Christmas with a wizard

Christmas has kind of felt like anything but this year.

My wife is just days away from giving birth. I haven't worked since July 31st. We're trying to save money so we're not even doing stockings this year. The sun set around 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

In short, it's not our normal Christmas.

So it was nice to do something Christmas-normal tonight, on Christmas Eve.

Every year we try to watch something "appropriately Christmasy" at Christmastime. For us, "appropriately Christmasy" means, approximately, "something epic in scale, possibly in the realm of fantasy, or at the very least having nice costumes, production design and visual effects."

Honorees for the hallowed Christmas Eve and Christmas night spots have included, in recent years, such films as Where the Wild Things Are, Anonymous, Tangled, The Empire Strikes Back, The Muppets and Disney's A Christmas Carol.

This year, Oz the Great and Powerful joined their number.

It was my second time, of course. My wife had yet to see it.

You may remember that I loved it when I first saw it, bucking the critical consensus by quite a bit. My second viewing cooled some of  my fervor, but I still think it's a really solid fantasy with a lot to say about the magic of movies.

What pleased me most is that my wife dragged herself out of a pregnancy-induced stupor approaching sleep to tell me that she, too, had liked it quite a bit.

Sure, I wanted her to endorse my own perspective on it, since it's a perspective that needs as much help as it can get. More than anything, though, I was glad that on Christmas Eve, she could dream herself away into a world where she's not in physical discomfort all day long, in hot weather that doesn't make that condition any easier.

Merry Christmas to you all, as well. May it be as normal a Christmas as you want it to be. 

Reviewing Hollywood, not Oz

Remember those hyperbolic critigasms I talked about last Friday?

Yeah, I'm feeling like employing a few of them myself this morning.

Simply put, I kind of loved Oz the Great and Powerful. Of course I'm not going to say it's better than The Wizard of Oz, but it's of sufficient quality that I will tolerate it when today's young folks, who haven't seen the original, inevitably declare that they like this one better once they go back and discover it. (Some of that is the unbridgeable gap of technology. To some young people, The Wizard of Oz is always going to look "old," and we just have to accept that that's how they're wired.)

So now that I want to critijizz all over the place -- sorry, that was gross -- I'm struggling with why others don't.

The movie has a Metascore of only 45, which is down four points from the last time I checked. Even the critic who liked it the most (Kim Newman of Empire) scored it only 80 out of 100. If I were to produce a Metascore expressing my feelings about Oz, I'd probably go with a 91 or a 92.

In the pressure cooker that is the film criticism industry -- that's a joke, but stick with me -- there's a lot of concern about how your peers will view your judgments. At least I imagine there to be -- I don't talk to many other professional critics. (Yes, I'm still one, even though I haven't been working since the end of 2011. You don't stop being something just because you aren't doing it right now.)

My love of Oz is the kind of thing that would make me look like a rube at best, or a studio kiss-ass at worst. How could I just sit there and eat this contraption up?

And so I've come to a decision: Some of the critics who sunk this movie's Metascore are reviewing Hollywood, not Oz the Great and Powerful.

It's almost impossible these days not to be suspicious of a studio's motivations for making a certain movie. In fact, there's no reason to be something as vague as suspicious. It's easy enough just to know that the studios are in it for the potential profits, because making movies is a business, and if you don't make movies people want to see, you'll go out of that business.

The problem among critics (myself included) is that we tend to treat this motivation as an insurmountable obstacle. If there's even the slightest suggestion that a movie is being made just because of its familiarity with audiences and the ability to make a successful line of toys, we prejudge that movie harshly. It's got to climb a long way back up just to convince us that it's not utterly soulless.

Oz the Great and Powerful seemed to be a prime case of this. The original movie was nearly 75 years ago, and there hasn't been a theatrical release in this series (the sequel Return to Oz) since the 1980s. It would have been easy to assume this one was safely buried, never to need resurrecting. And once the resurrection was announced and the first glittering digital images of the movie were seen, it was equally easy to assume it was going to be a bunch of pyrotechnics with no heart.

And it certainly could have been. But Sam Raimi and his team of screenwriters gave this movie that little extra oomph that took it beyond the minimum that would have been required of it. Not only is the writing smart and the cast chosen fortuitously, but the digital effects are as good as you would expect, combining the signature elements of The Wizard of Oz with enough new stuff to dazzle you without giving you Star Wars Prequel Syndrome.

