A cultural touchstone and cinematic rite of passage has gone by the wayside

There are obviously seminal films that the passing of generations can erase from the list of must-see movies, or more to the point, movies people don't need to "must see" because they've already seen them.

I didn't think The Wizard of Oz was one of them.

Yet last night when I was out for drinks with some past and present writers for my website, I discovered that two of the three of them had not seen The Wizard of Oz. Actually, the third might not have seen it either, but he was not present when the subject came up. I'm pretty sure at least he would have made the time.

These guys are not as much younger than me as you might think, either. One of them is only just 30, but another is turning 37 next week -- only 12 years younger than me. 

The weird thing is that they took a certain pride in not having seen it, doing a little elbow bump to congratulate themselves.

I won't revoke your cinephile card for any movie you haven't seen, but there are certain blind spots that just seem improbable if not impossible. Didn't they have The Wizard of Oz on TV once a year like we did in America, where everyone set aside whatever they were doing -- it being one of only three channels they could watch -- whenever that occurred?

Oh no, they didn't. See, these guys are enough younger than me that they don't remember a time without cable. Heck, one of these guys was born in the 1990s. He probably doesn't remember a time without internet. 

Plus, they explained to me, The Wizard of Oz held no such similar stature in Australia to the stature it held in the U.S. I hardly think that's the case, but it's certainly possible that the networks here did not have a deal to show it annually on television, before people even had VCRs and you could rent it at your local video store.

It took being a captive audience, with no other choices, to make The Wizard of Oz such a familiar text for those in my generation -- those Americans in my generation, I should say. If this was one of a hundred movies they showed on TV at only a set time each year, maybe we wouldn't have all tuned in, but it was a special night you would circle in the TV Guide whenever it came up.

I mean, there were other movies that got shown regularly on TV. It's a Wonderful Life would have been one, but curiously, it took me until I was an adult to see that one. So we all have our blind spots and we should not gasp in surprise at anyone else's. I still haven't seen the original King Kong, which I loosely consider the strangest movie for a person in my position with my proclivities not to have seen. 

But I do think it would behoove a cinephile to at some point make a specific decision to watch The Wizard of Oz, just to fully get the references to it in the culture, just to see what all the fuss is about. Because I'm a cinephile who has grand delusions of one day being a completist -- that is, seeing all the movies that have ever been made -- I'm sure not to let a movie of the stature of Wizard of Oz slip by me. Of course I will never be able to do that, but the desire reflects an interest on my part to be conversant with as much of the cinematic landscape as it is possible for one person to be. Not knowing The Wizard of Oz would feel like quite the deficit in that ambition.

Of course, not all cinephiles are created the same way. Some want to spend their time on movies they have already decided speak to a specific aesthetic preference they have, or will in some way challenge what movies can do. They can take one look at Wizard of Oz and know that it probably doesn't scratch either of those itches.

Neither can I imagine, though, a cinephile who just waves his or her hand at the whole idea of The Wizard of Oz, like it can't possibly be worth watching. I can maybe understand not getting to it yet -- 30 is still young -- but through their elbow bumps, they confirmed they had specifically avoided it, kind of like they were trolling someone who might at some future date ask them the very question I asked them last night.

They are probably no more embarrassed about not seeing The Wizard of Oz than I am embarrassed about only seeing Gladiator the one time. Later in that conversation they expressed shock that I had only watched the 2000 best picture winner once, perhaps even questioning how that was possible. One of these guys is working on a shot-by-shot remake of Jurassic Park, another film I have only seen once all the way through.

They're just young, and I'm just old.

We may be having a gathering in December at the home of one of the guys, who has moved about an hour outside town. If we do, we'll have some drinks Friday night and then watch movies on Saturday to recover from our hangovers. The idea is to each bring one film the others have not seen to contribute to that little Hangover Film Festival.

If not for the fact that the third younger guy -- who is between the other two in age -- has probably already seen it, I'd be inclined to spring The Wizard of Oz on them. If they aren't going to educate themselves, I can certainly do it for them.

The idea, though, is to introduce people not only to something they've never seen, but maybe something they've never even heard of. Forcing them to watch a movie they've already decided not to watch themselves is not in the spirit of the day, nor is it likely to have the result I want. You don't get that many opportunities to force a recommendation on someone where they are pretty much compelled to watch it right then and there, and not delay their own viewing indefinitely. Better make it count and try to hit a home run.

