Someone On Tim Burton Drugs Threw Up On Oz - Sam Raimi/James Franco Bring You: Oz The Great And Powerful

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1623205/

I saw the trailer for this yesterday and I can't even...

Made for a cool 200 mil

liked that the trailer started in Academy Ratio and then expanded out to 2.35:1 but yeah this looks guff

can't be worse than Alice, surely, but also can't be bothered to find out

kind of surprised this doesn't appear to be based on any of the many L. Frank Baum-penned sequels/prequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?

this will be 100000x more tolerable than Wicked, at least.

Alice in Wonderland:

Domestic: $334,191,110
+ Foreign: $690,108,794

whoa

yeah i recently came across those alice in wonderland numbers recently! it's the 12th high grossing film of all time, i thought it was like a moderate hit at best...no one ever talks about that movie

Yeah this just looks like Wizard of Oz in Wonderland

nothing about this even interests me?

3D is soon going to make "all time" unadjusted grosses and "the last 2 years" the same thing.

Normally, Michelle Williams+Rachel Weisz+Mila Kunis would be an automatic go-see. Not so much, this time...

yeah the more stars are shown in this, the more I recoil

disrespectful prequels to iconic films feels just abt right for 2012 hollywood

jonah hill IS Rosebud the Sled in the 3D blockbuster WASSUP KANE

a la forthcoming Making of Psycho, whose audience will largely be ppl who haven't seen Psycho

brb fetching yr development deal xp

disrespectful prequels to iconic films feels just abt right for 2012 hollywood

kind of surprised this doesn't appear to be based on any of the many L. Frank Baum-penned sequels/prequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?

I have no idea, what was Baum's backstory for the wizard?

I have a friend who worked on the makeup for this movie, so I'm sure the makeup will be nice. That's the one positive thing I can say.

having just rewatched the original 'wizard' and remembered how awesome and surprisingly complex and intriguing and multifaceted it is i'm feeling kind of completely fed up with the whole spate of oh-so-clever 'revisionist' takes on the material.

i refuse to believe this won't be good - raimiiiiiiiii

Pretty certain that a friend is dragging me to this tonight. The commercials and the premise had me afraid. The reviews I've read since have me VERY afraid. I'm not even enough of a Raimi fan to take comfort in his being at the helm.

I'll let you know.

Slant review is a delicious nuke. "Franco, well cast as a poseur..."

i feel like the arc of america's relationship w/james franco is basically

http://i287.photobucket.com/albums/ll158/captportmanteau/inbrugeswhydidntyouwaveback.gif

irl lols

My Raimi fangirlyness is guilting me into hoping that this is good and possibly even seeing it in the theater

You better not John Carpenter me, you fucker.

From a major Raimi fan:

http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2013/03/oz-the-great-and-powerful.html

James Franco, who's now claimed the mantle of the worst actor in the United States from the quiescent Paul Walker.

hey now, paul walker's not that bad

Shrek + Hugo + every Burton/Depp joint of the last decade = this.

So, pretty much what you'd expect.

Also, the theatre we saw it at didn't have a 2D option, so my eyes still feel like they're bleeding hours later.

don't associate Sweeney Todd w/ this

kind of surprised this doesn't appear to be based on any of the many L. Frank Baum-penned sequels/prequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?

yeah, they tried that with 'return to oz' and it didn't make any money. every 'oz' reboot from hereon out is just going to be a shitty version of the original film.

Jeez, I keep forgetting about Sweeney Todd because it didn't suck.

Yes it did, it sucked wholesale

Im v glad the cast in this is so hot because i am under orders

I am watching franco talk to some sky movies clown about this movie and his eyes are actually unfocused and he looks fucked out of his head and zach braff is doing all the talking for them and i'm worried about james franco in 2013 and my god does this look the worst

He apparently never sleeps, so lets hope that's the extent of his problems.

this is going to be terrible, isn't it

there's no way around it

The two things that struck me the most were

a) the inappropriate casting (noted in the FFC review i liked above, so maybe on my mind as I was watching). Franco and Kunis clearly haven't a fucking clue what they're supposed to be doing in this movie.

b) the Shrek-style wink-nudge asides throughout, turning an already obnoxious movie into a assholish one as well.

*an

c) zach braff is cast as vocal talent. of all things he is and is not, a disembodied voice of note is surely amongst the latter. obv a deeply irritating cunt is amongst the former but that's besides

had pretty high hopes for this, so the buzz is a bummer. crossing fingers it won't be 4 years till the next raimi movie and that it won't be Oz 2.

