Oz the Great and Powerful

When this movie came out, I was mildly intrigued, but by the way they had the commercials laid out, I got the impression that three women in the commercial were fighting over Oz and that the whole movie was soaked with too much magic. It was one of those commercials that ended up being too vague, and I came to the conclusion that my family wouldn't ever be interested in watching it, so I went and forgot about it, since I didn't have the money to go and buy the DVD.

Yesterday, I stumbled across it on Netflix. I was bored and I wanted to watch something other than another episode of Forensic Files. So a click later, I found myself plummeting into Nostalgia Lake.

When I was younger, I had an insatiable appetite for anything meteorological or tornado-related. This was fuelled by The Wizard of Oz, due to the tornado at the beginning of the movie. Of course, every time the tornado was to come on screen, I would rush to my bedroom and gather up my blankies and my stuffies before I went back to the movie. I keep saying that my fascination with tornadoes is rather morbid, and it hasn't changed at all. I haven't watched The Wizard of Oz in years, not since I had to do a review on it in English class over the summer when my teacher sent me a link to it online. We used to have it on VHS, but our machine went and died when I was 13/14 years old and we had to clear out all our VHS tapes since we couldn't get our hands on another machine (I wish we hadn't).

Despite my apprehension on it, Oz the Great and Powerful turned out to be a lot better than I could have ever expected.

Netflix's synopsis, "He's an amateur magician and a con man, but all of Oz expects him to save the day. He should have booked Vegas", doesn't do the movie justice, leading me to believe if those at Netflix really know what they're doing when they write up the synopsi for their movies. Oz deserves a better synopsis, because it was so much more and the last sentence of the synopsis leads me to believe that the writer had inserted their own opinion into it.

Because Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmanuel Ambrose Diggs, or "Oz" as everyone knows him as, is a magician who was a part of a travelling circus, and he seemed to be doing pretty well despite the fact that he was playing with the hearts of several women at the same time, and that he was so skilled with his tricks that he made it look like he could perform miracles.

He was so convincing, he inadvertently duped a young, wheelchair-bound girl into thinking he could heal her so she could walk again.

Of course, that becomes the least of his worries when it turns out he flirted with the wrong woman and ended up enraging the circus' strongman. He vacates his mobile headquarters as fast as he can, managed to escape out a trapdoor in the floor moments before his head can be torn off by the strongman, and tears across the circus grounds until he comes across a hot air balloon, which he takes from its handler, claiming all the while that he owned 50% of it.

Making it into the air, he does a little jig before he notices that everyone in the circus, everyone who had come to watch him make his escape, is now running away, screaming at the top of their lungs. Confused, he turns around to look at what sent them running and is struck speechless. All he can manage to do is gasp as he takes in the massive twisting column of air writhing towards him. It only takes him a moment before he realizes that he's stuck in the air and that he's heading right towards certain death. In frustration, he screams as he is sucked in, his dreams of grandeur slipping from his fingers as death stares him in the face.

Inside the tornado, he's faced with death again and again as debris slams into the basket of the air balloon again and again. He faces off against the circus organ as it plays a haunting melody. But then it seems to all end as he reaches a point in the tornado that indicates that it's not what it seems. For a moment, Oz is totally weightless. It's gone strangely calm and debris has suddenly stopped trying to kill him.

But it's only calm for a moment, a moment that's only long enough for him to grab his top hat before he's sent reeling up the rest of the funnel cloud.

Beware of the tornadoes in Kansas, because there's a 50% chance that they're portals to another world.

This was a very well written movie. I got to know the main character rather well in the first five to ten minutes, well enough that I would get second-hand embarrassment whenever he flirted with women or did something that I had a feeling would cost him further down the road (the yellow brick road, haha). I usually don't come across movies written this well, and this was such a treat.

