Mixed Media Report

This round-up includes reviews of Adolescence, Good Night, and Good Luck and Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning, as well as a tribute to Charles Strouse.

Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper in Adolescence. (Photo: Netflix.)

It’s a confirmed truth that British actors can do just about anything, but the consistency and range of performances in the recent four-part English series Adolescence (streaming on Netflix) is so impressive that it may have set a new standard. The style of the limited series, created and written by Stephen Graham, who plays one of the principal roles, and the prolific playwright and screenwriter Jack Thorne and directed by Philip Barantini, is documentary realism, and the characters are etched in such precise psychological detail that they register more as figures in an Impressionist group painting come to life than as actors at work. You carry them away with you; I watched the first half at the end of the evening and woke up early the next morning with them still crowded into my brain. (I couldn’t get back to sleep until I’d finished the series.) My praise is meant to extend to the young performers, who give performances of unwavering authenticity on a par with the adults. Those of us who love watching English TV drama – and that includes almost everyone I know – have our favorite actors, but the only member of the cast of Adolescence I recognized was Graham, whom I’d admired as the captain of the whaling ship in The North Water and as Jamie Bell’s brother in the movie Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. I assume that my lack of familiarity with the others enhanced the freshness of the experience, but then British actors are chameleons anyway.

Oppenheimer: The Center Does Not Hold

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer.

Christopher Nolan makes his bid for movie posterity with Oppenheimer. His three-hour biographical epic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist known as the father of the atomic bomb, is culled from a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, and transpires over more than three decades (from the mid-1920s through the late 1950s). Many of the roles, both major and ancillary, are taken by familiar, talented actors, and the film, shot by Hoyte Van Hoytema, who has lit all of Nolan’s films since Interstellar, is beautiful to look at. Oppenheimer is a serious effort but not, I have to say, a very good picture, though it contains one section, focusing on Trinity, the first detonation of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1945 – the culmination of the research conducted by the Manhattan Project under Oppenheimer’s direction – that belongs in a good picture: it’s taut, gripping and suspenseful.

The Grand Experiment – Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War

Josh Brolin as Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War.

Note: This review contains spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War.

In the production logos that precede Disney and Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War, the “io” in “Marvel Studios” slowly morphs into the number 10, signifying the real-life decade that has passed since Iron Man was released in 2008, when this whole “cinematic universe” experiment began in earnest. It is not overstating things to say that this process, whether or not you’ve enjoyed following its peaks and valleys, is unprecedented in cinematic history, and that fact in itself anchors Infinity War in a sense of tangible accomplishment. Much ballyhoo has been made about the fact that the film doesn’t make a lick of sense if you haven’t seen the Marvel movies leading up to this (and if you haven’t, then what exactly is driving you to buy a ticket for this one?), but that attitude belies the mind-boggling time and effort that has gone into setting up these dominoes, so that this film can concern itself primarily with knocking them down. Experiencing the setup is worth it, because Infinity War is nearly three hours of pure payoff.

Podcast: Interview with Biographer David Robinson on Charlie Chaplin (1985)

(from left) Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1985, I sat down with film critic and biographer David Robinson about the recent publication of his book on the life of Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin: His Life and Art (originally published by McGraw-Hill in 1985, revised in 1992 and 2001, and currently in paperback by Penguin).

Along with Chaplin's own My Autobiography (1964), Robinson's official biography would later be used as source material for Richard Attenborough's 1992 biopic Chaplin, which starred Robert Downey Jr. as the famed comedian and film director. Robinson was the main film critic for The Times of London from 1973-1990, and his books include Hollywood in the Twenties (1968), a 1970 volume on Buster Keaton, and World Cinema: A Short History (1981).

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with David Robinson as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1985.

Thor: Ragnarok – What Were You The God Of, Again?

Chris Hemsworth in Thor: Ragnarok.