Nah, this is a future AV Club My Wold Of Flops entry if there ever was one.

i dunno, they're already gearing up for a sequel, and - though I've never heard anything good about it from anyone ever - alice in wonderland was a big hit

This whole thing owes its existence to the success of Alice in Wonderland, which, while I know it was a hit at the box office, still surprises me when its pointed out how MUCH of a hit it was, especially considering that I can't think of a single person I know who liked it all that much.

xp! 1. this movie is the direct result of burton's alice in wonderland being successful

2. you'd think that after the spider-man trilogy made billions raimi could do whatever he wanted so why did he do this

He did do whatever he wanted post-Spiderman. He did Drag Me To Hell. Then came this payday.

It does not matter if you like a movie or not once you've bought the ticket.

Someone on Facebook said this was misogynist. What's that about?

This Oz is quite the pussyhound.

i understand the witches show their very cold tits

xp

Truthfully, the movie is far too sloppy and dumb to qualify as misogynist. Anything like that made it in purely by accident. Justifies absolutely nothing, of course, but its not like the movie set out deliberately to be offensive. It's crimes are far more aesthetic than anything.

c) zach braff is cast as vocal talent. of all things he is and is not, a disembodied voice of note is surely amongst the latter.

braff has been the voice of PUR water filter commercials for a few years now, ensuring that I have not purchased one of their products during that time.

The film was definitely missing a scene where Oz and his monkey servant bond over a boring Shins song.

Someone on Facebook said this was misogynist. What's that about?

― circa1916, Saturday, March 9, 2013 7:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't know about any misogyny, as I haven't seen it (nor will I ever), but there was a big piece at Jezebel the other day about L. Frank Baum, his women's rights advocacy, and the fact that nearly all of his stories' heroes were women, with no love stories; and that this movies is the exact opposite of that: http://jezebel.com/5989268/why-oz-the-great-and-powerful-is-a-major-step-back-for-witches-and-women

yeah Dargis made ref to that in her NYT pan of this thing.

Major step back

huge hit - http://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=3647&p=.htm

esp when you compare it to jack & the giantslayer, which has made half as much in two weeks, with similar $200m budgets

I can't help it - I have to back-up a dump truck full of snark to this thread.

Did *ANYONE* honestly expect this movie to not suck?

Everything about this movie feels like a silly example from Thomas Lennon/Ben Garant screenwriting book - if you told me that James Franco switches bodies with a basset hound midway through, I would have believed you.

Apparently people like going to big 3d spectacles involving beautiful people and millions of dollars worth of visual whoop-de-doo.

I don't really want to see this but if someone dragged me I'd be like "cool, Mila Kunis in 3D I CAN LIVE W THAT".

Did *ANYONE* honestly expect this movie to not suck?

cast and director was enough to HOPE it wouldn't suck

well, director

VG I <3 you so much for this thread title!

lol! <3

i wouldnt call this a huge hit yet, esp if it falls off 60%

cast and director was enough to HOPE it wouldn't suck

u know it's the guy who made 3 utterly gratuitous Spiderman movies, yes?

are you repping for Ditko or

morbz did you see them or were they too gratuitous

Hello.

I enjoyed this film greatly.

Yes, there were a couple too many "ooooh, look!" 3D moments (the "ooh" was in the script, I mean), but still.

Better than "Les Mis", the music certainly helped it there.

Remind me never to see Les Mis.

Don't see it.

srsly, up to halfway through, I was like "help , lemme out!!!"

The last half is alright, to be fair. But when people say "I'd like to see it again", I'm like "can I come in about an hour into it?"

i saw the first 2 gratuitous ones, croup

what would have made them non-gratuitous

This was a real mess, but I kind of enjoyed it. Plot is all over the place and the whole feel of it is so mixed and disjointed (some of it beautiful, some of it really garish green-screen-looking) that it has a kind of empty, dream-like quality for the first half or so – and not necessarily in a positive way, more like there should be more stuff going on or a fuller feel or less straightforward going from A to B. Maybe that’s what kids’ films are like these days, not much sense of consequence - I think Alice in Wonderland suffered from this too. Not sure the CG monkey worked at all but the china girl was well done and they seemed to resist the urge to Dreamworks-up the modern joke factor, or provide ‘clever’ origins for every single aspect of the original movie. Also James Franco wasn’t as annoying as I’d feared, he’s actually fairly well cast.

