The Wizard of Oz

The classic 1939 movie “The Wizard of Oz” recently returned to movie theaters, for one week, in IMAX 3D.  Although I’m not a big fan of it, I did consider it worth checking out in that format, and the treatment itself was impressive, if not so much the movie itself.  The higher resolution exposed some of the flaws, but overall the film as about as good as it’s going to get.

Book.   The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) was L. Frank Baum’s attempt at a children’s story which was somewhat more lighthearted and grim than the usual fairy tales, e.g. Hansel & Gretel’s parents abandoning them in a forest to a cannibalistic witch. 

            Dorothy & Toto are pulled up into a tornado in Kansas and magically transported to the land of Oz.  They meet the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and eventually the Wizard himself, in the Emerald City.  They’re helped by Glinda the Good, and opposed by the Wicked Witch of the West.  WWW’s minions are flying monkeys, although in the story the flying monkeys obey whoever commands them with a special magic item (later on Dorothy herself commands them to fly her and her companions over the deadly desert).   She not only defeats the Witch, but also exposes the Wizard as a “humbug” (fake).  However, the Wizard still rewards the Scarecrow with “brains”, the Tin Man with a “heart”, and the Cowardly Lion with “courage”.  After all this, Dorothy finally goes home to Kansas.

            After this, Baum became a victim of his own success.  Children mercilessly begged him to write more stories, and he felt compelled to comply.  So he kept writing more.  They get progressively stranger and more violent.  I don’t know if Baum was running out of good ideas or was “spoiling the milk” to sabotage his success.  I downloaded the complete compendium onto my Android Kindle and am still only 43% through after three complete stories.    

Movie.   The 1939 version with Judy Garland as Dorothy is probably by far the most known, but (see below) not the only one.   For the most part the movie is fairly faithful to the original story, the differences being fairly insignificant.  I don’t like the songs or music, though.  I could never quite enjoy the film, and as an adult I still don’t:  it is, despite 3D, IMAX, and song & dance, essentially a children’s story.

Return to Oz.   This is a 1986 film with Fairuza Balk as Dorothy; it’s strange because although the story is a sequel to the 1939 one (both in terms of being based on a subsequent book AND described in those terms in the movie itself) the actress is younger than Judy Garland was.   Her trip to Oz regressed her!  As I mentioned, it’s actually an adaptation of the next story in the series.  The Wheelers, the evil head-switching queen, Tik Tok, Bilina, Jack Pumpkinhead, the Gump, and the Nome King are all part of that story.  Relative to the first story, this one comes off as more disturbing and less pleasant.  However, I’d say it’s fun to watch simply due to its unintentional trippiness.

Oz the Great and Powerful.   Wizard Oscar “Oz” Diggs (James Franco) is a stage magician, not a real wizard.  He gives out music boxes to his female admirers (including Abigail Spencer, who is very pretty).  Like the original W’o’Oz, the film starts out in B&W and transforms into color.  Heresy, I know, but I much prefer this movie to the 1939 version.

            A tornado hits Kansas (big plot swerve there, huh?) and takes him to Oz.  In the Emerald City he meets a pair of sisters Theodora and Evanora (Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz) who welcome him as the “wizard” who will “save” Oz from the Wicked Witch.   Theodora falls in love with him, but Evanora immediately recognizes that he’s a fraud.  They send him off to kill the “Wicked Witch”, who turns out to be the good witch Glinda (Michelle Williams).   For his part, Oz has not much in the way of scruples about playing the “wizard” for Kansas hicks to earn his living, but is considerably less comfortable when it comes to doing so for real to either kill someone or being depended upon to save innocent lives.  Ultimately, though, Oz “A-Teams” it and comes up with an elaborate plan, using what “wizardry” he does know and understand, i.e. contemporary science tricked up to appear as magic, with an explicit reference to “The Wizard of Menlo Park”, Thomas Edison (no mention of Tesla…huh?) to defeat the two sisters (some vaguely Ewok-type operations in here too, but no Jar-Jar like character, thank God).  This is even more remarkable given that Oz doesn’t seem to have any formal background in science or engineering.  For their part, Evanora tricks Theodora into eating a poison apple which transforms her from “Cute Jackie” into the “ugly green bitch” we recognize from the 1939 original.   