“I don’t hang with the Avengers any more. It all got too corporate.” – Thor, Thor: Ragnarok

You’d be justified in thinking I’ve been too kind to Marvel’s most recent films. They really are singularly excellent at the art of seduction; of presenting you with dazzling visual spectacle anchored by just enough plot and character coherence that you leave the theatre feeling satisfied, even if their appeal begins to wither once you’re back outside. I really have no desire to ever watch Doctor Strange again, even though I gave it a glowing review. I can understand the shame that sometimes follows, where you feel you’ve somehow been duped. But I don’t ever feel taken advantage of, personally. Disposable, enjoyable, escapist chicanery on the silver screen is as much an essential part of a balanced cinematic diet as anything else. It’s quite enough for me that Marvel’s legion of technicians, production designers, digital artists, costumers, and stunt performers work their asses off to deliver what most moviegoers see as exciting one-off experiences (especially since the sequel is already coming down the pike right behind the one you just saw, guaranteeing that these talented people are still getting work). I don’t hate the formula. The formula works.

Friendly Neighbourhood – Spider-Man: Homecoming

Tom Holland as Spider-Man in Spider-Man: Homecoming.

Spider-Man: Homecoming’s title is pretty apt, considering it’s not only a high-school drama, but the return of Marvel’s primary poster boy to the warm embrace of their Cinematic Universe. Since Sam Raimi’s original run at the series, which culminated with 2007’s confused, schizophrenic Spider-Man 3, we’ve been subjected to attempted reboot films in 2012 and 2014 that failed to inspire either critical praise or box-office dollars. In more than just the comic-book sphere, Sony Pictures has been desperate for a hit, and everyone’s favourite wall-crawler just wasn’t cutting it. So – in a shocking display of foresight, creative integrity, and financial savvy – Sony execs inked a deal with Marvel Studios to allow Spider-Man to be recast and featured in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with a first appearance in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. As it stands now, the MCU is officially Spidey’s home, and Sony will take home all the profit from his appearances (save merchandising rights, which Marvel was smart to grab in the deal).

This works to our benefit as moviegoers in a few ways, not the least of which is that a beloved character is finally in the hands of creators who know what the hell to do with him. That Peter Parker (Tom Holland) will be allowed to participate in the ongoing shenanigans of the MCU is another plus, given that franchise’s monster success and its proven ability to deliver smart, emotionally driven superhero stories. With Civil War, Spidey already felt at home – and with Homecoming, he truly settles in.

Group Therapy: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Pom Klementieff, Dave Bautista, Chris Pratt, Kurt Russell, and Zoe Saldana, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

Adjusting to the popularity and success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been a continuous learning process for me ever since Iron Man in 2008. At first, it was breathlessly exciting to see an interconnected series of films based on beloved characters that was as bright and entertaining as we all hoped comic book adaptations would be (something that the awkward years between Tim Burton’s Batman and Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins couldn’t ever convincingly prove). Then, fatigue set in: we’re closing in on a decade since Robert Downey Jr. made his triumphant career comeback as Tony Stark, and the structural patterns of this entire enterprise have now become clear even to the most willfully oblivious fanboy. The cracks in the façade have started to show, and Marvel Studios now faces its greatest challenge yet in maintaining the momentum of their blockbuster machine, by keeping us all engaged despite the fact that we’re all sick to death of these goddamn superhero movies.

For my part, making this adjustment meant tempering my expectations. I’ve learned never to expect any Marvel movie to be better than the one that preceded it, and this leaves me in a state of nearly always being pleasantly surprised at how competent, engaging, and sometimes genuinely stirring these films manage to be. With few exceptions, the MCU has become very nearly perfect in how authentically “comic-booky” it is: these films are episodic, interconnected, emotionally heightened, character-driven, and disposable in the same way that their source material is. (I admit that I tend to forget each film almost immediately after I see it, and the next one’s sure to be hot on its heels anyway.) There might not be a better example of this formula’s success than James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, and there might not be a better possible follow-up to that film than Vol. 2.