This movie was not predictable in the slightest, something I thought it would be since all I could remember from the trailer were three women in opposition of each other for some reason, a reason I assumed was because of Oz. I was proven wrong when the first person he meets in Oz is Theodora - who I assumed was the Good Witch who would wind up giving Dorothy her ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz. You can tell how long it's been since I watched that movie, since the good witch who gave Dorothy her ruby slippers was named Glinda, not Theodora.

I immediately began to suspect who Theodora was when Evanora, her older sister, made her believe that Oz had played her, and she began to cry and her cheeks burned when her tears touched them. My suspicions were soon confirmed when Evanora, who had revealed herself as the wicked witch who killed the sisters' father, turned her into the Wicked Witch of the West. Apparently, if deep down you are wicked and you cry, the hot water in your tears will burn you. Because that's what ultimately ends her in The Wizard of Oz. I thought it was a weakness all three sisters shared, but Glinda had tears gathering in the corners of her eyes, and she wasn't burning.

I guess the thing that thrilled me the most about this movie was they had me completely fooled on who exactly was the real bad guy until it they were revealed. I saw Evanora as guardian of Emerald City and concerned older sister who only wanted to protect Theodora when she saw that she was smitten with Oz. I fully believed that Glinda was the wicked witch who killed their father until it was revealed that it was actually Evanora who did it!

Then I thought Evanora was the one who would eventually transform into the Wicked Witch of the West, because her whole getup was green and black. But yet again I was proven wrong.

Oz was a cleverly written main character. I didn't like that he was a heartbreaker, but he was put through a rigorous Path to Redemption character arc that turned him into a kind-hearted man in the end. I thought there was a clever point of juxtaposition when he couldn't heal the girl's legs back in Kansas, but ended up being able to fix the China Doll's legs with glue in China Town. That occurred to me as I lay in bed last night, revelling in the excellent story telling the movie had.

One thing I don't get though - Evanora was killed at the end of the movie, so she's not the witch who was crushed under Dorothy's house when she came to Oz. So who was the witch who was crushed under the house? Who was the original owner of the Ruby Slippers? Did Glinda, Evanora, and Theodora have another sister? Or was it a cousin? According to the The Wizard of Oz the witch crushed under the house was, in fact, the Wicked Witch of the West's sister, the Wicked Witch of the East. So who exactly is this sister?

• The transition from black and white to colour when Oz goes to Oz was a nice touch.

I'll definitely want to show this to my kids when I have them and when they're old enough to understand the story. Because they're definitely going to grow up watching The Wizard of Oz. It's movies like these that make me look forward to the days where I'll be saddled with the responsibility of being a mom.

And this is a movie I definitely want to watch again.

Movies That Have Left Me Dissatisfied

This was something I just wanted to share, since it occurred to me that, lately, I've been subjected to certain stories that have made me want to scream with frustration. Only one novel I've read in recent memory has had this affect on me, and that was The Phantom of the Opera.

But this post is about the movies that left me with a bitter taste in my mouth, literally.

I don't really know why I wanted to make a post about it, but I guess I wanted to talk about story endings. I know that there are effective ways to end a story, but some of them end up being totally unnecessary. Really, some endings I've seen on movies have just left me frustrated and furious.

Here is a list of movies that have made me frustrated:

1. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
2. The Amazing Spiderman 2
3. Star Trek Generations
4. Maze Runner & Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
5. The Pretender: Island of the Haunted

Usually, I'm pretty tolerant about how a story is crafted, due to the fact that I'm a realist 50% of the time. Real life often doesn't allow for happy endings of "happily ever afters". So when something doesn't go perfect for the main characters, then I'm fine. Because that's realistic. Though, even though I'm fine with it, that doesn't mean that I'm happy about it, lol.

1. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life

One evening, Mom was flicking through the channels when she stumbled across this movie. She went "eh, why not?" and changed to it. When I was little and I was just becoming coherent enough to play computer games (I've been playing video games since I was five - and computer games are more challenging than video games, I swear! lol) I discovered Mom's copy of the Tomb Raider CD-ROM disk. I quickly discovered that I could only make it through a quarter of the first level before I would make it to a stone bridge in this cave where I would be taken down by a couple wolves (and where exactly did those come from???) and GAME OVER would be thrown up onto the screen.