The 3-D was really good – I don’t see films in 3D much and when I do, there’s always a trailer for the Great Gatsby up first which is SO HORRIBLE in 3D (really pop-up-book style, dissolves that don’t work in 3D, just a weird cartoonish look) that I think I’m going to severely regret it but this was a pleasant surprise (although a little like the Disneyland 3D theatre with stuff flies at yr face more than normal). Opening title sequence was really nice.

The look of a lot of it was bang-on wrt to the original - that slightly wonky oversaturated feel was pretty good and made the movie for me.
Mila dances in what look like PVC trousers if that helps anyone decide whether to watch this or not.

The 3d is the blurriest, worst and most invasive ive seen yet. its hard to say how the movie looks besides, as i couldnt see a thing, but im veering towards awful. The script and plot are insultingly stupid. The performances are appalling. The music is even rubbish. This is one of the worst movies i have ever seen.

zach braff as a talking monkey is almost the fucking highlight.

Lol I just read this thread and was informed that it is not based on one of the many many Oz books. What a terrible idea! Its free public domain source material and would give this project some form of artistic integrity. Its not like the books make much sense or have a lot of continuity anyway and you could easily pick and choose parts from all over...

but NO we have to make James Franco be pretty and conflicted in a made up story that some hollywood hack came up with that sucks.

This movie is gonna suck so bad that it will sync up with The Division Bell

you dont understand, look, i knew this would be bad but i have been shocked.

xpost

Real life LOL!

btw les mis is a million times the better movie, were one to arbitrarily rank them alongsides

bravo viceroy

Zach Braff was so good as Billy Crystal voicing a monkey.

voicing a monkey would be a good euphemism

Well im using it from now on. "Don't go voicing a monkey on me now. Oh I'm just kidding, I love you"

where's cunga

voicing a monkey, idk

Haha

Producer Joe Roth became involved for nearly the same reason as Kapner, stating that "...during the years that I spent running Walt Disney Studios -- I learned about how hard it was to find a fairy tale with a good strong male protagonist. You've got your Sleeping Beauties, your Cinderellas and your Alices. But a fairy tale with a male protagonist is very hard to come by. But with the origin story of the Wizard of Oz, here was a fairy tale story with a natural male protagonist. Which is why I knew that this was an idea for a movie that was genuinely worth pursuing."

Which is kind of the key, James Franco is stinking his way slowly through The Little Conman Who Could, and everything else in the movie is more interesting than him. Mila Kunis is actually a really good (and oddly hot) Wicked Witch, and the scene just before her transformation had some nice body horror.

Raimi does hate his hags, though.

Also not one but two sassy blacks! Considering the last film I saw in the theater, I had to remind myself that the head of the tinkers guilds was not in fact being played by Samuel L Jackson.

I predict that the Mariah Carey song that played during the end credits will achieve the same timelessness as "Somewhere Over The Rainbow".

Kunis is actually not really good, nobody is. Whoever upthread said that kunis and franco were both confused/lost throughout was otm.

Kunis is even worse in this than Franco is.

But yeah, neither of them has any idea what they're doing in this movie (pretty sure that was my comment above, but if not, thirded).

Both kunis and franco better than weisz, performance and character.

But idk how you could say any of em were interesting, even relative to each other.

Kudos where due the doll was incredibly well done.

Did killer box office in its second week, which means I was wrong about it just needing time for word to start circulating over how much it sucks. Seems ppl actually like this thing. More to come then, I guess.

How, why

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/03/08/sam-raimi-says-he-doesnt-want-to-direct-the-oz-the-great-and-powerful-sequel/

I haven’t planned on directing the sequel. I did leave some loose ends for another director if they want to make the picture. I tried to make it a complete ending, so that the audience would be fulfilled, but I also let Evenora and Theodora get away.

I was attracted to this story but I don’t think the second one would have the thing I would need to get me interested.

considering disney's pretty happy with it, it sounds like raimi didn't have fun if he's closing the door so quickly

or maybe disney already told him he couldn't have john malkovich as the vulture

Will see this when it hits the cheapies, just b/c I'm a fan of sam raimi.

Why tf does a movie need a male protagonist to make it "worth pursuing"? Xp re that quote above.
Friend of mine worked on the doll, cool thing to have on your reel

So my Mom (who, incidentally, also told me that she fell asleep during the film) tells me that her hairdresser claims that Oz is the best movie he's seen in 20 years. WTF people?!

that's forgiveable coming from yr mom's hairdresser

i've given this a week, and i've decided that this was actually much worse than i had thought. what a steaming pile.