Movies For Adults: A Bigger Splash, Dheepan, Maggie’s Plan, Indignation and Hell or High Water

A scene from A Bigger Splash.

The division between films made for adults and those directed at teenagers and young adults seems to be a perpetual reality in cinema today, but it’s even more apparent in the summer when the tent pole superhero movies, sequels and remakes dominate movie screens. Now, I actually go to some of those films, and I quite liked Captain America: Civil War and X-Men: Apocalypse, typical of the consistently well-made and smart Marvel Comics adaptations – though admittedly their formulas are becoming tiresome. (Not enough real chances are taken with the characters, unlike in the comics’ source material and the generic long fight scene where our heroes end up bruised but not beaten is becoming cliché. But since A-List talents like Robert Downey Jr., James McEvoy and Michael Fassbender, among others, essay those roles, and since skilled directors like Kenneth Branagh often take on those projects, the films do make a dramatic impact.) But I also have to admit that most people over 50, such as the bulk of the students who take my film courses, have no interest in costumed caped crusaders and the like. They prefer films rife with adult situations, firmly grounded in reality and, ideally, not too sentimental in the end. Here then, are five films made just for their demographic, of varying quality, most of which say something about how we live now. (I could include here Whit Stillman’s period film Love & Friendship, which is based on Jane Austen’s Lady Susan. It’s certainly dialogue driven but it’s also as arid as Stilman’s other movies (Metropolitan, Barcelona) and saddled with uniformly dull, superficial performances, most notably by the film’s titular star Kate Beckinsale, lamely essaying a scheming, duplicitous widow in late 18th century England.)

On Finishing Last: Shane Black’s The Nice Guys

Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in Shane Black’s The Nice Guys.

Shane Black has been operating, to use the gaming term, on "god mode" for most of his career. He's one of those filmmakers whose most dismal failures (see: 1987’s The Monster Squad) are still sharper, funnier, and cleverer than anything else on the marquee. This isn't to say he's immune to failure, far from it; even when his films are as smart and compelling as The Long Kiss Goodnight, for example, they're likely to do just as well at the box office as that one did (which is to say, not at all). In lieu of significant financial returns, Black has carved out a nonetheless comfortable niche as a purveyor of genius-level shlock, a peddler of pulp with aspirations of grandeur that, like the characters in his noir-tinted screenplays, never gets the riches and recognition he (probably, mostly) deserves.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) is one of my favourite films, and it’s hard not to see The Nice Guys as a spiritual successor. They’re similar on the surface: a washed-up detective takes a rough-and-tumble type under his wing to help uncover a mystery lurking at the edge of civilized society, set against the glitz, glamour, and hidden agendas of the City of Angels. Everyone has a secret. And everyone has a price. It’s a noir potboiler setup so familiar that, were it not for Black’s talent at executing this kind of stuff (and the relative lack of noir mysteries in cinemas, especially at this time of year), it would be downright boring. Thankfully, a tight script, a great cast, and a consistently charming sense of humour save it from the same fate that Black’s other works have suffered.

Captain America: Civil War – A Situation Pointed South

Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. in Captain America: Civil War.

If you had told me in 2011, after I had just seen Captain America: The First Avenger, that not only would Steve Rogers become one of my favourite superheroes, but that his third sequel would be the absolute gold standard for all superhero movies to follow, I would have laughed in your face. Who gives a crap about Mister Stars and Stripes and his magic shield? But you should cut me some slack – in 2011, there was no way to know yet that Marvel’s plan to dominate the comic book movie market would be such a grossly profitable global success. Captain America: Civil War is pretty much as good as it gets – and I don’t mean that in an equivocating, “we’ll take what we’re given” kind of way. I mean that the ensemble superhero movie has never been done this well before, and likely won’t ever be again. For Marvel and the world of comic book cinema at large, Civil War is a triumph.

Swingin’ Sixties: The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (Photo by Daniel Smith, Warner Bros. Pictures)

The bar for espionage antics in 2015 has been raised unreasonably high by Ethan Hunt and his Impossible Missions Force, so I wasn’t sure at all that an old-fashioned Cold War caper like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. could even compete. Sure, it was the first film by Guy Ritchie since his Robert Downey Jr-led Sherlock Holmes sequel, A Game of Shadows, and sure, the trailer promised a heaping helping of old-school charm and mid-60s mod fashion. But is that enough to put it in the ring with what is, in my opinion, the best action spy thriller in recent memory?

Fighting for Fun – Avengers: Age of Ultron

Note: This review contains spoilers for Avengers: Age of Ultron.

During the climactic battle of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America (Chris Evans) tells his team, “If you’re hurt, hurt them back. If you’re killed… walk it off.” It’s a snarky quip that encapsulates the whole film: gone is the comic energy that glowed at the heart of The Avengers (2012), but that doesn’t stop director/geek deity Joss Whedon from doing his damnedest to keep the franchise limping along, and fighting to be fun through to its last overstuffed, brooding gasp. Whether or not it’s a fight that he and his ever-inflating cast actually win… is a matter of opinion.

Neglected Gem #62: True Believer (1989)

In True Believer, James Woods plays Eddie Dodd, a New York lawyer who made his name on political and civil liberties issues in the sixties. Eddie still likes to present himself as a renegade – he tokes up in his office, he eschews traditional workday dress, even in the courtroom, and he wears his hair in a ponytail. (The salt-and-pepper color gives it the appearance of a powdered wig – he could be an aging Revolutionary War hero.) But the only clients he accepts these days are transparently guilty dope dealers whom he gets off on technicalities and who reimburse him in drug money. He justifies his office full of sleazes by claiming, “The last struggle in the war for constitutional rights is being waged over drugs,” and on some level he believes he’s still sticking it to the bastards in power every time he wins a case. The truth is, though, that he’s grown as cynical as any old sixties warrior: he’s come to believe everyone’s guilty. It’s a fresh-faced law-school grad named Roger Baron (Robert Downey, Jr.), a long-time admirer who turned down more prestigious offers to take a job as Dodd’s assistant, who stirs his dormant spirit. He gets Eddie to take on the case of a young Korean named Shu Kai Kim (Yuji Okumoto), in prison for eight years for an alleged street killing in Chinatown, who’s just knifed a fellow inmate, the member of a racist gang, in self-defense. Eddie agrees to reopen the Chinatown case, though he goes in assuming that, like all his clients, Kim is guilty as hell. But then a punk beats him up outside his apartment, threatening worse if he defends “the chink,” and that makes him angry and curious. The deeper he digs, the more certain he becomes that Kim was framed. Soon Eddie Dodd is back in the fray.

Mixed Menu: Jon Favreau’s Chef

Emjay Anthony, Jon Favreau and Sophia Vergara in Chef.

In his new comedy, Chef, Jon Favreau directs himself as a culinary artist whose life implodes with his very messy, very public break from a high-end L.A. restaurant. But it becomes the best thing that’s happened to him when he creates his own food-truck with his adolescent son – a fly by the seat of your pants operation that’s as much fun as it is delicious. That’s a great idea for a comedy, and certainly it’s an improvement over his last feature film project, 2011’s Cowboys and Aliens (which should have been camp hilarity but had entirely the wrong tone). The problem with Chef isn’t the tone, for the most part, but its structure. Favreau hasn’t thought through the whole picture – it’s underdeveloped and bizarrely slow moving in places. The result is material that’s scrumptious one scene (to the eye, ear, and stomach) then flat the next. In a word, uneven.

Rainer on Film: An Actor's Critic

Back in the good old days when American movie criticism was dominated by a few dozen intelligent people who could write and who were knowledgeable and really cared a lot about movies, plus Richard Schickel – and even he could sometimes make sense so long as the movie he was weighing on in didn’t have a man with a gun riding a horsie in it – the National Society of Film Critics used to publish these lively anthologies, bringing together previously published reviews and profiles and think pieces written by its members, organized around a theme. (One of them, the 1990 Produced and Abandoned, edited by Michael Sragow and devoted to celebrating worthy obscurities – “the best films you’ve never seen” – featured a cover illustration of a dusty-looking guy who looked as if he’d stepped out an Edward Hopper painting, leaning against an unoccupied ticket-taker’s booth, with a blissful smile suggesting that the promise of seeing something amazing made all the hungry suffering he had to bear seem worth it. That’s as good a way to describe what it felt like to be a hopeful movie freak in 1990.) In 1981, the Society put out a collection called The Movie Star, and that book was my introduction to Peter Rainer, whose essay “Acting in the Seventies” did a terrific job with a great subject. Rainer appreciated the value of “classic” movie-star acting, as demonstrated by a master like James Cagney or Cary Grant – “I like Cary Grant in None but the Lonely Heart, his ‘best’ performance, but I love him in North by Northwest.” – but he also grasped what had changed after Brando and the rise of the Method and then the counterculture, which led to a new generation of actors who thought of movie acting as a vehicle for true creative expression, and who – in the cases of actors such as Jeff Bridges, Gary Busey, and the young Robert De Niro – don’t “keep a respectful distance” from the characters they play.

And Rainer also recognized the importance of a parallel track of new hip comics – Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, Robin Williams, the Saturday Night Live crew – who established themselves in nightclubs and concert stages and on record albums and on TV, and who were beginning to cross over into movies, often in dramatic parts: “They don’t even crack up in the middle of one of their own skits to show they’re only fooling. They’re too obsessed to crack up. They represent craziness without sentimentality. Their comic personalities are woven around the put-on, and improvisation becomes a way of scrounging up idiosyncrasies that will, hopefully, connect with the audience. Young people who don’t identify with these comics still connect with the craziness.”

Too Fast To Live, Too Old To Get Funding: Passion and The Canyons

Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams star in Brian De Palma's Passion

Brian De Palma and Paul Schrader are both survivors of the ‘70s “movie brat” era, both bold directors still intent on pushing the outside of the envelope even as they tiptoe toward or past their seventieth birthday, and both continue to have to dance and cajole and plead and scheme just for the chance to make another movie. De Palma’s latest, Passion, is a French-German co-production based on a movie from just three years ago, Alain Corneau’s Love Crime (Crime d'amour). This is the director’s first film since 2008’s furiously angry Iraq War screed, Redacted, whose best scenes updated the black-comedy absurdist slapstick of the Vietnam-era Greetings and Hi, Mom! to the time of George W. Bush. The only politics in Passion are of the office variety; it’s about the setbacks and humiliations that Isabelle, a marketing executive played by Noomi Rapace, suffers at the hands of her “mentor,” a bitch on wheels named Christine, played by a blond Rachel McAdams.

Back to High School: The Great Gatsby

Leonardo DiCaprio in The Great Gatsby

Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby bears little resemblance to the slender masterpiece on which it is based – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s now iconic 1925 novel – but that probably won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has followed this director’s career. While his critics see him as a sort of Andrew Lloyd Webber of movies whose histrionic period pieces (Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet) put one in mind, to borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael, of “a dog with the broken bones of a cat sticking out,” few of Luhrmann’s fans would likely contest that characterization. To them, Luhrmann’s movies are carnival sensations, romances to excess that celebrate the hysterical pace of the modern age in brazen, trashy style (and anyone who doesn’t like their cats grafted messily onto dogs is just a purist, patrician snob). There’s a faint odor of schoolyard allegiance that clings to the debate around Baz Luhrmann, and it never fails to make me feel like the teenager who chooses to stay home with a book while all her friends go out to a rave.

Downey Softener: Iron Man 3

Robert Downey Jr. (right) as Tony Stark, in Iron Man 3

Iron Man 3 is a pre-programmed summer blockbuster (of the sort that now opens in the middle of spring) and the second sequel in a comic-book movie franchise (that also ties into the Avengers mega-franchise), but it’s also a Robert Downey, Jr., so attention must be paid. For most of the past quarter of a century, Downey has been the most gifted and unpredictable American movie actor under fifty, which is an official-statistics-sounding way of saying that he’s the best actor in English-language movies who isn’t Morgan Freeman or Daniel Day-Lewis. Iron Man 3 represents a reunion for Downey and Shane Black, who directed the movie and is credited, along with Drew Pearce, with writing the screenplay.

Tribute to David: Mark Clamen

David Churchill (1959-2013)

Given the sad passing of our friend and colleague David Churchill, we've decided to honour him in a manner totally fitting to our memory of him. Since he was such a strong advocate of Critics at Large from the beginning, he was quick to initiate ideas. One thing he was quite fond of were omnibus projects like the Remembering 9/11 collection (which led to our first e-book) and the Titanic 100th Anniversary commemoration. Therefore, we felt strongly that we could best salute our late columnist by creating an Omnibus of David. From April 16 until April 24, we plan to publish – daily – the best of David Churchill as chosen by our writers.

Today's piece is from Mark Clamen.

– The Editors at Critics at Large.

When I first met David, he was sitting at a table with Kevin Courrier – I would quickly discover that this was exactly as it should be. This was three years ago. It was only a few days after Shlomo Schwartzberg had generously invited me on board to write for Critics at Large, and we all met at a Chinese restaurant on Yonge Street, in Toronto. It was actually at that same restaurant that the three of them had come up with the germ of the idea for the blog several months earlier: a project born from the love of, and perhaps even the need for, writing. Three years is not a very long time, but it is difficult for me today to imagine a time before that Tuesday night. David, Kevin and I would continue to meet regularly, ostensibly to manage the daily operations of publication and to brainstorm upcoming posts and projects but (as I would come to both expect and look forward to) most of our time was spent simply talking. David and Kevin had been friends for decades, and while they never tired of speaking with one another – eagerly beginning and finishing each other's stories – from the first meeting, I never felt like an outsider. The topics of conversation would vary (personal, political, currents events) but at the core was always the arts: movies, music, books and, the one topic I felt I could contribute to, television. David Churchill – a lifelong writer – had only recently returned to arts writing, but this was the only David I have even known: the one whose eyes shone with engagement when you spoke with him. I don't think I've ever felt quite as listened to as when David was on the other side of the table. These regular dinners (which continued until late December of 2012) remain the heart of what Critics at Large has become for me: a warm, inviting, sometimes hilarious and always engaging, inspirational space of friendship, ideas, and a shared love for the popular arts.

David possessed a fearlessness – in living, and in writing – that I’ve always wished to have. That quality of David has long amazed and inspired me, as a writer and critic, but it would be wrong to imply that David was a passive agent of inspiration. Always encouraging and positive, he would often pull me (it seemed quite literally) to produce what he seemed so much surer than I was I could do. Just one example: regularly, over a period of months, he would remind me – gently, jokingly, and always firmly – that I should write a piece for the 9/11 e-book he was editing from the blog’s writers. I had hedged and procrastinated for so long that it still amazes me that he could always find the energy to bring the topic up as often as he did. When I finally did do it (and it wasn’t even remotely the hurdle I had been imagining it was), David’s email response was immediate, unequivocally enthusiastic, and (due to some all-caps profanity) unprintable here. Later that evening, at our regular meeting, I was greeted by David’s wry, bright-eyed smile. Whether he said it out loud that night or not, the words I hear in my mind are all his (words I know I will hear for years to come every time I miraculously meet a deadline): “I always knew you could do it, brother.”

