223 replies to this topic

[Tyler]

Nick Alexander, on 16 December 2009 - 02:23 PM, said:

Shawshank Redemption
The Godfather (I) (I love II, just not I).
Juno
North by Northwest
The Squid and the Whale
Igby Goes Down

I'm with you on The Squid and the Whale. I didn't know there's actually anyone who likes Igby Goes Down, though.

[bowen]

Persona, on 16 December 2009 - 02:47 PM, said:

Did you see this and make this decision when you were, like, six, or have you had a deprived childhood?

That the performances were weird is evident to anyone who is watching; even children can tell that much. How old do you think Dorothy is supposed to be in the movie? 8? 12? 16? The movie is every bit as weird and strangely conceived and performed as Benigni's Pinocchio, except that one is a universally-loved family classic and the other is a universally-reviled bomb.

And careful about casting any stones. Never forget: You are a Princess Bride hater.

[Overstreet]

I've never been fond of The Wizard of Oz. I crept out of my room and watched it over a babysitter's shoulder one night without her knowing I was there. When the flying monkeys showed up, I went back to my room, scared out of my wits. I've watched the film a few times since then, but never really enjoyed it much.

[bowen]

SDG, on 16 December 2009 - 03:37 PM, said:

bowen, on 16 December 2009 - 02:00 PM, said:

I'd like to point out that I win, in the sense of being most out of step with mankind at large.

Only on the basis of low statistical sampling. You managed to hate the one most universally loved movie, but I contributed four titles to your list of 23. Still, I'm a distant second to benchwarmer, who has five titles to my four, with three titles more popular than any of mine, and whose #4 and #5 picks are more popular than my #3 and #4, respectively.

Oh sure, I could have named more movies, but I thought The Wizard of Oz was notable enough by itself.

I can be beaten though: All we need is someone to stand up and say: "Citizen Kane? Long and dull." or "Seven Samurai? Just a rip-off of A Bug's Life."

[SDG]

bowen, on 16 December 2009 - 06:50 PM, said:

And careful about casting any stones. Never forget: You are a Princess Bride hater.

The Wizard of Oz trumps The Princess Bride for countless reasons, not least the dynamism of TWoO's female characters versus Buttercup's utter passiveness. (I say that as one who is quite fond of TPB but whose love for TWoO is true.)

bowen, on 16 December 2009 - 07:00 PM, said:

Oh sure, I could have named more movies, but I thought The Wizard of Oz was notable enough by itself.

I can be beaten though: All we need is someone to stand up and say: "Citizen Kane? Long and dull." or "Seven Samurai? Just a rip-off of A Bug's Life."

No no, I admit, it's the single boldest stroke in the whole thread.

Edited by SDG, 16 December 2009 - 10:58 PM.

[Persona]

Ordet sucks!

[bowen]

SDG, on 16 December 2009 - 07:04 PM, said:

The Wizard of Oz trumps The Princess Bride for countless reasons, not least the dynamism of TWOZ's female characters versus Buttercup's utter passiveness. (I say that as one who is quite fond of TPB but whose love for TWOZ is true.)

I suppose you COULD call the bizarre behavior of the female characters in The Wizard of Oz dynamism, but it isn't the description that comes immediately to my mind.

Seriously: How old do YOU think Dorothy is supposed to be in that movie?

[SDG]

Persona, on 16 December 2009 - 07:08 PM, said:

Ordet sucks!

Nice try, Mr. Ordet Weeper's Club President.

[SDG]

bowen, on 16 December 2009 - 07:13 PM, said:

I suppose you COULD call the bizarre behavior of the female characters in The Wizard of Oz dynamism, but it isn't the description that comes immediately to my mind.

It's nothing to do with how you would describe it. Dorothy, Elmira Gulch, Aunt Em, Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West drive the plot. Uncle Henry, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and the Wizard mostly stand around. Except for the Scarecrow, maybe.

Meanwhile, what does Buttercup do? What is she asked to do? Trust in her Westley to come and save her, otherwise he will fetch her a biff. It's like a sick joke that this story was conceived by a father of two daughters who came up with this story in response to their request for a story about "princesses" and "brides": What father of two daughters is so X-chromosomally challenged that he conflates "princesses" and "brides" into a single character whose job is to stand stock-still in the middle of a whirl of pirates, kidnapping, giants, life-or-death duels, screaming eels, fire swamps, rodents of unusual size, torture, holocaust cloaks, etc., etc? And who doesn't even become a princess, and becomes a bride only offscreen, after the end credits?????? A sick joke, I say.

