Oz the Great and Powerful - Grading & Discussion

[Gaith]

The 3D itself has earned a rare perfect score from Cinema Blend, its first such rating since Hugo.

Also, B.O. returns were quite strong ($80m). It seems this weekend's just slightly snarky AV Club headline "Oz The Great And Powerful getting a sequel, so you can find out what happens next" will come true. Munchkin-shaped xenomorphs, here we come!

... Eh? What? How do you mean, "No?"

If you decide not to see this based on the reviews of critics, well, then, you sir are ... missing out on the opportunity for the 3D Weisz.

Aye. Well... one can't have everything, I suppose.

 

[Gaith]

... And I guess these aren't quite so funny now that the movie's a hit, and definitely will get a sequel, but when the review hit last Thursday, the AV Club commentariat produced some golden comic post-release headlines:

OZ FLAWS DRAWS BLAHS

"WE'RE OFF TO FLEE THE WIZARD": AUDIENCES ARE ALREADY OVER RAIMI'S RAINBOW REDUX

AUDS ZZZZ OZ

YOU WEREN'T THERE, AND YOU WEREN'T THERE: OZ'S AUDIENCES GIVE MOVIE THE SLIP-PER

NEW OZ FAILS TO SYNC WITH PINK FLOYD, OR AUDIENCES

OZ THE GWEAT AND TEWWIBLE

AUDIENCES TAKE WHIZZ ON RAIMI'S TAKE ON WIZ

NEW OZ FILM DOES POORLY AT BOX OFFICE

SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW THERE IS A GOOD MOVIE, BUT NOT THIS ONE

FRANCO BOMBS, GUERNICA SPARED
​

 

[DarthTom]

Audiences often ignore the critics when it comes to films like Oz - or other fantasy films. Disney's John Carter did well opening weekend but it fizzled fast when word of mouth said the movie sucked and reaffirmed what the critics said.

We shall see how long Oz holds at the box office.

 

[stj]

Audiences often ignore the critics when it comes to films like Oz - or other fantasy films. Disney's John Carter did well opening weekend but it fizzled fast when word of mouth said the movie sucked and reaffirmed what the critics said.

We shall see how long Oz holds at the box office.

From boxofficemojo:

On Friday, at least, John Carter failed to overcome an awful marketing effort and barely took first place ahead of last weekend's winner The Lorax. Silent House and A Thousand Words were also disappointing, and it looks like this could be the first weekend of 2012 to see a year-over-year decline.

Disney's mega-budget sci-fi spectacle John Carter opened to a middling $9.82 million on Friday, which is lower than almost all recent comparable movies. Its debut was a mere fraction of past March hits 300 ($28.1 million) and Watchmen ($24.5 million), and was also notably off from mid-range genre movies Battle: Los Angeles ($13.4 million) and 10,000 B.C. ($12.5 million). Compared to recent big-budget Disney movies, John Carter's opening was about half that of Tron Legacy ($17.5 million) and even a tad lower than Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time ($10.2 million).

Since it's only one day in, and there are rumblings of strong international numbers coming out of Russia and East Asia, it's premature to write John Carter's obituary. However, it now looks poised to finish the weekend with less than $30 million, which is a truly terrible start for any heavily-marketed sci-fi movie, much less one that cost a reported $250 million.

(link: http://boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=3390&p=.htm)

No, the word of mouth was irrelevant. Critics were extremely negative, but they almost all reviewed the budget and the marketing campaign instead of the movie.

I gather the critics are fairly negative, at best lukewarm, about Oz, but the most magical things about this movie are the production design and the 3D FX. I've noticed that most critics don't notice much about the movies. Oh, they notice the dialogue and the stars' performances but then everybody does that. So far as using their collectively vast viewing experience, well, some film school cliches about the director seems to be all most of them bring to the table. Insofar as they are consciously interested in film as "Art," most seem to be stuck in a conservative PC mode. Oz is much too indifferent to reactionary notions about the darkness of human nature to thrill them.

 

[Thestral]

Also, I'm sure all of us sci-fi fans noticed the incredible rip off from the Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. First the evil witch uses green lightning to fight the good witch [seem familiar?] but even steals the line from Wars, '...I've been waiting a long time for this.'