            It looks like someone decided, “let’s ‘remake’ the original 1939 Wizard of Oz using 2013 3D CGI magic,” or as Waters might say, “all these electronic goodies which are available for people like us to use.”  Although it’s a prequel (story of how the Wizard of Oz came to be) it’s very faithful to the original movie in spirit and also much of Baum’s work – including the little living China Girl.  I’ve yet to come across the actual story (if any) from which this movie is derived, aside from the Oz stories in general.  The ending strongly suggests a sequel is being set up, and I’m pleased to see that unlike “John Carter”, this movie seemed to do well at the box office, as it well deserved, making that sequel much more likely to see the light of day.  Amen.

Silent films.   There were several silent films before the 1939 film.  I saw a pair of them, one from 1914, one from 1925.  Neither follows a story I’ve read, but they may be following subsequent books, or very liberally adapting the existing stories. 

      I found the plot the first one to be kind of stretched, and was not overly impressed by the various characters.  Female leads from this era consistently seem to have a boring plainness and ugliness we would never accept in actresses nowadays.  I guess that’s what passed for beautiful back then.  Theda Bara vs. Angelina Jolie?  Please, Bara can’t compete with Jennifer Aniston, or even Jeanine Garafalo.  Oddly, the leading men are still handsome – go figure. 

            I found the second movie to be…how should be put this?  Yet another unintentionally trippy film, especially due to the bewildering array of pantomime animals and very scanty use of the story boards (dialogue boards silent films use in between actual camera shots).  I vaguely gathered the story was about some princess bewitched to have her heart stoned (!) as to be immune to love for anyone, and eventually – very unclear how and a vast amount of time and effort in between – cured and happily reunited with her modest-income loved one.  Again, I don’t know if this was simply lifted verbatim from a story of his with the expectation that audiences at the time would have already been familiar with the story.

            With silent films, you’re working with a medium which is clearly obsolete.  Even D.W. Griffith classics like “Birth of a Nation” and “Intolerance” have that scarcely definable weirdness which provides part of the entertainment value to us jaded twenty first century viewers, who now have not only color and sound, but also THX (if not THC….hmm, I wonder if that is a coincidence) and 3D and IMAX effects; though I’d argue that “Gone With the Wind” or “The Wizard of Oz” (both 1939) have more in common with “Avatar” than with the silent films just 10 years before.   

Baltimore

I covered Baltimore before, briefly, in my Maryland blog (6/25/10), but if Hagerstown and Frederick deserve their own blogs, why not Baltimore?

It’s the biggest city in Maryland, located 30 minutes northeast of DC on 95, Route 1, and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.  On my trips to NJ/NY, Baltimore winds up being right around the 1 hour mark of a four hour drive, the quarter mark, so to speak.  It has its own beltway, 695, which I’ve been around mainly to get to Towson.  Not one but two tunnels, Harbor and Fort McHenry, provide a bypass for traffic going to or from DC to NY.

 

Most recently I saw Clutch at the Shindig Festival at Carroll Park, which is over in western Baltimore near where the Montgomery Park building is; another Clutch show, back last July, put me up Charles Street to another part of town for the free Artscape Festival.   Baltimore is a city I learn by bits and pieces, as I’ve never lived or worked there.  Mainly it’s been concerts at Hammerjacks (ages ago) and the Ram’s Head Live in the downtown area (again, thanks to Clutch), or less often legal work.   The Circuit Court building is ancient – turn of the century style – and the downtown area features in “Die Hard 4”, masquerading, highly unsuccessfully, as Washington DC.   No one who has ever been to either city, much less both, would ever mistake one for the other.  “And Justice For All…” is another legal drama in Baltimore.  The other city Baltimore reminds me of, due to the heavy dose of monuments and fancy nineteenth century buildings, is Richmond, Virginia.