Quote

Seriously: How old do YOU think Dorothy is supposed to be in that movie?

J. M. Barrie answers: "The difference between a Fairy Play and a realistic one is that in the former all the characters are really children with a child's outlook on life. This applies to the so-called adults of the story as well as the young people. Pull the beard off the fairy king, and you would find the face of a child."

Edited by SDG, 16 December 2009 - 07:27 PM.

[bowen]

SDG, on 16 December 2009 - 07:20 PM, said:

bowen, on 16 December 2009 - 07:13 PM, said:

I suppose you COULD call the bizarre behavior of the female characters in The Wizard of Oz dynamism, but it isn't the description that comes immediately to my mind.

It's nothing to do with how you would describe it. Dorothy, Elmira Gulch, Aunt Em, Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West drive the plot. Uncle Henry, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and the Wizard mostly stand around. Except for the Scarecrow, maybe.

Meanwhile, what does Buttercup do? What is she asked to do? Trust in her Westley to come and save her, otherwise he will fetch her a biff. It's like a sick joke that this story was conceived by a father of two daughters who came up with this story in response to their request for a story about "princesses" and "brides": What father of two daughters is so X-chromosomally challenged that he conflates "princesses" and "brides" into a single character whose job is to stand stock-still in the middle of a whirl of pirates, kidnapping, giants, life-or-death duels, screaming eels, fire swamps, rodents of unusual size, torture, holocaust cloaks, etc., etc? And who doesn't even become a princess, and becomes a bride only offscreen, after the end credits?????? A sick joke, I say.

Quote

Seriously: How old do YOU think Dorothy is supposed to be in that movie?

J. M. Barrie answers: "The difference between a Fairy Play and a realistic one is that in the former all the characters are really children with a child's outlook on life. This applies to the so-called adults of the story as well as the young people. Pull the beard off the fairy king, and you would find the face of a child."

That's an after-the-fact rationalization. Baum didn't write up a 17-year old Dorothy and then use Barrie's argument as to why she didn't act her age, he wrote up an 8-year old Dorothy. Hollywood then cast a 17-year old in the part, also for reasons that had nothing to do with any argument of Barrie's.

That Buttercup is a weak character in The Princess Bride is indisputable.

But if you claim the right to score points against The Princess Bride for its weak female characters, why cannot I score points against The Wizard of Oz for its weak male characters? I hardly see that you can advance the cause of one movie against the other with this line of argument.

Edited by bowen, 16 December 2009 - 07:42 PM.

[Peter T Chattaway]

bowen wrote:
: That's an after-the-fact rationalization. Baum didn't write up a 17-year old Dorothy and then use Barrie's argument as to why she didn't act her age, he wrote up an 8-year old Dorothy. Hollywood then cast a 17-year old in the part, also for reasons that had nothing to do with any argument of Barrie's.

Perhaps, but I think we err by expecting any sort of "realism" in a movie like The Wizard of Oz. Films were still very influenced by theatrical traditions at that point in time, and The Wizard of Oz arguably more than most. You wouldn't think twice about a teenager playing a child in a panto, so it's no big deal if a teenager plays a child HERE.

Now, the age-appropriateness of, say, the actor who plays Max in Where the Wild Things Are would be a whole other story, because there definitely WAS an attempt at some sort of realism there (in the bookend sequences, at least), and there are certain things that fit the psychology of a 5-year-old much more than they do a 12-year-old (or whatever the actual respective ages are, there).

[bowen]

Peter T Chattaway, on 16 December 2009 - 07:52 PM, said:

bowen wrote:
: That's an after-the-fact rationalization. Baum didn't write up a 17-year old Dorothy and then use Barrie's argument as to why she didn't act her age, he wrote up an 8-year old Dorothy. Hollywood then cast a 17-year old in the part, also for reasons that had nothing to do with any argument of Barrie's.

Perhaps, but I think we err by expecting any sort of "realism" in a movie like The Wizard of Oz. Films were still very influenced by theatrical traditions at that point in time, and The Wizard of Oz arguably more than most. You wouldn't think twice about a teenager playing a child in a panto, so it's no big deal if a teenager plays a child HERE.

That the studio thought they were doing nothing objectionable is certainly true. That audiences at large have agreed with them is also true. I know full well that my position on this movie is a lonely one. The thread, after all, pretty much invites people to take up the sort of position I am in here, as nay-sayers to movies that are generally acclaimed. But I will stand my ground, lonely as it may be and as unlikely to produce a single convert as it may be.