If Disney didn't now own the rights to Star Wars and under different circumstances, I'd think the whole ending battle scene between good and evil would be outright plagiarism from the last Star Wars film. She even uses her light saber err wand to fight off the green lightning.

Wut?

 

[AvBaur]

In my opinion, "Oz, the Great and Powerful" is infinitely better than most people (well. critics) seem to give it credit for. While the trailers made it look like another soulless cg spectacle in the vein of Burton's "Alice in Wonderland", Raimi manages to instill his film with a genuine sense of wonder and a lot of personal touches. It's refreshing that the movie takes its (very well acted) characters' emotional lives seriously and treats them without the least bit of cynicism, all while retaining a great sense of humor and whimsy, and never neglecting the visual spectacle and the fun of it all.


The movie left me with a smile on my face and a tear in my eye, which is a lot more than I would have expected from a big Disney family event movie these days.


Should definitely be seen on a big screen and in 3D!

 

[Admiral2]

B+

Passible, in spite of the presence of James Franco, who has got to be blackmailing somebody to keep getting work because it can't possibly be due to his skill as an actor. If he and January Jones were ever made the male and female leads in a rom-com you'd have to put audiences on suicide watch because nobody would be able to stand all the toneless, emotionless droning.

And is it a bad thing that I found Mila Kunis more tolerable after she ate the apple?

Whatever. The sets were nice, and the 3D didn't suck...

 

[Guy Gardener]

Wicked the Musical is so much better.

Go take your spouse to wicked.

This movie is in the past.

Mila in trousers was wrong.

(Modern dresses are mostly stupid, but the old timely stuff is usually a (painful) work of art.)

Oz should have thought she was naked or a lesbian, if he knew what a lesbian was, but definitely a prostitute, since he wouldn't know the difference between girl trousers and bloomers.

Did they say variations of "I'm not the wizard you want but I'm the wizard you need" at least 5 or 6 times?

So blunt.

Evanora got her makeup taken away and that's it? She hadn't been magically castrated at all, she was still just as powerful, only so vainly embarrassed by her appeance that she scampered to live with the Munchkins until a house fell on her rather than cast off some more green lightning and win the day?

(Womans lib and all. Too ugly to be outside. Talk about not owning yourself. If they were sisters or colegues, surely they all knew Evanora was 50 years older than the rest of them?)

Tell you a secret Girl, once you win, you define beauty just like Kim Jong-Il defined the apex of world HIEGHT and intellect from his throne in North Korea.

"Sigh"

Was Rachel wearing ruby slippers?

Oh.

Rami claims that the 1939 movie made up the slippers which weren't in the book so he didn't have to use them, so he didn't.

Meh.

I bet the old movie made up the bubbles too!

Wicked makes this look like a turd.

 

[cardinal biggles]

Raimi would be correct; Baum's novel featured silver shoes; MGM changed them to ruby slippers to take advantage of the film's use of Technicolor.

 

[Guy Gardener]

That was never in doubt, I say "claim" because it doesn't seem like a good enough reason to exclude the slippers, in an attempt to distance his new film from the "original" (there was a silent era Wizard of Oz wasn't there?) if he's going to film the first 20 minutes in black and white.

"I don't want to" is a good reason.

"I don't want to because they weren't in the book" is less good.

 

[Gaith]

^ "I won't because, while the books are in the public domain, as an element unique to the MGM film we don't have the rights to that", for good or not good, is the actual reason.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Well Diana Ross wore silver slippers in the Wiz so the fear of litigiousness has been around for a while.

"I'm not allowed to" or "I'm not allowed to without handing over a but load of money" are also both good reasons. Which made his answer to the question seem even more political that he artistically and stylistically chose not to borrow from MGM because he was interested in his own unique vision... But how much would it have cost to use Ruby slippers?

Do you think David E Kelly paid for his slippers, when he dressed Camille up in full Dorothy during an early episode of Chicago Hope to soothe a trichotillomaniac? Or did they slip that under the wire as a parody?

UM.

Did any one see the evil dead Car?

Sam's supposed to put it in all his movies some where.