History.  Founded in 1729 as a town, named after Lord Baltimore (note: the band Sir Lord Baltimore are actually from Brooklyn, New York), it became a city in 1796 and incorporated in 1851.  It’s the site of Fort McHenry, the subject of Francis Scott Key’s famous song, “The Star Bangled Banner,” which of course is our poorly-sung national anthem.  Notable B-moreans are Edgar Allen Poe and H.L. Mencken.   The city boomed after the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad opened in 1835.  During the Civil War a few riots persuaded the US to occupy the town.  I remember in school some of the more pedantic jerks used to snivel about George Washington not being the first President, facetiously citing several prior Presidents of the Continental Congress (or Congreff, as Woody might say), which was the provisional US government from 1773 to 1789.  Likewise, from December 1776 to February 1777, it was the capital of Bourgeois Revolutionary Soviet of America, as I like to call it. 

It suffered a fire in 1904, and riots in the Civil War, 1877, and 1968.  The Inner Harbor area, probably the nicest and most upscale neighborhood – where I’ve been on dates – was refurbished in the early 80s.  The city still has its share of crappy neighborhoods.  There’s a red light district close to Ram’s Head Live.  The harbor itself is fairly large – so much so that two tunnels have to bring traffic under it.

Which leads to my question:  why are there TWO tunnels?  The Harbor Tunnel opened in 1957; this is the tunnel I remember our family going through on trips to NYC and Long Island in the 1970s.   Apparently this wasn’t enough (though I don’t remember heavy traffic in the Harbor Tunnel), so they tied up 95 with the Fort McHenry Tunnel in 1985.  After that they renovated the Harbor Tunnel and opened it up again in 1990.  The Harbor Tunnel is fed by the 895 bypass, which hooks up to 95 at either end.  To me they’re pretty much the same, but I usually wind up taking the Harbor Tunnel by default and the Fort McHenry Tunnel just out of sheer boredom and variety.

National Bohemian is the city’s beer, although it’s not brewed in Baltimore anymore (NC and GA).  It’s now owned by, and tastes like, Pabst (which earned its Blue Ribbon at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893).  It’s called Natty Bo and has a one-eyed, mustachio’d mascot, Mr. Boh…who is rather distinctive even if the beer itself isn’t.

Sports.  The Cleveland Browns relocated in 1996 and became the Baltimore Ravens, an obvious tribute to Edgar Allen Poe.   They won the Super Bowl last year against the 49ers, and back in 2000 against the NY Giants:  Ray Lewis was on both teams.  The Colts relocated to Indianapolis in 1984, having started up in Baltimore in 1951.  The Colts beat the Cowboys in 1971, after having lost to the upstart Jets (led by Joe Namath) in 1969.  The baseball team, the Orioles, date from 1954 and won the World Series in 1967, 1970, and 1983.  I've passed by Camden Yards countless times but have never been to an Orioles game; the same with passing M&T Bank Stadium and never seeing the Ravens play.

Poe.   Seeing as they didn’t reference Mencken when renaming the Browns, I’d say Poe is more important to Baltimore then H.L.  Frank Zappa was born and grew up in Baltimore – I saw Zappa Play Zappa at a “rename a Baltimore city street after the musician” free festival – but moved to L.A. with his family in 1952 when he was 12 years old.  Poe himself had a rocky life and moved several times, living in Baltimore several times before dying there in 1849.  No other city – not Richmond, not Boston – seems to lay as much claim to him as Baltimore does.  

On The Road

This is the long-awaited film version of Kerouac’s famous road trip novel, which I finally managed to watch on DVD – there was no discernable local theatrical release I could find.  Sam Riley plays Sal Paradise (Kerouac), Garrett Hedlund (Tron Legacy) plays Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), Viggo “Aragorn” Mortensen plays Old Bull Lee (William S. Burroughs, author of The Naked Lunch), Kristen (“Bella”) Stewart plays Mary-Lou (Dean GF #1), and Kirsten Dunst plays Camille (Dean GF #2).  There’s even Elizabeth Moss (aka Peggy Olson from “Mad Men”) as Galatea Dunkel.  Here she doesn’t have to do any ad copy for sexist clients, just bitch about her husband abandoning her at Old Bull’s place.

