OZ the great and powerful/side effects

Oz the great and powerful

I don't really have much to say about this.  A friend wanted to see it, we went, time passed, and it was over. Its ultimately an inert, somewhat pointless film, but has just enough decent execution not to be completely boring (which I'll wholly attribute to director Sam Riami).  The 3-d is about a 5 on the obnoxious scale, and don't think too hard about how it fits into the Wizard of Oz universe because the logic really breaks down.  Really the most interesting part about the film is to see how much referencing of the original film it could get away with without having to pay Warner Brothers (who owns the rights to the Wizard of Oz) any royalties.  The answer is more than I thought.

Side effects

Since this was a Soderbergh film I was inevitable going to see it.  Its well-made and entertaining, its not anywhere near my favorite of his works.  I think the problem is that its a little bit too clever and clinical, lacking the energy of his best films (i.e. Out of Sight or Magic Mike).  Basically even though its well executed and impressively slips between multiple genres, I never quite got engaged on more than an intellectual 'lets see what happens narratively' level.  Its definitely worth seeing, but I think it'll ultimately be viewed as a minor work (by Soderbergh (or your mom's) standards).

Life of Pi

The trailer for this didn't excite me at all.  It looked a little too much like a genre I (and whoever I stole the term from) like to refer to as 'White Middle Class Porn.'  This basically means that its vaguely spiritual with some non-threatening ethnicity, and you feeling like something profound happened, even when it really didn't.  However, I kept hearing good things, Ang Lee won an academy award, and I heard the Smurfs 2 trailer was going to be shown, so I decided to see if my feelings from the trailer were wrong.

They weren't, but that doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't see the film.  Its beautifully shot with some tremendous scenes that Lee obviously put a lot of care into.  It also makes pretty good use of 3-D, with only one really distracting 'pokey' scene.  That said the dialougue is expository at best, and cut rate new-agey at worst.  Since most of the film is one guy on a boat with a tiger I half-wish they had just shot without any talking.  You could have easily followed what was going on without the voiceover, and it would have left more time to focus on the phenomenal imagery.  Also the ending is really stupid.  Completely crosses the line into the White Middle Class Porn/Super Cliched NPR listener territory that I was afraid of.  Its not enough to torpedo the film, but it did make me almost laugh out loud.  Really if they had chopped a half an hour and spent the whole time on the boat with minimal set up the film would have been much better.

Final Note:  Gerard Depradieu get a 'and' credit in the title sequences.  Dude is literally on screen for 45 seconds and has about six lines of dialougue.  I have to figure more of his part got cut because it's a completely extraneous role (to be fair that's pretty much all of them except the dude on the boat and the tiger) and for the life of me I can't figure why they felt the need to pay a 'name' to play it.  Maybe I'll read the book to find out.  Probably not.