 

[DarthTom]

Wut?

Wut do you mean Wut? The rip offs from Revenge of the Sith up to including, "......I've been waiting a long time for this," and the green lightning from her fingers wasn't obvious to you? Shit they even had the good witch fighting off the green lighthing with her magic light saber err wand.

Another nitpick of this film. At least the original had the timeless song sung by Judy Garland "Somewhere over the Rainbow," that is still a classic today.

 

[Gaith]

Do you think David E Kelly paid for his slippers, when he dressed Camille up in full Dorothy during an early episode of Chicago Hope to soothe a trichotillomaniac? Or did they slip that under the wire as a parody?

I'd imagine so, yes. Or maybe there was a WB corporate connection of some sort.

"I'm not allowed to" or "I'm not allowed to without handing over a but load of money" are also both good reasons. Which made his answer to the question seem even more political that he artistically and stylistically chose not to borrow from MGM because he was interested in his own unique vision... But how much would it have cost to use Ruby slippers?

Since publicly admitting they were wary of legal trouble could itself encourage legal trouble, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the filmmakers were directed to ascribe any and all dissimilarities from the '39 movie as purely artistic.

 

[Greylock Crescent]

Another nitpick of this film. At least the original had the timeless song sung by Judy Garland "Somewhere over the Rainbow," that is still a classic today.

Of all the potential criticisms of the film, this is the most irrelevant, inane, and inappropriate.

Otherwise, why didn't they just use a CGI Margaret Hamilton instead of Mila Kunis? Hamilton's performance is still classic today. Why not simply replicate it in the new film?

 

[AvBaur]

^ Because Disney doesn't have the rights to Hamilton's likeness, which is actually why Kunis' skin in the movie is a different shade of green.


Apparently, they even had a lawyer on set to make sure any legally problematic similarities to elements unique to the 1939 movie are avoided.

 

[Guy Gardener]

The Emperors force lighting was blue.

Although yes the effect did look similar but that's because it's lighting.

Lightning looks like lightning and other than MAKING IT GREEN, lightning is going to continue to look like lightning most of the time.

I've seen shit about Harry Potter Wands vs. light sabres elsewhere on and off.

Light sabres come in a lot of colours including purple.

George Lucas can try to patent lightning if he wants to, but frankly he'll just end up being treated like the last emperor of Japan or a 20-something Michael Jackson.

I don't see you complaining that what Theodora had going on throwing fireballs reminded you or Backdraft or Ladder 49.

 

[DarthTom]

The Emperors force lighting was blue.

Although yes the effect did look similar but that's because it's lighting.

Lightning looks like lightning and other than MAKING IT GREEN, lightning is going to continue to look like lightning most of the time.

I've seen shit about Harry Potter Wands vs. light sabres elsewhere on and off.

I understand this. But coupled iwth the lines, "....I've been waiting a long time for this," and that the good witch faught the lightening off with her wand which is similar to a light sabre just seemed to me, like a shameless rip off of the Sith.

Hey, I get it - a lot of people liked the film. I wish I could have my $15 back for seeing it in Imax - oh and the 3 hours as well.

The only redeeming quality of the film IMO other than the amazing effects was the Trek trailer.

 

[Guy Gardener]

I hated the film.

I thought the lightning was reminiscent of Palpatine.

But I've been waiting a long time for this is the first line to a song by Green Day called "Waiting" that was recorded in 2000.

And I'm pretty sure Jay said "I've been waiting a long time for this my little green friend" in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

These are all really unimportant words strung together.

It can't qualify as a meaning quote other than technically it's something that was said.

 

[Merlanthe]

went to see this today. the little china girl si awesome. thought it was a good take on the oz story. didnt like that he and glinda hooked up at the end.

sure she could see through his lies to who he really was and he didnt try to gull her with a music box like he tries to nearly everyone else but i didnt see any sparks of attraction between the two and his interest in her seemed to stem a lot form her looking like the one girl back home he who was marrying another which is not a good basis for a relationship. imho they worked better as friends and the movie would have been brilliant ending with the little china girl's delight at getting a new family rather thana cliched hook up.

otherwise a good movie.