            This story ranks up there with The Great Gatsby as a perennial favorite of high school English teachers, I have my theory as to why (assuming my impression as to its popularity is accurate).   Rock journalists love Keith Richards, as we well know.  Keith has done all the things we’d love to do and lived to tell the story – and even outlived many other rock musicians (Elvis, Michael Jackson, John Bonham, Keith Moon, Janis, Jimi, Jim Morrison, etc.).   So with regard to him, I think the rock journalists hold him in awe: “those who can’t, teach.”  And with On The Road you have a similar deal as with my observation on Star Trek: Kirk is who male Trekkers wish they were, Picard is who they actually are.  Here, Dean is who all those English teachers wish they had been, whereas Sal is closer to who they actually were at that age – but hey, Sal is Kerouac himself, so don’t feel too badly. 

            Now on to the movie review.  Funny, I’ve seen Walter Salles’ other movies (“Central Station”, “Motorcycle Diaries” and “Paris Je T’aime”) but this didn’t register to me that it was one of his films.  I suppose my take on directors is, if the technique is so bizarre that you notice it (e.g. Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers”), the guy screwed up somehow.  So Salles did a good job on this one.

This movie had far more bisexuality and men kissing than the book had (though less male-on-male romping than Ser Loras Tyrell in “Game of Thrones”).  Mind you, I didn’t read the book back in high school, I read it very recently.  I can imagine the movie people arguing, “well, Kerouac kept it all out so as not to offend the squares when he published the book [written in 1951 but not published until 1957, and even then after some struggle and difficulty], but that’s what actually happened.  Now that we’re in 2012 and people aren’t so uptight about these things anymore, we can more accurately portray what really happened.”  But this was a novel – a work of fiction loosely based upon Kerouac’s own experiences. 

            So as unpleasant as I found that element of the story, I’ll concede it’s probably closer to portraying the aggregate of experiences which the group did back then.  They smoked pot.   They crossed the country by bus, car, hitch-hiking, etc.  When they drove themselves, Dean was behind the wheel terrifying whoever they picked up with his maniac driving, this back when cars had shitty brakes and suspensions – and no seat belts.  When suitable female companionship was not available, they jumped in bed with each other, or engaged in MMF threesomes as the whim and opportunity arose.   Ultimately the whole thing was each person’s surrender to sensuality and hedonism, pushing tolerances to the limits, of which Dean’s was probably the highest.  Getting back to the high school English teachers, the novel gives the rest of us a chance to live vicariously through these characters.  [“Don’t try this at home.  These are professional beatnik novelists.”]

            Then again, maybe someone should recreate the experience again.  And by that I don’t mean, cross America on back roads in Hudsons or buses, necessarily.  Not an exact slavish recreation of the 1949 experience, but a recreation based on existing circumstances.  Take Amtrak or Greyhound.  Take I70 or I80.  Take ecstasy or LSD, which weren’t around for Dean and his buddies to enjoy in 1949.   As per The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the Kesey road trips in Furthur in 1964 were their On The Road for that time, especially since Neal Cassady was driving the bus, and thus was a common element of both; at that time not only was LSD available, it was still legal.  Now that bisexuality is more accepted, it’s optional in the 2013 version because we’re not out to shock anyone anymore – bring along Marilyn Manson & Eminem?  Surrender again, but in the world as we know it now, with the Internet and iPods.  Every generation should have its On The Road, not just the beatniks of the late 40s or the hippies of the early 60s.  

Friends

Every now and then I like to do a blog about more vague, esoteric ideas, rather than books, movies, wars, rock bands, etc.   Especially since this word can be extremely vague depending on the context.

