wasn’t exactly ready to join Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake in Friends with Benefits.  Turns out the joke was on me, because Friends with Benefits is by far the better of this odd couple.  Director Will Gluck, who made such a winner out of Easy A with Emma Stone, creates a solidly funny film here, which is by and large victorious thanks to the infectious chemistry between Kunis and Timberlake; their characters are likeable from the first, and – pivotally for a comedy film – they’re funny, too.  Also back from Easy A is Patricia Clarkson, who reprises her role as the kooky and sexually liberated mother, this time of Kunis’s character.  The only part of the equation that doesn’t fit is Richard Jenkins as Timberlake’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted father, whose outbursts lead not to comic relief but to unexpectedly heartfelt pathos.  While the film falls prey to the clichés of the romantic comedy genre, it does so more credibly than No Strings Attached, without asking us to cry for the protagonists when their bizarre experiment complicates itself.  Wisely, the film remembers that we have to like our characters in order to want to see them together, and Gluck and company – particularly his leads – achieve both by leaps and bounds.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!