Emerald City/Facebook.
I have never liked The Wizard of Oz. I didn’t like the book, and I hated the movie. I’ve avoided it in all incarnations ever since having to watch that mess on television when I was a young sprog. I’ll probably give this, um, take on Oz a miss too. It will be a visual feast, no question about that, given direction by Tarsem Singh. (The Cell was one of the most visually beautiful movies ever, but boy, was it stupid. If you want visually stunning and a good story, watch The Fall.) Tarsem Singh knows how to bring the stunningly beautiful, but he needs to be reigned in a tad by a good story and by a specific sense and style. Else it’s just a free for all, and that’s what happens here, going by the trailer at least.
This looks enjoyable enough, in a popcorn way, but the trailer exposes a terrible mishmashmush of, well, damn near everything, and some glaring admissions of “hey, went with bog standard norm boring.” A serious plus is Vincent D’Onofrio, because when isn’t he a plus? But I found the trailer troubling, on many levels.
Dorothy isn’t white. Well, that’s a start, I guess. I was initially heartened by the pride rainbow in the Kansas farmhouse window, but that gets quickly blown away, along with Dorothy. Could have been exciting if Dorothy were genderqueer, or lesbian (there’s no reason the scarecrow love interest couldn’t have been genderqueer or lesbian, right? But no, standard uber-hunky white British dude.) Well, it is on network teevee, so it’s probably best not to expect too much. The munchkins are gone, replaced by what looks to be some sort of semi-primitive tribe of Indians. There’s progress for ya. The rest of it looks like they tried to steal from every fricking culture and era ever, a bit Chronicles of Narnia here, a bit Game of Thrones there, and probably a bit of The Holy Grail somewhere, too. What it doesn’t seem to have is its own distinct style, and that’s enough to keep me away, even if I do want to watch just for the eye candy, and boy, is there a lot of that.
https://youtu.be/WKeRnyFIHWs
If you want visually stunning and a good story, watch The Fall
Not to be confused with “Legends of the Fall” ;)
Another visually stunning movie is Peter Greenaway’s “The Tempest” and, well, pretty much anything else he’s done.
Marcus:
The only thing that bugged about that movie was the dissing shown towards Alfred Russel Wallace. I absolutely loved the little girl’s assumption that the Indian in the story was an East Indian, and I liked her bringing communion wafers to him to eat -- “crackers!”
Don’t forget Star Wars…
At least I can tell you where the Emerald City is: Barcelona. I swear I stood on that balcony nigh nine months ago.
To the wizard of Oz: I grew up with the Russian version with the most beautiful illustrations of Lionid Vladimirsky and I love those books dearly.
I strongly recommend Wicked, though (the novel).
Ivo @ 4, I’ve read it, it was gifted to me, otherwise I would have skipped it. I’m rather ambivalent about Maguire’s books, I find him too derivative for my tastes. I prefer Jim C. Hines (If you haven’t read his Princess books, I highly recommend them) and Tom Robbins.
If I had a functioning TV and some cable-like-thingy I would absolutely watch a show that had that scarlet-clad person in it.
Didn’t like Wicked, either. I could not follow the logic of the story right to the end, it seemed disjointed and incomprehensible. Still contemplating whether to read the read the rest of the series. I read Maguire’s version of Snow White, and while it had elements that I liked, I did not like the book as a whole.
I liked The Fall. Visually stunning is an understatement.
This -- mixed feelings, because with all the beautiful things they’ve done, it seems they did a lot of other things not-right. I did enjoy the Oz books in general, though, as a light piece of odd entertainment, somewhere well below Alice in Wonderland on the scale of surreal books.