TV Show.   I might as well address the NBC show, which ran from 1994 to 2004.  I didn’t follow it from the beginning, I simply started watching it because it came on after “Seinfeld” (1989-98) and I was too lazy to change the channel or turn off the TV, which was probably what NBC bet on when it gave it the “Must See TV” Thursday night time slot.   By the time “Seinfeld” ended in 1998, I had come to like Joey, Ross, Chandler, Monica and Rachel.  But not Phoebe.  I could never stand her.  Nor did I care for Gunther, Central Perk, or the way the official name of each episode starts with “the one with…”  However, I did buy into the Rachel-Ross romance and didn’t like Emily.   Anyhow.

School.  It seems that from every school, I wound up with two friends, though by now St. Martin’s has been such a long time ago, although I’ve found many of my school chums on Facebook, I’ve yet to be able to meet up with them.  

Marymount in Paris?  Danton and Geoff, but again difficulty in meeting them as Danton is in NYC and Geoff is in Dubai?  London?  Computer, locate Geoff. 

ASP?  Jean is in Germany, Phil is in Colorado. 

UMCP?  Ken won’t speak to me, Dave and I write to each other. 

GMU Law?  John in Virginia Beach, Jim in Chantilly.

Work.   I suppose it’s possible to be friends with the people you work with, but I distinguish things this way.  If you don’t spend any time with the person away from work, they’re not your friends, no matter how well you get along with them at the office.   At work, you’re paid to be there, and it’s better to get along than to fight or backstab, right?  But if they won’t spend their free time with you, they have no business calling you their friend.

Fair Weather Friends.   I remember my dad telling me about this.   A pair of kids called us up asking if we wanted to hang out with them.  My dad remarked, “Pfft.  Why are they calling all the sudden?  Sounds like no one else was available,” and explained this concept.  People who only hang out with you when they have nothing better to do.

That also covers people who only call you when they need you for something.   Either hang out together or stop calling me your friend.   Some friend dynamics might be changing in Colorado and Washington:  see “Pineapple Express.”

“Friends” (men and women).   This is where it gets really bad, because when women use the word “friend” regarding men, it can mean almost anything. 

1)    Boyfriend asks girlfriend about one of her guy friends, who might be an ex-BF or a guy the BF knows she likes.  She says, “oh, he’s just a friend.”  If all the other circumstances indicate that he’s more than just a friend, that “oh, he’s just a friend” should be completely ignored.  I say there’s “smart jealous” and “stupid jealous”.  “Smart jealous” may include scenarios such as: ex-BF who suggests a weekend rendezvous.  “Stupid jealous” involves a flirtatious cab driver or the girl’s brother who simply happens to be good looking.

2)    “Friend zone”.  Sometimes a woman consigns a man to eternal platonic-tude.  Maybe he’s unattractive or overweight, maybe he’s too much of a wuss, but for whatever reason, she has no interest in him and probably never will.  She calls him a “friend” and he should know that means he’ll NEVER get in bed with her. 

3)    Friends with Benefits.  If we listened to what Hollywood tries to tell us, this would not exist.   Women don’t go for casual sex!  They require a firm commitment, an emotional bond!   And if the woman won’t go for a casual sex relationship, it won’t exist.   Same with booty calls or f**k buddies.  Hollywood told us these things don’t happen…so they don’t…right?

4)    “When Harry Met Sally”.   Most chick flicks seem to have some sort of message which is intended for the BF/husband to “get”.  This one…not so much.  Its message is more for both parties.  Harry (Billy Crystal) says that “men and women can’t be friends, because sex will always get in the way.”  To some extent that’s true.  If a man and women like each other enough to be friends, the question will arise why they’re not together.  It seems 70% of friendships between men and women (who aren’t related) seem to be between people who were formerly couples but broke up on good terms.  The other 30% are between those who are too far apart geographically to be able to date.

Anyhow.  If you do have friends, make sure they know you appreciate them.   Treat them fairly, call them – not just when you need something – and enjoy yourselves.  It’s a big, lonely world, and we need all the help we can get.