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.

Heart Thumping, Mind Wheeling, Hail Thrashing - TORNADO!

(Sorry for the long post)

Summer can be a dangerous time for some. More dangerous than a simple sunburn or the risk of skin-cancer. The weather phenomena called the 'tornado' is a destructive force that strikes every summer - it's expected on the North American plate, where the conditions are just right.

Growing up, I always had a morbid fascination for tornadoes. When I say "morbid" I mean: "I find this fascinating, yet also terrifying". The mechanics of how tornadoes formed fascinated me, but the destruction and the lives they took frightened me to death.

I never thought I would ever have to hide from the threat of one. Sure, when my mother, grandmother, cousin and I were travelling across Canada when I was six, we drove through this weird cloud that stretched across the highway that had lead us about halfway across Saskatchewan. Mom could barely see and I can remember how her shrieking had my heart dancing in my throat - an experience I hadn't endured before, since I was only six and that was the first time I remember being out of my home province since I was 2 years old (though my parents traveled to the USA a lot when I was younger than that).

A few years later, my mother and I discovered that the weird cloud, that acted like a solid wall of dust, was caused by a tornado. We never saw a tornado, and the dust seemed to just hang in the air. It was by God's prevention that we hadn't hit the tornado as we drove through its cloud, and that everyone that drove through it (the highway was packed with cars that day - that's why Mom was shrieking so much. She didn't know if she could slow down, speed up, or whether or not she was still on the road since we really only had about 20 feet of visibility in front of the nose of the car).

That was as close to a tornado as I would ever get, I thought, up until last night.

It's one thing to run into a tornado when you're outside of your home province, it's another when a tornado decides to visit you in your backyard.

Since I was six, my family has moved one province over, from British Columbia to Alberta. I live so far north in Alberta, in the Taiga Biome where it's normally wet and void of the conditions needed for a tornado to develop. The only thing different from my childhood home on the west coast is the fact we get thunderstorms here, and it's not as humid, or wet.

I've heard over the last few years that tornados have begun to pop up down south. A couple years ago a tornado touched down on a farm outside of Whitecourt, a town/small city only an hour away from when I live, and dissipated before it could leave the farm's boundaries. Edmonton has been struck by a couple devastating tornadoes... but I honestly didn't think one would touch down so close. Edmonton is farther from the Rocky Mountains than I am, thus leaving it open for the volatile mixing of cold air from the Rockies and the warm air from down south.

Last night, my brother came back from summer camp orienteering (it's soccer themed and he's been looking forward to it all year) and warned us that there was a tornado watch, something that was a surprise. The weather was so calm and peaceful. The wind was gentle and it was actually cool and slightly rainy. Dad jumped outside and looked up at the sky while I peered out the bay window in our living room. At 9:30 in the evening, it was still light out despite the fact it would be gone in the next 30 minutes. But when I looked out that window, a dark, ominous cloud was creeping across the sky, like a black ooze.

Mentally, I went "uh oh", since the last time I saw a cloud like that, I was in the car with my mom as we went to pick my brother up from VBS. The thunder and lightning were fierce, and the rain had poured from the roof of the church with the intensity comparable to someone running several water hoses an just letting the water splatter loudly to the concrete of the parking lot. The rain drops that hit my face and back as I ran from the car to the safety of the church felt like bullets and were at least the size of my thumb.

My mind flashed back to that storm, and how it had terrified me then. I wasn't looking forward to facing such a terrifying storm so late at night, not after the recent memory of a fierce thunderstorm that hit at six in the morning in late June (I think...), where a tree across the yard was struck and the thunderclap was so loud that it sent my cat running from my bedroom and caused me to jump out of fright and nearly scream.

I went about checking the Weather Network app (last night), and I was presented with a terrible surprise. According to the Weather Network, the tornado watch had been upgraded to a tornado warning! A tornado watch is when meteorologists see that the thunderstorm is behaving in a way that it could produce a tornado and devastating side-effects like harsh winds, hail, and driving rain. But a tornado WARNING is when a storm chaser or someone watching the storm has seen rotation at the base of the cloud (think the swirls left by the whisk in your home-made whipped cream or how the water in your kitchen sink sometimes when it spins and then forms a funnel shape as it goes down the drain).

I've never felt such fear before! Dad went out onto the deck again, and watched the sky since there was still enough light to see by. He said that the clouds were going west, then were going north, then east. They were going everywhere, and I knew something was going on since clouds did not do that.

So, after some debate on what we should do (should we ride it out on the main floor or should we go downstairs into the basement?) I ran down into the basement and grabbed one of the cat carriers. Rushing back upstairs, I located my cat and stuffed her into the carrier and carried her downstairs. Dad rushed outside to shut the quad shed since it is one of those flimsy tarp ones stretched over a frame, and he didn't want it to blow away, and I prayed that he would be safe.

Once Pebbles was downstairs, I packed up my laptop, my mother's laptop, my kindle, and some books. I couldn't remember if my laptop is insured and I need it for college so I wasn't going to take any chances. Dad made it inside as the storm began to hammer the house with hail, harder than I've ever experienced before. I was lamenting our outdoor kitties because they must have been so scared! I love them so much, and even if the tornado was weak enough to not cause too much damage if it came through the property we were renting, the shed the cats take shelter in is so weak and the old barn they like to explore has sat on a strange slant since the day it was built several decades ago.

F-0, or "cold-core" tornadoes as they call them when they're as weak as a dust devil but still appear to be a tornado, are still strong enough to lift mobile homes and blow over cat sheds.

I'm still trying to deduce if it was a wedge tornado or a tornado cloaked by rain by this shot.

We all hunkered down in the unfinished basement, on the little decorative couch my mother hopes to refurnish someday, and to help take our minds off the storm raging outside, I opened my laptop and we continued to watch The Flash episode we had been watching before my brother came home (Season 2, Episode 1, in fact, since I had bought it from Google Play). At some points I couldn't tell if it was the wind shrieking outside or the sound effects from the show, but I kept my mouth shut.

After the episode was over, we watched "The Unicorn Song" by the Irish Rovers on Youtube, and a clip from the Irish Rovers TV show. By then, the storm seemed to have quieted down, and moved off, so we let my cat out of the carrier, shut down my laptop, and moved upstairs.

It was too quiet after the rattling caused by the hail which drove us downstairs. I honestly thought we were going to lose something - a storm had never been so fierce to us before. My dad had checked Doppler radar on his phone and the part of the storm that eventually created the tornado in the pictures I showed in this post passed right over us.

If you can zoom in, there's a tiny triangle of a funnel cloud smack dab in the middle of the picture.

Stupid me has always wished to experience a tornado for the rush, but now that I've experienced a near-miss, I wish I could go back and slap myself. This experience was NOT fun, there was no rush! I suppose it was a by-product of my morbid fascination with tornadoes, and I know better now.

I want to go see if there was any damage left behind. I'm hoping my dad will take me today before it gets too dark.