I’ve chosen David’s review of Sherlock’s second season as a tribute, not only because it displays David’s unique voice – that fantastic admixture of enthusiasm and critical attention – but because it reminds of precisely what David brought into my life, and what is now lost to me with his disastrously premature passing. One of the very first pieces I ever wrote for Critics at Large was a review of the show’s first episode. When David finally saw the show, he loved the series as much as I did but he came to it (as we all do) from a different place. Together, I like to see these two pieces as a conversation, a kind of tribute to the energizing space that David could create, just by sitting across the table.

Next year when Sherlock returns for its much-anticipated third season, it will be bittersweet for me. But I’ve already reserved a glass of wine with David’s name on it ready to raise up when the credits roll.

– Mark Clamen is a writer, critic, film programmer and lifelong television enthusiast. He lives in Toronto, where he often lectures on television, film, and popular culture.

Kansas Flatlands: Oz the Great and Powerful

James Franco stars in Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful, now in theaters

There is no good reason why a fresh movie spinoff of The Wizard of Oz shouldn’t be an eminently doable proposition. The new Disney film Oz the Great and Powerful – a “prequel” directed by Sam Raimi and starring James Franco as a two-bit carny magician who is whisked away to the magical land of Oz and, after proving himself through a series of heroic challenges, installs himself as the Wizard – has inspired a fair amount of anticipatory derision, and even some horrified shudders, as if it could only be an act of sacrilege, ever since it was announced. While the 1939 movie starring Judy Garland is rightly considered a classic, its status as a holy relic, like that of It’s a Wonderful Life and A Charlie Brown Christmas, has less to do with its inherent virtues than with the saintly reverence a lot of people seem inclined to feel towards anything they watched on TV ten times when they were kids. Years ago, this kind of living room repeat-viewing exposure was a rare phenomenon, but now that cable movie channels and home video have been a fixture of American life for so long that people who grew up on them are reaching maturity and getting jobs writing about movies, we’re seeing beloved-classic status automatically assigned to some real pieces of shit: movies from Top Gun, Caddyshack, Three Amigos, and even Sneakers. 

How would L. Frank Baum, the author of the original Oz books, feel about the idea that his masterwork was something more fragile and delicate than another potential franchise tent pole? He’d probably feel that he worked his hands to the bone to grow that tree and he didn’t need anyone getting in the way of it being properly sapped. Baum was an aspiring actor and playwright whose dreams of the stage had ruined him financially before he finally sat down and started writing children’s books. He wrote fourteen Oz books in all – the first great, long-running modern franchise of children’s fiction.  Baum charmed readers partly by using a theatrical ham’s instinct for showmanship as a substitute for the “mythic” qualities of European fairy tales. (Once Baum struck gold, he was quick to adapt his own work to the stage, and toured with a show that utilized film, slides, and live performers that promised a “travelogue” of Oz.) 

Judy Garland and Ray Bolger, off to see the Wizard in 1939

Pauline Kael wrote of the 1939 movie that Bert Lahr and Ray Bolger were so memorable as the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow because they understood “that the roles are vaudeville-comedy turns." The characters, and what the right kind of performers can bring to them, are at the core of Oz’s appeal, but every screen attempt to recapture that appeal – the 1978 movie of the Broadway musical The Wiz, Disney’s previous attempt to reboot the franchise with the 1985 Return to Oz, and the 2007 TV miniseries Tin Man – have gone big on concept at the expense of the characters. Much the same thing happens in Oz the Great and Powerful, but where some of the previous Oz films at least counted as honest failures by talented people committed to something they’d overthought, this movie doesn’t really have a concept so much as a marketing plan. It has a flat, defeated, half-hearted feeling that’s a little reminiscent of David Lynch’s Dune – another case of a gifted, idiosyncratic director “adapting” unusual material for a film that he has been made to understand isn’t really his project.