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8 Responses to “Paperback Book Club”
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8 Responses to “Paperback Book Club”
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Powered by WordPress, Mandigo theme by tom.
Entries (RSS)
and Comments (RSS).
Return to Oz is weird to watch now because Fairuza Balk went on to play a lot of weirdoes. So now her portrayal of Dorothy has a weird overlay of crazy on it.
I always figured Return to Oz would be popular among the book fans, because it’s closer to Baum’s style than Wizard of Oz was.
Screw ‘em. Return to Oz is a hell of a good movie.
I don’t remember whether that movie was good or bad. I just remember it being traumatizing. The very definition of Nightmare Fuel.
I should probably try it again, now that I am a mature, courageous adult. But, um, I’m bringing my teddy bear.
Interestingly enough, I was completely SCARED by the first Wizard of Oz movie where Dorthy was trapped in the Witch’s castle with an hourglass. I had the feeling that something HORRIBLE would happen when all the sand ran out. In contrast, when I saw Return to Oz in the theaters, I wasn’t that scared by the imagery, since it seemed more HONEST than the first movie. The farm being portrayed in colour took some getting used to, but once I got past that hurdle, the rest was easy going. It probably didn’t hurt that the Scarecrow, Tin Man & Lion were replaced by similar creatures Jack PumpkinHead, Tik-Tok & the Gump. It was a little disorienting when the previous three came back near the end of the movie & looked completely different from their previous incarnation.
In Oz cameos, I’m enjoying Ozma’s holding her own trying to wrestle the attempted leadership takeover by Geppetto in Fables. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before “her” gender is eventually revealed.
I only ever saw bits and pieces of Return to Oz on TV as a kid, and I remembered it being intense and kind of scary. I watched it with my roommates when it was re-released on VHS not long after college, and we all thought it was still pretty intense, and kind of *very* scary in places. Which, when you think about it, a lot of the kids movies we all love from the 60s and 70s were, too. I love a movie, family-oriented or otherwise, that doesn’t pander, over-explain, or water down.
The ironic thing is that Baum wanted the Oz book to be light and without the horrors that were common in kid lit at the time, but every good adaptation of his work has had some pure nightmare material.
I liked RETURN TO OZ, but I also found it disturbing (I usually like disturbing movies, though I hated STOP OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT, and that was REALLY disturbing…).