I walked out after 20m. And that's coming from a guy who liked John Carter AND Battleship.

the first 20m were the best by a distance

i am watching this right now.

why did the wicked witch who was pretending to be the good witch send the wizard that she knew wasn't a wizard to find the good witch, who the fake good witch said was the wicked witch, which would inevitably lead to him discovering that the witch she said was wicked was actually the good witch?

munchkins are singing now.

why did mila kunis just go ahead and eat that apple?? is the real wicked witch actually still in love with james franco??? was she ever?

mila kunis witch vs. michelle williams witch WHICH ONE?

mila kunis just ate an apple, went bad all of a sudden and just arrived in the good witch's city to randomly fuck shit up, and is possibly going to face off with michelle williams.

anyways, a lot of this movie makes no sense and looks horrible but i'm enjoying it. that's all i have to say.

Stop ILXing from the cinema, dude!

I know, we love you but get some rest!

if you are texting in a cinema that has other people in it, fuck you

Oh pls he's doing any bastard watching it a favour, if it's even possible for an extra flashing random light to make any difference to this pos

abanana otm

i downloaded it :(

Will see this when it hits the cheapies, just b/c I'm a fan of sam raimi.

― The New Jack Mormons! (kingfish), Sunday, March 17, 2013 11:47 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Basically my rationale for seeing Burton's Alice and I was still revulsed and wanted my 2 dollars and hundred minutes back. Not going down that (yellow brick) road again.

this is closing in on a $400 million worldwide gross, so all of you who went should be proud.

call them out by name

I was forced against my will!

Same as, but im preaching like paul agin it since tbf

spiderman 3 killed dead any Raimi love i once had. drag me to hell was nice, i confess, but i wasn't expecting much so that may have influenced my thinking of that joint.

xpost

Likewise, but the people who are going to like it have already decided that it's good, and few people who know better will go see this on purpose.

Haha, that was absolutely rotten.

Shittest film I've sat through all of for a good couple of years.

otm

a few people near me were watching this on my flight and my movie thing didn't work so I watched large parts of it with the sound off. it seemed sort of interesting and amusing that way.

the sad thing is disney already made a perfectly awesome oz movie three decades ago and no one ever talks about it except in a 'lol 80s movies' way

i just saw part of this on a plane and it was rouuuuggghhh.

so glad i didn't see it in theaters

Return to Oz is a total cult classic

return to oz was a childhood favorite, haven't seen it in years though

Me and my flatmate have decided to watch Return again soon (first time since childhood for both of us), will report back.

it holds up really well imo, captures the crazy, giddy narrative style of the baum books while adding this genuine sense of menace and darkness.

By the way, why do people reckon the usually perfectly decent Franco was so appalling in this? Poor direction or just couldn't be arsed?

he was fucked out of his head on substances

I am watching franco talk to some sky movies clown about this movie and his eyes are actually unfocused and he looks fucked out of his head and zach braff is doing all the talking for them and i'm worried about james franco in 2013 and my god does this look the worst

― i don't have to be fair, i'm *right* (darraghmac), Saturday, March 9, 2013 9:40 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's performance art man

Franco had no idea what he was doing in this movie. Franco had no idea what kind of movie he was in. Yes, the movie itself gave him little to work with, but that doesn't make his performance not terrible.

In fairness, Mila Kunis may have been even worse.

By the way, why do people reckon the usually perfectly decent Franco was so appalling in this? Poor direction or just couldn't be arsed?

― I wish to incorporate disco into my small business (chap), Wednesday, June 5, 2013 7:07 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he is usually perfectly awful, though

I can't remember ever thinking that he was actually good in a movie, though I could see his presence working in something like Spring Breakers (which I haven't seen).

he's ok playing allen ginsberg in that 'howl' movie.

maybe it's just hard to cast aside the "james franco, professional dilletante" associations when watching him

he's adorable in pineapple express

adorable

i like raimi and this cast enough that I have to assume Disney wasn't letting anything cool happen

I still think it's visually pretty cool

The art direction was alright, but some of the actual cgi was worse than in your average episode of Doctor Who.

So did this land Raimi in movie jail?

Working on an Evil Dead show seems like a much better use of his time.

Wow, I can't believe I only asked four months ago, feels like years ago. Anyway, just rewatched "Drag Me to Hell." What a fun movie that is. Is he even really actively working on the Evil Dead show, or is he just some sort of exec. producer or something? Oz was, what, five years ago? I should rewatch "A Simple Plan," which might be his latter day masterpiece. Certainly peak Paxton and Thornton performances.