In rebuttal to SDG's quote of Barrie, I offer my own quote of C. S. Lewis:

"Every good writer knows that the more unusual the scenes and events of his story are, the slighter, the more ordinary, and more typical his persons should be. Hence Gulliver is a commonplace little man and Alice is a commonplace little girl. If they had been more remarkable they would have wrecked their books. The Ancient Mariner himself is a very ordinary man. To tell how odd things struck odd people is to have an oddity too much: he who is to see strange sights must not himself be strange. He ought to be as nearly as possible an Everyman or Anyman."

Baum knew this and his Dorothy in the original book is very much an ordinary little girl. But Dorothy in the movie is very much an oddity, whatever reasons may have been in place for making her so. It is no wonder that she has become a major camp icon (perhaps THE major camp icon) in the gay community; it is a reflection of her strangeness that people imitate Garland's performance as Dorothy either for laughs or as proof of their own strangeness.

Finally, it is not as though children had not been cast in children's parts in movies prior to The Wizard of Oz. Shirley Temple anyone? Nor is it the case that I am required to bend my own judgments of what I enjoy to meet the oddities of previous periods. I do not, for example, feel obligated to enjoy blackface merely because it was once considered quite an acceptable form of entertainment.

[du Garbandier]

Jules and Jim
12 Angry Men
The 400 Blows
Braveheart
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life -- I don't really know how well-liked this is, but it has a 7.4 IMDB rating and it struck me as one dreadfully unfunny sketch after another.

[Darrel Manson]

New World

[du Garbandier]

I forgot Garden State -- liked by (seemingly) many, yet I found it condescending, dishonest, and generally spurious.

Oddly, though, I like The Ice Storm a lot, even though both films derive from Rick Moody books.

Edited by du Garbandier, 16 December 2009 - 10:10 PM.

[Anders]

MLeary, on 16 December 2009 - 11:11 AM, said:

Big Fish

Can I add to this just about every Burton film since 1999 (I actually enjoy certain elements of SLEEPY HOLLOW, mostly for the atmosphere and set design). I didn't absolutely hate CORPSE BRIDE, but it was co-directed by Burton and is more visually lovely than really engaging (much like SLEEPY HOLLOW).

I know this isn't as much of an issue here on A&F (except my negative view of SWEENEY TODD, which I should say stems more from my dislike of Burton and his idiosyncrasies than anything else. I actually like Sondheim's musical, and I can imagine a film-version of the story that would suitably grand guignol without being grating. I guess this makes SWEENEY TODD my favourite live-action Burton film of the decade). It seems many of my peers (late-twenty-somethings) fawn over Burton as if he's some kind of unassailable filmmaking icon. In my mind, the only really good film he's ever done is ED WOOD. Even his Batman films and especially EDWARD SCISSORHANDS are overrated.

Edited by Anders, 16 December 2009 - 09:57 PM.

[M. Leary]

I also don't like the soundtrack to Oh Brother blah blah blah.

[Peter T Chattaway]

bowen wrote:
: I do not, for example, feel obligated to enjoy blackface merely because it was once considered quite an acceptable form of entertainment.

Well, I enjoy parodies of Al Jolson more than actual Al Jolson, but whatever.

You raise an interesting point, though. The House Next Door recently hosted a fascinating, lengthy, in-depth discussion of Lawrence of Arabia -- and I was caught mildly off-guard, not for the first time, by the attention that was paid to the use of "brownface" in that film (i.e. British and Mexican-American actors playing Arabs). I can't say I'd ever even noticed such a thing in my viewings of that film; if I have paid any attention to the make-up whatsoever, I may have wondered if Peter O'Toole was made too pretty, but that's pretty much it. (It may be worth noting that Omar Sharif, an ACTUAL Arab, was a last-minute replacement for a French actor who had to drop out of the film for some reason or other; and of course, David Lean went on to cast Sharif as the Russian title character in his NEXT film, Doctor Zhivago. So you could say the ethnicity-blindness, so to speak, went in both directions, there.)

[David Smedberg]

I though that I had it bad when I disliked Batman Begins.

Then I found out that was nothing compared to how much I loathed The Dark Knight.

[Persona]

SDG, on 16 December 2009 - 07:14 PM, said:

Persona, on 16 December 2009 - 07:08 PM, said:

Ordet sucks!

Nice try, Mr. Ordet Weeper's Club President.

Darn. I post here too often to be able to lie myself into the Cool Kids Club.

I'm really having a hard time on this one. I love everything and everybody. Love Wins.

Edited by Persona, 16 December 2009 - 11:25 PM.