All You need to know about "Oz the Great and Powerful"?

[meganbmoore]

"When Mitchell starts talking about that man behind the curtain and how he got there, this storyline immediately strikes me as a great idea for a movie for a couple of reasons. One was because I love The Wizard of Oz. But this character is only in the last few minutes of that film and we have no idea who he is," Roth explained. "And the second

Comments

[anime_babble]

Yeah, pretty much the reason I have no desire to see this.

[rose_griffes]

Ditto what the above commenter said, although I hadn't heard that particular quote before. I am way more interested in reading the books now than I was before--I never read them when I was young.

[nekobot01]

The books are really wonderful - but written for a child audience. :)

I find them much more satisfying than any of the film adaptations. The annotated Wizard of Oz is a fun read, too, if you can find it at the library.

[meganbmoore]

I read a large chunk of them when young and reread a couple a few years ago, and thought they held up well. I mean, definitely for 10 year olds, but still enjoyable as an adult.

[nekobot01]

As a massive Baum-nerd, I've been really disappointed by the tone of the Oz coverage... and I'm assuming I would be infuriated by the film, too. It's just really frustrating to see a work that I love mangled like this by people whose understanding of the story goes as far as: Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland are the same thing.

I'm still waiting for somebody to make a film out of Ozma's origin story... there's a male protagonist for you. XD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marvelous_Land_of_Oz

[meganbmoore]

If you read the whole article, the dude didn't even know there was a whole series of books, and pretty obviously didn't bother reading any of them.

[the_jackalope]

Oh UGH. I mean, I mostly enjoyed the movie and I'm not SUPER annoyed that they chose to tell the Wizard's story as opposed to any of the MANY female stories in OZ (OK, I am a little, but I'll take an OZ story I can get), but there are TONS of male stories out there. SO MANY. And so many male centric fairy stories, there's one that just came out (Jack and the Beanstalk) but there's SO MANY OTHERS. Screw this idea that fairy tales are all about princesses. Clearly, not only has this man never read an OZ book beyond The Wizard of OZ, he's never read a fairy tale book either.

[meganbmoore]

Apparently, he didn't even bother reading the first before deciding to make the movie.

I feel everyone would just be better off (re)watching Tin Man.

[the_jackalope]

Wait. HE DIDN'T EVEN READ THE NOVEL? Well I guess that explains why Oscar is from Kansas. I sat there muttering in the theater, quite annoyed, that The Wizard was from Nebraska for the first 20 min or so.

[meganbmoore]

If you read the whole article, it becomes obvious that while they may have skimmed a few books while making the movie, the MGM movie was almost exclusively their reference.

[fivil]

This is pretty much what I thought when I saw the trailer to this Oz. Like ..fucking really now? We need to shove a male protagonist in there? And it's got to be James Franco? Dull! I doubt I'll ever see it.

Also annoyed me about the trailer - everybody was like "Only YOU can save us!", which is pretty all par for the course in a typical hero-centric Hollywood movie, which is precisely why it's so boring and been-there-done-that.

[meganbmoore]

I don't have the hate everyone else seems to have for Franco (I...have no opinion of him, really) but my initial "Pretty, but WTF?" to the trailer seems to have been the best response.