Oz the Great and Powerful

dvd of the week

The moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens her front door, after her house was been thrown through the sky by a Kansas tornado and landed in Oz, and the black, white and very gray world becomes not just Technicolor, but incandescent and utterly alive is, to me, one of the greatest moments in film history.

The fact that Sam Raimi, in his quite wonderful and extraordinarily gorgeous prequel, is able to pay homage to that moment and nearly equal its experience is the greatest surprise I had at the movies this spring.

Oz is the story of how the wizard (James Franco) ended up as the ruler of the Emerald City; how he is transformed from Oscar Diggs, a huckster magician in a travelling circus in 1905 Kansas, into the prophesied savior of Oz.

Judy Garland’s astonishingly sympathetic performance can never be replicated, but focusing the film on a shallow, if magnetic con-man ensured that the film could only be a hit, not an endearing, enduring classic.