What's especially smart is the way the film interfaces with its own technical advancement. On numerous occasions does this movie indicate its awareness of the essential slight of hand, the essential prestidigitation (to employ a favorite word that the movie also uses at one point), of special effects. The future wizard (James Franco) is a magician at a traveling circus stopped in Kansas, and he's pretty handy with a number of on-the-spot optical illusions. The story comes to ask a lot more from him than that, but it's really just illusions on a grander and grander scale -- which is what the computer effects in this movie are as well. In fact, there are even some moments where this movie functions a bit like Hugo, demonstrating its love of the art of moviemaking and the illusions that are part and parcel to it.

Some other things I will briefly mention that I loved about the movie:

1) Franco. He's got a sly grin or an awkward look for every moment in the story, and he's hilarious.

2) Michelle Williams. Simply luminous. I got lost in her eyes on numerous occasions, but it's not just because I'm a heterosexual male -- she's just a hypnotic presence here.

3) The opening credits. A fabulous and original, diorama-style creation.

4) The sidekicks. A winged monkey in a bellboy's outfit and a little girl made of china. Both were original types, and the china girl had some real pathos to go along with her general adorableness.

5) The wicked witches. Yes, there are two. Rachel Weisz and Mila Kunis each bring their own brand of nasty.

So why have most of the critics been grumpy about this movie?

My guess is that they could not unburden themselves of the notion that this movie was a soulless Hollywood enterprise, not made with the apparent purity of its forbear. But I've got news for you: MGM wanted to make money on The Wizard of Oz as much as Disney wants to make money on Oz the Great and Powerful, and they used the best prestidigitation available at the time to do so.

And don't forget this: The Wizard of Oz was actually the fourth film version of L. Frank Baum's novel. That's right, the fourth.

Look, I'm not going to let one movie reverse all my own well-documented cynicism about Hollywood. It's certainly justified more often than it isn't.

I just think it can blind us to the quality of movies that can still try to make tons of money, while at the same time being really good.

No hyperbolic critigasms, please

The biggest new release of 2013 (so far) comes out today, and with that are sure to come a bunch of positive assessments of its quality -- even if there end up being more negative assessments.

We call these "critigasms." They are phrases, often taken at least partly out of context and featuring a surplus of exclamation points, extracted from the reviews of marginally reputable critics, who are more interested in getting quoted than earning the respect of their more reputable peers.

But please, don't let me hear this popular nugget about Oz the Great and Powerful:

"Even better than the original!"

No matter what this movie may do well, there is no way it's actually better than The Wizard of Oz. And trying to pass that off on me is only insulting my intelligence.

Yet it's not so far-fetched that we might actually see that particular critigasm. After all, wasn't the last Pirates of the Caribbean "the best Pirates yet!"? Wasn't there somebody who said of A Good Day to Die Hard "You've never seen a Die Hard this good!"? Didn't somebody in the community of critical prostitutes describe The Phantom Menace as "Better than the three previous Star Wars movies -- combined!"

Maybe, maybe not.

But the point is that there's somebody out there venal enough to do it. If it'll get you on that poster, why not tell me that The Godfather Part III is "three times the Godfather!"?

I'll report back with my own critigasms -- or lack thereof -- on Oz after seeing it on Tuesday night.

Anniversaries missed

When we talk about missed anniversaries, we tend to think of clueless husbands who can't remember the day they got married, and therefore suffer sleepless nights on the couch as their wives stew over their neglectfulness, until they inevitably win their redemption through some grand gesture, because their wives obviously aren't going to stay mad at them forever. (Run-on sentence intentional.)

But when it comes to movies, you can miss an anniversary not by letting it pass unnoticed, but by acknowledging it too soon. In this case, you "miss" it like you would miss a target.

As is the case with Texas Chainsaw 3D, releasing today, 39 years after the release of Tobe Hooper's original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Why not just wait one more year and make it 40?

The answer: They want their cash grab, and they want it now.

Even considering these base motivations, I'd argue that you should just wait a year. You're still going to make the same amount of money in 2014 as you would in 2013, perhaps a little bit more due to increased ticket prices (which would probably cancel out increases in production costs). You're still going to find 3D about as popular as it is today. But you've got one thing going for you that you don't have in 2013: There may be some people out there who will find this cash grab slightly more legitimate because it comes on the 40th anniversary of the original movie.

Strangely, this series has a history of consummating prematurely. The first reboot of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was ten years ago in 2003 -- a year shy of the original's 30th anniversary. 

Look, you get an opportunity every five years to line up with some kind of anniversary. It needn't be something significant like the 25th or the 50th. The 15th or 35th will do in a pinch. Anyway, something to latch on to that seems to give the film an extra reason for being rebooted/re-released/unleashed on the world again in some form or another.

I understand not shooting for the anniversary if you are right in the middle of the five-year increments -- or will be once you finish the movie. If someone had thought up a 3D version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (because it obviously took a brilliant mind to devise such high art) in 2010, clearly you don't want to wait another four years before capitalizing on your sublime inspiration. But if you're only going to be one year away? Just sit on it for six months, and then start principal photography. 

I should say that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not the only film series to blatantly miss an obvious anniversary date, and perhaps not even the most egregious example in the year 2013. Oz: The Great and Powerful, due out in March, will be coming out one year shy of the 75th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz. Just one year. Didn't anyone, anywhere, think of this? The 75th anniversary is also a pretty big deal, because at this point you can no longer get away with acknowledging anniversaries in increments of five years. No one talks about the 55th anniversary of something, or the 70th anniversary of something. That 75th anniversary would have been big.

Would have been.

I guess I have to admit that these things are imperfect. With both, or really all three, of the movies I've mentioned above, any delay in the production could have pushed the movie to that anniversary year. Perhaps they figured that they'd either go early, a pragmatic idea in any business venture, or experience delays and end up lining up with the anniversary, like they'd meant it all along. The worst would be to shoot for the anniversary year, but botch it and come out a year late.

Or most likely, they just didn't care about such things.

The only reason I care about such things, other than a general interest in numerology and a perverse desire to attach relevance to the financially-driven decision to reboot a movie series, is that there have been some examples of incomparable fortuitousness as it relates to the timing of these reboots/re-releases.

Let's take last year's 3D re-release of Titanic. Its release date was doubly fortuitous. Not only was it the centennial anniversary of the doomed ship's sinking, but it was also the 15-year anniversary of the film's initial release. And those anniversaries were even in a position to align in the first place because the movie came out 85 years after the ship sank.

Eighty-five is nobody's idea of some milestone anniversary, but it'll do in a pinch.

How Oz was saved from Tim Burton

Wait, you thought I knew how?

Actually, I have no idea.

It is beyond my imagining that Tim Burton is not the director of Oz: The Great and Powerful. How were we spared this awful fate?

Again, I have no idea.

The fact that there is a sequel -- or prequel, or whatever -- to The Wizard of Oz is an awful enough fate for some people. But let's not forget that this isn't the first time there's been such an attempt to capitalize on the Oz brand. Return to Oz already curdled that particular innocence way back in 1985, taking today's opportunistic remake trend off the hook for the crassness of which it is so regularly and so justly accused.

When it was clear that even sacred cows like The Wizard of Oz would not make it through untarnished, it seemed almost certain that Tim Burton would be the one to tarnish it. Didn't it? I mean, has there been a director in the last two decades more suited to this material, and more specifically, more suited to ruining it?

In fact, as I see on wikipedia, Burton actually was in talks to make this film at one point, and in that iteration of Oz: The Great and Powerful, Johnny Depp was indeed set to star. In that perfectly deadpan and non-gossipy way that it has, wikipedia gives no explanation for the following sequence of events, only listing them as facts:

"Robert Downey Jr. was Raimi's first choice for the part of Oz. When Downey declined, Johnny Depp was linked to the role of Oz with Tim Burton attached to direct. By the end of February 2011, James Franco was in final negotiations to star in this film."

Which is, of course, what ended up happening.

I love the implication in these three sentences that Depp and Burton were a package deal. If you wanted Depp to play Oz, you had to get Burton to direct. Apparently, Raimi could not direct Depp, and Burton could not direct Franco. Thankfully, one of the two of them -- Depp or Burton -- caused the idea to collapse before it could gain any traction. Either that, or someone at Disney looked past the bundles of cash Burton made them with Alice in Wonderland and decided that they just couldn't bear to see the soul sucked out of Frank L. Baum's marvelous world by the erstwhile Mr. Helena Bonham Carter.

Having Raimi as director gives me significantly more hope. He's one of a number of directors -- among them Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro -- who should really be given the opportunity to save some of Burton's many mistakes before he makes them.

Why am I talking about this now, when Burton has a movie in theaters (Frankenweenie) that may actually be both original and good?

Well, I saw the Oz trailer a couple weeks ago and have been thinking about it since then. Also, Dark Shadows wiped out most of my merciful impulses toward the man, such that even any good will generated by Frankenweenie is too little, too late.

The trailer certainly looks good in some ways. But the truth is, whoever's directing it, Oz: The Great and Powerful will probably be a lot closer in quality to Return to Oz than to The Wizard thereof.