Csquared Thoughts

so depressing

Terry was reading something and pointed out to me that Katherine Ross of The Graduate fame is now seventy. So depressing. sigh.

The Wizard of Oz, part 2

My earlier entry on The Wizard of Oz was prompted in part by comments made by San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle. In his column, "Ask Mick LaSalle," he comments further on the movie in answer to a reader's question.

I saw the movie a dozen times and didn't realize it, either, but by the end of the movie, Toto is still on the chopping block. Dorothy left home to save him, and by the end, he's not saved. Miss Gulch is still alive. She still has the court paper to take Toto away, and Auntie Em and Uncle Henry are still useless. The only change is that Dorothy has resolved never again to leave home, which I'm sure Toto appreciates. Now I'm sure that the makers of "The Wizard of Oz" wanted us to leave feeling that somehow everything would work out, but they did nothing to actually assure us of that. For example, if we thought that Dorothy had become empowered by her experience in Oz, that might have helped. Instead, she seems to have mistaken Glinda's remark - about everything she needs being inside of her - to mean that everything she'll ever need is on that lousy farm. So the movie ends on the note that there's no place like home, after we've just spent 100 minutes seeing that there's really no place like Oz.

Look, the movie is a masterpiece, and I wouldn't really want to breathe on it. Yet I do wonder if it might have been better if Oz weren't a dream, that Dorothy comes home, but with some lingering suggestion that her experiences actually happened. Because if they did happen, it would mean Dorothy is a match for any witch, on either side of the rainbow.

Well, I suppose that's correct. It's hard to argue with the logic. But, gee Mick, did you really have to blast away my perception of the film like that? Sigh.

The Wizard of Oz

With all the hype and press around the 75th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz and the accompanying DVD release, one interesting point has been made. The film was not a big hit in theaters when it was released in 1939, and didn't achieve legendary status until it became an annual television event on CBS in the 1950's and 1960's.

And how well we remember. For the first several years we didn't even have color TV, so much of the transition from Kansas to Oz was lost. But what memories CBS gave us with the annual broadcast! Long before VCR's (let alone DVR's) we planned ahead, made sure dinner was taken care of and out of the way, and the whole family gathered in front of the TV to watch the movie, commercials and all.

It didn't matter that we'd seen it before. The flying monkeys were just as frightening, and the Wicked Witch of West just as scary when she turned over the hourglass the sixth or seventh time as it was the first.

The movie is in our DVD library, and we can watch it whenever we want. Complete with the transition from the black and white of Kansas to the color of Oz. But it's not the same.

Thank you, CBS, for all those great memories!

Star Trek

Terry and I saw the new Star Trek movie yesterday. This is the one where the characters in the original series are seen in their Starfleet Academy days.

Early rumors suggested that the new movie would take a lot of liberties with the Star Trek story. This was not the case. The young actors did a great job of capturing the essence of the crew (Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Scott, Sulu, and Chekov) as they might have been in their Starfleet Academy days. And they did so without imitation or parody. The script was well-written and had a lot of subtle (and some not-so-subtle) references to the original series that only an old-time Trekker would catch.

The script did play havoc with the space-time continuum, but that's not unusual for Star Trek.

One nice tribute: the computer voice, as throughout all the series and movies was done by Majel Barrett, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's sometime wife. Barrett died just a couple of weeks after finishing her work on the movie.

Overall, an nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon.