Over the course of 14 novels

Sam Raimi’s new film, Oz the Great and Powerful is the latest attempt and it just released to DVD, Blu-ray and 3D Blu-ray. Visually, this new Oz is extraordinary: the special effects and 3D are first-rate, and some scenes, particularly in the early going are stunning. Yet for all its grandeur and photo-realistic rendering, the movie is largely soulless. Every aspect of the production is rendered in exquisite detail, but nothing feels as real as the handmade costumes, sound stages and background scene paintings from the MGM film. Like many other aspects of the film, there’s just something missing. This updated Land of Oz feels like a series of backgrounds for action or extended discussion, but we end up having little idea of what the world is or who the people are who inhabit it are.

The witches are the centre of the story Glinda, Theodora and Evanora (played by Michelle Williams, Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz) all struggle in underwritten and unconvincing roles. Kunis is stuck with the worst of these playing Theodora and her subsequent transformation into the Wicked Witch of the West lacks any sort of reasonable explanation and as a result, remains utterly unconvincing. The same can be said for Oz himself. James Franco does a serviceable job in the Oscar Diggs/Oz role, but this is a character that needs its performer to be all in, which Franco clearly isn’t. The scriptwriters seemed to be in the same boat, unable or unwilling to let Oscar/Oz be the narcissistic coward that he is in the books. Their efforts to have him undergo some kind of moral transformation becoming a virtuous hero during the final act is painfully stilted and has Disney’s fingerprints all over it. In the books, he is “Oz, the Great and Terrible,” a subtitle entirely too honest for this film.

Which brings us to the biggest problem with Oz the Great and Powerful: The film is a betrayal of the world of female power as described in the original Oz stories. While L. Frank Baum may have been ambivalent in some ways about women’s power and his female characters were often a bit too much sweetness and light, there is no question that his Oz was a place where women defined their own strengths and their own lives and took responsibility for the care and protection of their world. The plot holes in Oz the Great and Powerful are telling, and what they indicate is a troubling disdain for gender equity by its creators. Glinda’s acquiescence of the throne to Oscar/Oz rings entirely false and it begs the question; “Why would this woman of such strength, self-awareness and dignity all of a sudden fall for the dubious masculine charms of a two-bit charlatan?” The whole finale smacks of misogyny and serves to sink this Oz into oblivion where it belongs (but not before making nearly half a billion dollars in its theatrical run … a sequel is in the making).

The gender politics of Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful are indeed demoralizing. Despite the sometimes uncomfortable racial and other cringe-worthy elements of Baum’s early twentieth-century novels, they are a product of their time and remain far more expansive in their representation of women and gender equity than a film that claims inspiration from those very sources can conjure up more than a century later. One would think that this new Oz might offer something new, encouraging, or enlightening given the hundred or so years of evolution in gender and social politics that’s occurred since Baum penned the original stories, but if anything – at least with regard to the woman at the heart of the story – their positions have regressed. What remains is same tired story of patriarchal supremacy that rises through the subjugation of women. The Oz that Raimi gives us is not a world of possibility and potential, it is a world that replicates the demeaning and diminishing power structures of our own.

At least Baum’s Oz books and the MGM film classic that followed offered us something better.

Personally, I like Sorkin’s worlds a lot more than I do the real one and while this preference is clearly self-delusional, it makes me feel better to know that other people feel the same way. The Newsroom opens with a pitch-perfect, on-stage diatribe delivered by the anchor of a major cable news network about how great America is. The anchor, Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) sits on a three person political affairs panel in front of a university student audience when the question, “What makes America the greatest country on the planet?” is posed from the floor. A clearly uncomfortable McAvoy is finally goaded by the moderator into supplying an answer to the question… and it’s not the one anyone was expecting.

Weeks later, after taking a mandatory vacation while the controversy his terse response
generated dies down, McAvoy returns to the office to discover his staff jumping ship and an old flame, Mackenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) has been hired as his new executive producer. A cross-section of Sorkin’s standard character archetypes assume various roles in the new regime and before you can point to the sky and say, “Boss, dee plane, dee plane!”, McAvoy and Co. have refashioned a Edward R. Murrow-styled nightly newscast built on integrity and the highest broadcast journalism standards. Sure it’s all bullshit, but it’s riveting liberal bullshit and it takes the sting out of knowing Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly all have millions of followers south of the border.

As discouraging as it is to know the typical American would never consider becoming informed about the world around them, I take solace in the fact that they can still write terrific fictional stories about what it would be like if they did.

And that’s good enough for me.

200 years after the Brothers Grimm publication of Hansel and Gretel, Hollywood has decided to try its hand at the story with the abysmal Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. The plot involves updating Hansel and Gretel into semi-adult, kick-ass, leather-clad, steampunk ninjas who roam the Germanic countryside armed with oversized shotguns and articulating crossbows with the express purpose of dispatching witches using maximum firepower. The siblings are played with very little interest by Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton. Both of them need to fire their agents. Today.

Try as I might to conjure up a film of lesser merit… I simply can’t. This might just be the worst film Hollywood has produced in recent memory. By comparison, it makes Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer seem like a stroke of cinematic genius. Beyond missing the entire point of the fairy tale, it manages to be as nasty as it is ridiculous, a testament to the depths Hollywood action films have sunk to in recent years. It gives one pause to consider how the film got to be this terrible. The credits list Will Ferrell and Adam McKay as executive producers, so perhaps the project started out as a comedy and ended up being the humourless fantasy adventure/pile of shit it became. MTV films logos are festooned on the credits as well, so maybe they’re to blame. It matters not because there’s so much wrong here that teams of people must have been involved to fuck it up this royally. They even manage to take Shrek and make him into a bloodthirsty killing machine named Edward, who strangely ends up as Gretel’s platonic boytrollfriend. I’m guessing that the love interests both Hansel and Gretel experience are there to limit the audience’s speculation about their vaguely-incestuous relationship. At least that would have been interesting.

Cloud Atlas, a film I ripped to shreds in a review that I haven’t got around to posting yet, gets a complete rewrite now that I’ve seen Hollywood’s revised version of rock bottom. As awful as the experience of suffering through it was, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is ten times worse. Every year after the Oscar glow dies down, we’re faced with a period of depressing DVD releases from the bottom of the Hollywood dumpster… and this year is no exception.

On the upside, things can only get better, because they certainly couldn’t get any worse.

…and then I watched Oz the Great and Powerful.

House of Cards is an alternate adaptation of a previous BBC miniseries of the same name, which was itself based on a 1989 novel by British Conservative politician and best-selling author Michael Dobbs. Reworked for its Washington D.C. setting by Beau Willimon (Ides of March), House of Cards is the story of Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), a Democrat from South Carolina’s 5th congressional district and the House Majority Whip, who after getting passed over for appointment to Secretary of State, decides to exact his revenge on those who betrayed him. Spacey’s Underwood is deliciously immoral with outsized ambitions and an ego to match. His character is so reprehensible and callous that some might find it all too much. His initials are no coincidence. This isn’t a show for everyone, but if you can love to revel in humankind’s dark side, the outlandish and oily depths its characters will go to in pursuit of their interests will satisfy even the most cynical political junkie. House of Cards is an updated combination of I, Claudius without the nice guys and Richard III without the hunched back.

The supporting cast includes Robin Wright, (stellar as the quiet, but ruthlessly capable Lady Macbeth), Kate Mara (as a young reporter in an annoying and underwritten role) and Corey Stoll (as a hapless, but likeable junior congressional representative with a serious drug and alcohol problem ripe for exploitation). Despite mostly solid performances from the cast, House of Cards is built entirely around Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood. He is obviously loving the role and sinks his teeth into it without reservation. The script is so-so and some of the dialogue certainly misses the mark, but on balance House of Cards generally works. Given the rueful behavior of our own politicians of late, it’s admittedly hard to gauge how much of this is satire, but Underwood’s Machiavellian scheme to rise through the political ranks might just be the best Rube Goldberg since Wallace and Gromit’s Cracking Toast morning wake up machine.

Worth a shot if you like your shows dark and menacing, a pass if you don’t.

…and if you don’t believe me about the image improvement from streaming to Blu-ray, the following a is photo snapped from my home screen comparing the two.

]]> http://thefilmbuff.com/12-house-of-cards-2013/feed 0 http://thefilmbuff.com/i-cant-get-arrested http://thefilmbuff.com/i-cant-get-arrested#comments Sun, 02 Jun 2013 18:10:19 +0000 La Sporgenza http://thefilmbuff.com/?p=5345 Cruising up on half way through the 15 new Arrested Development episodes launched on Netflix last weekend, and as much as I wanted to love it, the magic just isn’t quite there. Part of the problem is structural – it seems that the logistics of bringing such a large and talented ensemble cast back together couldn’t be overcome so each episode ends up focused on one of the Bluths instead of the family as a whole. I hadn’t realized the degree to which the entire Bluth family dynamic was instrumental to the show’s near-seamless structure… until it wasn’t there. The only character that makes an appearance in every new episode is Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman) and as good as he is, the real genius in the first three seasons was positioning Bateman to be the audience’s surrogate, the lone bit of sanity within the zany Bluth universe. Bateman was brilliant as the Bud Abbot to the rest of the cast’s Lou Costello during these earlier episodes, and without the constant barrage of near-constant madness aimed squarely at him, these new episodes suffer slightly.

Critics have been fairly harsh on the new season – Variety called the concept for the fourth season “an interesting idea that was more exciting on paper.” TV Guide‘s Sadie Gennis found the narrative a drag that accelerated only toward the end of the season. People‘s Tom Gliatto wondered why Netflix bothered to reassemble the ensemble cast if not to mimic past seasons. The most stinging review came from New York Times writer Mike Hale who chastised Netflix and creator Mitch Hurwitz for traveling “down a bad path” with the Rashomon-style story. He heralded the new season as the death of the entire series. Ouch.

The most bizarre fallout from the tepid reviews Arrested Development received was reserved for Netflix’s stock price however…. it sank 6.4% (erasing about $800,000,000.00 in market capitalization) the day after Arrested Development’s Season 4 released. It’s hard to know what to even say about that. We live in a bizarre and sad time full of lemmings in search of another cliff to charge toward? Quite frankly, despite the fact that probably 50% of our former customer base are now converts to Netflix and Apple TV, I care less and less about the world the online media. It’s a mug’s game, increasingly focused on delivering maximum returns for investors in lieu of anything else (and losing $800M of Netflix’s investor money because one show gets modest reviews certainly won’t help matters going forward). Perhaps it was always thus, but as we peel back the layers and really look at how media is now barfed out of the end of a computer cable and onto people’s variously-sized black mirrors, I can’t help but wonder if “progress” is the right word for the path we’re on.

Arrested Development’s rebirth as a Netflix show isn’t as bad as some critics have made out, it’s just indicative of the times we live in.

One of the best examples of the new kind of film making that evolved out of this period is Haskell Wexler’s criminally-neglected Medium Cool (1969), just released on a remastered Criterion Blu-ray. Medium Cool is documentary-like examination of both real and fictional events that occurred in Chicago in late August of 1968 at the time of the infamous Chicago Democratic convention. The convention became a flashpoint for the growing student protests and the Vietnam anti-war movement and the police riots that ensued claimed numerous causalities, cementing the resolve of the protesters from that point forward into a coherent whole.