Rest assured, though, that I will be figuring out a way to get them to watch The Wizard of Oz at some point in the future.

They may not like it, but at least now they'll know what everyone is talking about. 

Embrace the bogus

Welcome to night #2 of our Bill & Ted's weekend ... or really, morning #2 after night #2.

And yes, I can say "our" as my wife surprised me by watching most of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, even though she had planned not to. At first she said she was just going to watch ten or 15 minutes of it, then she stayed for the whole first hour. Why she didn't just finish the viewing at that point is beyond me. I will never understand the viewing habits of other people.

She did, though, realize very close to the start that she had already seen it. So I guess it's slightly less weird that a person would bail on a second viewing of something they'd already seen than their first viewing ... though my wife would do that too. Maybe I'm the weird one for insisting I watch things to their completion, even repeat viewings. Who knows.

At first I was shaking my head at Bogus Journey, getting a painful reminder of what I found so disappointing about this film, but partway through I had a bit of a revelation. When I started likening this movie to the sequel to The Wizard of Oz, it gave me a whole new perspective on it.

The original Wizard of Oz is, of course, a mostly bright and sunny movie -- I'm talking about its tone here, though most of the scenes do take place during the day. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure has the same feel to it.

But I felt an immediate sense of revulsion back in the 1980s when I first saw a trailer for Return to Oz, the sequel (of sorts) released some 45 years after the original. The movie may not have had a significantly higher percentage of scenes set at night -- not that the trailer could really show me this anyway -- but the sunny demeanor of the original seemed to be entirely absent from this movie. It felt garish and twisted, as if entirely missing the point of what an Oz movie was supposed to be.

I finally saw Return to Oz about five years ago and by this point, I could fully enjoy its garishness and its twistedness. Yes, there's some nightmare imagery in that movie, but instead of being repulsed by it, I found it a brave and surprising departure from The Wizard of Oz.

Such is now my impression of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey. It's never going to surpass Excellent Adventure in terms of my affections, but it's a lot closer to the original than I ever would have guessed.

Yeah this movie is garish and darker, but that's okay. You get that sense right from the start, in that grotesque scene where the robot Bill and Ted peel away their faces to reveal their robot underparts to a horrified room full of future hostages to the villain, played by Joss Ackland. (And when I saw him, I immediately thought of his role in Lethal Weapon 2 -- "Diplomatic immunity!" "It's been revoked.")

That spirit continues, of course, when Bill and Ted are killed -- pushed off a cliff by their evil doppelgangers -- and make a trip through all sorts of existential afterlifes. Or should that be afterlives? There is plenty of garish imagery to accompany this, with both objective and subjective visions of hell. The first comes complete with an image of the literal hell, including a horned incarnation of the devil. But then you also have a personal hell for each lead, as Bill relives a nightmare moment where he was being kissed by his ancient and physically unpleasant grandmother (also played by Alex Winter) and Ted is chased by a malevolent Easter Bunny.

In addition to being bothered by the darker tone, when I first saw this movie, I considered this a decidedly different way of forcing us to suspend disbelief than the original. See if you go with me on this. While you can argue that time travel is "realistic," in that many films have put forward the single belief-suspending notion that time travel is possible and then followed some fairly clearly delineated rules from there, all this afterlife stuff is patently "unrealistic" and breaks the rules originally established by the series.

This time, though, I just went with it. Ultimately, what happens in a Bill & Ted movie is just a way of seeing how these two Southern California slackers will react to different stimuli. It's all just a way for us to enjoy their clearly delineated personalities -- the only rules that really matter.

I think the Return to Oz comparison was ultimately inspired by the eventual use of practical creature effects in the form of the character Station. This was one part of the movie I decidedly did not remember, and if you didn't remember Station either, here he/she/it/they are:

I think I ultimately don't consider Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey the type of movie that should feature characters like this, but like I said, this time I just went with it.

Making that easier is the fact that I was laughing a lot more than I expected to. As just one example, Winter has a couple hilarious line readings in a row when the afterlife version of the military school drill sergeant, played by Chelcie Ross, is tormenting them. First he's trying to figure out how to salute the character, and he says "Sir! Dude! Yes! Sir! Sir! Dude!" Then after being given their punishment, he says to Ted "Dude, I don't think there's any way I can do infinity push ups."

In fact, one of my more interesting takeaways of watching this movie was a reminder that Alex Winter was always the more interesting of these two performers for me. Given the career Keanu Reeves has had, it was easy to forget the kind of promise Winter showed. In fact, even now, I appreciate him in these movies a lot more than I appreciate Reeves. His charisma shines through more, while Reeves gets a bit lost in the fact that his hair is covering his eyes most of the time -- kind of like a dog whose eyes you can't see. You can't really connect with someone's charisma if you can't see their eyes.

I have to wonder how much time Winter spends wondering why he didn't have a career like Reeves did. It could easily embitter a person, and probably has, though seeing them on Stephen Colbert the other night, it seems that they retain a very strong personal fondness for one another, even going out for meals together and such (during non-pandemic times of course). It probably benefits him to remain friendly with Reeves, and maybe Reeves doesn't give a person a choice by just being a good guy you couldn't resent. But if I were Winter, I'd probably be resentful as hell.

It's interesting to me that I'm going on at much greater length about the movie I don't like as much than I did about the original, but clearly this has been the greater "discovery" of the two for me this time. But I can't leave off my discussion without referencing the scene I remembered best from the first time around, when William Sadler's Death -- just as great as I remembered -- plays a variety of games against Bill and Ted.

The sequence is played perfectly. It starts with the ridiculousness of playing Battleship, as the sides exchange shots and Sadler either delights in a hit on his opponent's ship or curdles as his battleship is sunk. Then, once he extracts a "best of three" scenario upon losing, it's on to the equally absurd botched finale of a game of Clue, in which Death guesses the wrong murder suspect when he accuses Colonel Mustard. "Plum, I said Plum!" he says, rattled, and then changes the terms to best three out of five. We only see the final losing moments of a game of electronic football, and then it's on to the coup de grace -- a game of Twister between Bill and Death. The tension builds as we see Death contorting to place his foot on a color far out of his range, and as he falls, it's a great release of comedic energy.

Having had two really fun viewing nights in a row, I am primed and ready for Bill & Ted Face the Music.

The hot property

I put in a reservation for The Wizard of Oz from the library in time for us to watch it at Christmastime.

Three weeks ago, my reservation finally came in.

Three weeks later, I have to return it unwatched because there are two more pending reservations for it.

That’s a lot of interest in a movie that turns 80 years old this year.

I don’t know whether it’s because the library has too few copies of it, or because indeed people are seeing the 80^th anniversary as an occasion to revisit the movie and show their kids, but this movie is just a damn hot property in the Melbourne Public Library system. We’re showing our kids, but the 80^th has nothing to do with it, given that I first tried to reserve it last year. It’s a BluRay, but I figure that probably has little effect on its popularity.

Now, I strongly suspect my attempt to reserve it was not delayed because there were 20 people ahead of me on the reservation list – you can check that and I believe it was four or five at the most – but rather because somebody lost it behind their couch. I believe this copy, possibly the only copy, of The Wizard of Oz was caught in some kind of purgatory that went beyond the normal rental-renewal-reservation cycle. It had to be. And the person who lost it would have owed the library tens of dollars upon returning it, though among the other saintly things the Melbourne libraries do is randomly wave off fees now and again, especially if they become excessively large.

The movie is due on Friday, and that means I won’t have another Sunday night – the time we traditionally watch movies as a family – before it’s due. So, back to my spot in the queue, to starting that six-month cycle all over again.

And then I thought: Why not just return it late? They will probably wave off the fee anyway.

And if they don’t, well, 35 cents will have been a worthy cost to show my kids one of the all-time family classics.

Why it’s so popular – I mean, so much more popular than all the other popular cinematic classics – I may never know. You’d think it would be pretty available elsewhere. I only hope it’s as popular with my kids on Sunday as it seems to be with the citizens of Melbourne at large.

I finally saw: Return to Oz

I was too young to know the word "blasphemous" in 1985.

But if I'd known it, the 11-year-old me would have certainly produced it upon seeing the trailers for Return to Oz, from which I ran screaming -- metaphorically, at least.

I could think of no more definite way to curdle the joy of the classic 1939 film than this grim and despairing sequel, 46 years later, populated with weird and frightening characters.

It turns out, from finally watching it, that my initial impression of Return to Oz was 100% accurate. However, I'm now less certain that this is a bad thing.

After finally watching Return to Oz, I can say with 100% certainty that it was conceived as a horror movie. Whether this was the right thing to unleash upon us is a different question. But what I once viewed as a colossal failure of tone is now more appropriately seen as a nightmare aimed at children.

The reason I even decided to overcome my apprehensions and give it a chance was that I'd heard some podcasters recently talk about how secretly awesome it was. Could all that twisted material and bad hoodoo actually be great? And what were these "Wheelers" that they were praising in particular?

So when I saw it in the kids section at the library -- the kids section -- I decided to give it a whirl.

If you are like me and ran screaming from this movie, I can tell you that it picks up a couple months after Dorothy's initial return from Oz. Turns out Dorothy -- now inexplicably about eight years old and played by Fairuza Balk -- did not live happily ever after. In fact, instead of resuming her life as a normal and compliant Kansas farm girl, she just wants to tell everyone about this magical place she visited. These being sensible Kansans in the year 1899, they don't want to hear any guff about a magical land with ruby slippers and emerald cities. But instead of benevolently humoring her, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry decide to take her to a doctor in an eerie hospital -- someone who plans to submit her to what appears to be electroshock therapy.

Dorothy, I don't think we're in The Wizard of Oz anymore.

If you told me this were the same hospital they used in Jacob's Ladder, I would believe you. Fortunately, with the assistance of a (possibly imaginary) fellow patient, Dorothy escapes during a perfectly timed power outage that struck just as they were about to power on the equipment. The two girls rush down to a nearby river and plunge in, the sinister hospital administrator hot on their heels. Dorothy grabs on to a crib that washes along in the river and awakens in what she soon determines to be Oz. Oh, and instead of Toto -- who does make an appearance earlier on -- she's got a chicken from her farm with her. A chicken that now can talk.

But it's not the Oz she remembers -- the yellow brick road has been reduced to rubble, as has the Emerald City. Most of its buildings are still standing, but all of its citizens have been turned to stone. Except for the Scarecrow, who was left as king -- and who may be key to the salvation of the city, if he can be found. As Dorothy collects companions -- a mechanical man named Tik Tok, who looks like a bronze and rotund version of the Pringles guy; an early draft of the character that became Jack Skellington, called Jack Pumpkinhead; and the trophy head of a moose that had been killed on a hunting expedition, which flies around a demented version of Santa's sleigh comprised of a couch and some other odds and ends, and goes by the name "Gump" -- she starts to figure out what has happened to her beloved Oz.

Hint: It involves these guys.

If that's not horrifying enough, let's pull out so you can get a better view.

Yep. That's a deranged man wearing a mask helmet with wheels for hands and feet.

"Jesus Christ," I said aloud upon encountering my first Wheeler.

As if these monstrosities -- this film's version of flying monkeys -- were not bad enough, we're just getting started. Dorothy then encounters a wicked princess who keeps a hall of disembodied heads, which belonged to Emerald City citizens whose bodies still remain frozen in stone, and which she switches out with her own depending on her whims. Eventually, she also comes face to face with an evil creature made of rock called the Nome King. The Nome King has rock minions whose faces appear in whatever rocks are near Dorothy, and report back on her progress. He has magic powers and can turn people into "trinkets." *shiver*

For about the first 20 minutes of Return to Oz you're thinking -- if you're sensible -- "My goodness, this is just awful." It does indeed seem to be a catastrophic misunderstanding of what made The Wizard of Oz a classic. Even Auntie Em and Uncle Henry are unmoved by the prospect of submitting their niece to a regimen of suspicious medical experiments involving electricity. Then there are just the things that seem careless, like the fact that the cheery score is out of sync with a drab setting that owes more to the depictions of Victorian England on film than American frontier movies -- and not the cheery versions of Victorian England, but the realistic ones, like Roman Polanski's Tess.

But once she actually goes back to Oz you're thinking -- if you're sensible -- "This is no accident." It may have been an accident on the studio's part that the creators of this content got away with what they got away with, but those creators did not miscalculate. They made exactly the movie they intended to make. Taking their lead from the Grimm theory that fairytales are terrifying, they made a terrifying expedition into Oz, one that owes more to something like Alice in Wonderland (underscored by the aging down of Dorothy) than Victor Fleming's interpretation of L. Frank Baum's material.

Indeed, as much as we may credit (blame?) this film's screenwriters for their strange creations, most of them are taken from Baum's book Ozma of Oz. That's at least where Tik Tok, the Wheelers, the Nome King, the evil princess and the Deadly Desert come from (did I mention there's a desert which turns you into sand if you touch it? That happens to one poor Wheeler), though it would appear that Jack Pumpkinhead and Gump may be original creations. (Adding to the creepiness -- Pumpkinhead is a bit touched in the head. He's always worried about his head rotting, and he keeps asking Dorothy if she's his mother.) Wait, no -- they're from another of Baum's books, The Marvelous Land of Oz.

Most of what's creepiest about this movie works. Some of it doesn't. The quality of the visual effects/costumes/etc. varies at about the same extent. So while most lovers of rule-breaking cinema and anomalous oddities will be won over by Return to Oz, there are the parts of it that just seem sloppy and bad-weird as opposed to good-weird.

Still, I was ready to hate this and I so didn't. In fact, I'm looking forward to my next viewing.

A return to Return to Oz, as it were.

Witches aren't scary - except when they are

Witches are just as prominent in the coterie of Halloween baddies as ghosts, goblins, vampires, mummies and zombies. But their union has not been doing a great job with PR. While many of those others can be quite frightening, witches are often consigned to the category of "funny" monsters. They may cackle and they may have green skin, but we can usually laugh them off. They're harmless.

Given this perception, it sometimes surprises me how many truly chilling movies there are where witches are the primary villains.

In each case that I have acknowledged this, I've written it off as an exception to the rule. But how many exceptions can you have before you start re-thinking the rule?

Here are five such movies, starting with the one I re-watched on Sunday night for the first time since 2006:

1) Suspiria (1977, Dario Argento) - I have to admit, the first two times I watched Suspiria, I thought the opening 15 minutes so terrifying that the rest of the movie inevitably paled by comparison. However, that opening is terrific enough that I went ahead and bought the movie on the strength of those 15 minutes alone. (The Goblins score certainly helped grease the transaction.) In thinking about Suspiria, I would sometimes tell myself that witches being the villains are a primary example of why the rest of the movie doesn't live up to that opening, when the identity of those antagonists has yet to be established. This time, though, the whole movie filled me with dread, and I appreciated certain things that maybe didn't land as effectively on previous viewings: like the supernatural, undead snoring of the witch Helena Markos, or that mysterious room in the top floor of the dance academy where the witches go to perform their rituals at night. The witches discomfited me enough on this viewing to inspire this post.

2) The Blair Witch Project (1999, Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez) - It's right there in the title, but I bet people don't often consider the fact that what they're afraid of in this movie is witches. Or, one witch in particular. But as with Suspiria, it's scary as hell, and some people consider this one of the most frightening movies they've ever seen. Perhaps the key is that you really don't know what you're afraid of in this movie -- you know they're looking for a witch, but all you actually see is inconclusive evidence of evil, all you hear are noises that your imagination conflates into whatever terrorizes it the most. But when you come right down to it, it's a witch that's giving us the spooks when we watch this, the granddaddy of the modern found footage movement.

3) Paranormal Activity (2009, Oren Peli) - I'm just now realizing that both of the most successful found footage horror movies of recent years use witches as their monsters. You find this out to a greater extent in the sequels to Paranormal Activity as the mythology becomes better developed, but it's a coven of witches at the center of all the spooky happenings in these movies. You get frightening flashes of them from time to time, and they are ghastly creatures indeed.

4) Rosemary's Baby (1968, Roman Polanski) - Yes, even Rosemary's Baby features witches -- witches in cahoots with the devil. Witches are the devil's servants, and never has that been more evident than when they ensnare a woman for the devil to impregnate. So again, as in Blair Witch, it's not what we see of the witch that scares us so much -- it's what we don't see. Minnie and Roman Castavet look and usually act like harmless old New York busybodies ... until we see what they are really like, through glimpses of a drugged haze, and near the end when the jig is finally up. Everything that's unholy and unsavory about Rosemary's Baby is tied to their status as these practitioners of the occult.

5) The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming) - And why not? Although Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West is in many ways the template for our modern green-skinned Halloween witch, she does not soft pedal the role in the least. And though she may not be terrifying to a lot of adults, her shrieking intensity has some real balls to it, and could scare the pants off plenty a little kid. I'm sure she scared me when I was young enough ... though I think the flying monkeys were slightly more traumatizing in that regard.

And Hollywood knows we're still secretly horrified by witches. Next up is this year's The Witch, which won the directing award at Sundance.

It may just be the next one to turn our skin green.

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.