The reason why I was dissatisfied with this movie's ending: Terry had to be such a overgrown baby in the Cradle of Life. Didn't he realize that if he took Pandora's Box, he could, eventually, be the last living man on Earth (if he opened the box) or would eventually become a victim of the plague contained within the box (if he sold it)? I was really disappointed that he was greedy enough to try to push past Lara in the Cradle so she was forced to shoot him. I really liked Lara and Terry as a pair.

2. The Amazing Spiderman 2

I really enjoyed the first Amazing Spiderman movie, so I thought I would love this movie just as much. At the beginning, it was exactly what I expected, but then it quickly spiralled into something less than what I was hoping for. I sympathized for Max Dillon/Electro - one of the villains.

The reason why I was dissatisfied with this movie's ending: Gwen's death. The subsequent twisting of Harry Osbourne's mind because of his inherited disease so that he was eventually so desperate to live that he labeled his childhood friend - Peter Parker - his enemy. And he killed Gwen! I fully believe that Peter should have been able to save Gwen despite how intense his battle with Harry was, but the writers decided that she had to die instead of actually getting to fulfil her dreams. (Oh, and if you can't figure out why she died when Peter clearly caught her - well, the sudden stop caused by Peter catching her with his webbing snapped her back).

3. Star Trek Generations

I like this movie. I loved how it brought the original Star Trek series and The Next Generation together through finding Captain James T. Kirk in the Nexus. One thing I didn't like about it, though, was the fact that Data just had to swear as the Enterprise-D's saucer-section crash-landed. Was that exactly necessary? I thought people had almost completely discarded the instinctive need to swear? I know Data was trying out his emotion-chip, but still--

The reason why I was dissatisfied with this movie's ending: Captain Kirk's death. Probably every Star Trek fan agrees with me - Kirk's death was unnecessary. He had plenty of time to get off of that catwalk before it fell. I knew that he was out there distracting Soran so that his rocket would blow up on him, but Kirk could have started running for solid ground as the rocket exploded, or he could have run over to somewhere else. I really wanted to see how Kirk would have reacted to the 24th Century.

4. Maze Runner & Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials

Where can I begin? For one thing, I really don't like dystopian films or novels, but the action in the first movie had me intrigued. I got to like the characters, even though dread throbbed in the pit of my stomach. I was intrigued from the beginning of the first movie because I wondered if these kids were on some other planet, and were being dropped off by machines left over from the human race and that the human race no longer existed. But then I quickly learned that, no, the teenagers were not on another planet, but were actually on Earth, and Earth has been hit by some sort of catastrophe caused by the sun?? I'm not sure since it's only called "The Flare". Apparently there was a massive solar flare that must have weakened every human's immune system that a plague of epic proportions swept through the population of the planet. I didn't like The Scorch Trials at all, and spent the time my family watched it building Lego as it droned on in the background.

The reason why I was dissatisfied with these movies' ending: I admit, I liked the action in these movies, but the endings left me with bitterness to end all bitterness in my mouth. With the first movie, when they killed Chuck off - they didn't have to kill Chuck off! But probably it happened in the book (I haven't read the book). The ending of the second movie frustrated with how Teresa betrayed her friends for W.C.K.D. even though it was made very apparent that W.C.K.D. is evil. Really, Teresa??!?

5. The Pretender: Island of the Haunted

The Pretender has to be one of my favourite cat & mouse-themed TV shows of all time. In each episode, Jarod - the main character, the "pretender" - goes about helping someone who was wronged, like a security guard who was killed by a couple of police officers who broke into the bank he was guarding and made it look like he was the criminal. Or the family of an pilot who was accused of being drunk when he was flying a jet (so it crashed and he died) so they couldn't get his pension. And all the while he teases and taunts the organization who kidnapped him when he was a kid and exploited his genius for their research. More often than not, I wish the Pretender had gone on for more than four seasons and two movies.

The reason why I was dissatisfied with this movie's ending: This is the second movie of the two movies produced to help tie up the TV series since the Pretender was cancelled, leaving it at a very tense and suspenseful situation. The reason why I was dissatisfied with the ending of this episode was the fact that it revealed why Jarod was taken by the Centre when he was a child. He was taken because of a prophecy. But that's not entirely the whole reason why I wasn't happy with ending - viewers were left with Jarod still on the run. What I wanted was for the entirety of the Centre to be gone, destroyed, so Jarod could settle down, start a family, and find his mother, father, and sister. After all, wasn't that his goal and was what he had been striving for the entire show?

~~~

Now, those are the movies, that I can remember, that have frustrated with their endings. They leave me going into overdrive with my thoughts. I overthink about it until, ultimately, I have to abandon it knowing I can't change them. So all I can do it fume quietly about them, lol.

But every writer has a reason for an ending that may annoy me, but sometimes those endings really don't make sense, or entirely unnecessary.

What movies have driven you up the wall, or driven you crazy?

My Thoughts on Belle

The year is 1769.

Britain is a colonial empire and a slave trading capital.

When I saw Belle on Netflix, I thought it looked like a rather interesting story. I don't see very many Period Dramas about those who do not have light skin.

Belle is about Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsey, the biracial illegitimate daughter of a British naval officer and an African slave. Her father lost track of her until he found her again in the slums and took her home. She only really knew him for a few hours before he had to go back to sea, and he died out there before ever coming back.

Belle is full of themes about racial inequality, about how the colour of your skin, way back then, placed you in a class of respect no matter what your social class was. If you were white, you were fine. But if you were black, or even half-black, you were dirt. Because blacks were slaves.

But Dido wasn't a slave. Her father had money, he was wealthy, and she inherited it all when he passed away.

In the beginning, the Murrays and her new aunt were a little shocked and didn't know how to really go about this since Dido was the bi-product of an extremely sinful act and she wasn't white. But what I loved was that they grew to love her in a way that she was a member of the family.

I loved how accurate the film was to the time period and the fact that Dido eventually found the love of her life. I also loved how Dido was a real person, even though she's been hidden by time. Thankfully, she sat still enough to have her picture painted, so we know what she looks like to an extent.

I found it very interesting how Belle took place around the time of the Zong massacre - where a British captain and crew threw the entire quantity of slaves off the ship and let them drown because the drinking water was running low and the slaves were "diseased". The slaves were diseased because they were packed too closely together, and the ship passed by eight ports where they could have gotten water. According to history, the captain and crew did this in hopes of claiming insurance money on the slaves, which would amount to more than what they would have gotten for sick slaves. But thankfully, it was ruled that the insurance companies pay nothing to the Zong crew and it was thought to be one of the events that eventually lead to the outlawing of slavery all-together.

I'm also glad Dido didn't choose to marry the rich guy. His family was really only seeking after her money, anyway.

It was a relatively satisfying movie, and it helped remind me what society had to go through to get to where we are today.

The conversation that stuck with me...

William Murray (Dido's great-uncle): "This is not about Miss Lindsey."
John Davinier: "Of course it is! It's about all of us! ...It's about everything. ...Everything that's important!"
William Murray: "Mr. Davinier, ... the world is a devastating place. You must protect your emotions if you wish to prevent matters of law and...love from devastating you."

Period Drama Challenge

Hosted by Miss Laurie of Old-FashionedCharm (sign up) The Period Dramas I Will Watch:

• The Paradise
• Murdoch Mysteries
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
• The Princess Bride
• Belle
• Sherlock Holmes

I'll start with 5 - I may watch more. But I'm in a bunch of other challenges, and since I am trying to write a complete novel, and I am trying to up the amount of novels I want read...well...I'll have to see :3