The fictional elements of Medium Cool is the story of John Cassellis (played by a very young Robert Forster of Jackie Brown fame) who is fired from his job at a television station for taking an interest in the subject matter of his work and for protesting that his superiors had forwarded footage he’d shot to the FBI. After leaving his girlfriend, he becomes involved with a single mother from West Virginia named Eileen and her young son Harold who now live in a low income area of Chicago. The unemployed Cassellis attaches himself to a documentary film crew covering the convention, just as Eileen takes to the streets in search of the runaway Harold, all of which takes place as tempers flare and violence erupts around the demonstrations.

Medium Cool might look and play better now than it did in 1969. Unlike many of the counterculture epics of the day, the arguments, techniques, values and ethics of this groundbreaking picture haven’t dated. If anything, it communicates with its audience better now than it did on its original release. Haskell Wexler, an accomplished and celebrated cinematographer, made his directorial debut with Medium Cool, blending dramatic and documentary content with seamless ease. Wexler and his crew found themselves in the middle of the student demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention and the numerous commentaries and supplements included on the Criterion Blu-ray about how the film came to be are well worth exploring. It’s a fascinating story unto itself.

In the opening scene, we see Cassellis, the fictional news cameraman at the centre of the story, at an early morning car crash he and another reporter have happened upon. They dispassionately capture the crash’s aftermath on camera and audio tape, but never once consider helping the victims. A belated call to emergency services occurs only after they’ve finished documenting the crash and casually drive away without a second thought as to the victim’s well-being. This initial scene sets up the film’s underlying themes, specifically the media’s complex relationship with the news it documents. Cassellis becomes representative of the media in general, initially removed from the social upheavals that are happening all around him, only to discover that he is not immune from then. His relationship with Eileen (Verna Bloom), a single mother from West Virginia, forces him to confront the growing racial, economic and generational divides that are tearing the city apart.

It’s impossible to watch Medium Cool without noting the uncanny similarities between the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention and Toronto’s 2010 G20 fiasco. Everything from the unnecessarily-massive police presence (estimated at two cops for every protestor in Chicago, roughly the same ratio as the G20 “security” force), to the use of excessive force and tear gas by the police against protestors, to the lack of hue and cry from the general public in the aftermath of both events eerily mirror one another, separated by four decades, but not much else. Set against the backdrop of growing civil unrest, Medium Cool is the definitive document of the late ’60s social zeitgeist, a complex study on an array of important issues of the day including the media, the ongoing militarization of police forces, and the democratic right to lawful assembly. At a time when the U.S. was still reeling from the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and wrestling with growing civil unrest over Vietnam and the civil rights movement, Medium Cool asked whether the media was professionally bound to dispassionately record events or whether they had a responsibility to intervene in injustice. The film is an essay on the uncertain line between objective reporting and moral culpability.

The timing of Criterion’s release of Medium Cool is ironic given the intense level of media scrutiny surrounding the Senate scandal and the bizarre melodrama currently unfolding at Toronto’s City Hall. In a recent exchange with an old friend of mine, himself an ex-newspaper reporter now teaching at the Journalism School at Carlton University, a variation on some of the same issues presented in Medium Cool was the topic of discussion. He raised the interesting point that our awareness about these matters has come as a direct result of the media’s efforts to hold politicians accountable for their actions; “both (incidents) have been almost entirely triggered by the work of journalists, fulfilling their watchdog role in our democracy. I think that is actually an important point and one that hasn’t been stressed enough. In the case of both the mayor and the senators, these scandals have not emerged from the police, or from some inquiry or commission, but solely from the hard work of journalists.”

Watching Medium Cool should leave you with conflicting thoughts about its message and themes, at least as they echo the contemporary politics and media issues of our own time. On the one hand, the disturbing similarities between the aggressive police tactics employed in Chicago in 1968 and Toronto in 2010 would seem to suggest that little has changed in the intervening years. That said, the media, and in particular, the Toronto Star has risen to the occasion numerous times in recent years pursuing stories that might otherwise have been swept under the carpet, the very concern Haskell Wexler raised in this fascinating cinematic time capsule.