Continuing to wend my way through the Sight and Sound Top 250 Greatest Movies of All Time. This week, it’s #229 on the list,Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz. For a longer introduction to this series and a look at the full list, just click here. And if you want a heads-up on what I’ll be watching for next week in case you want to watch along, just head on over to the Facebook page or follow me on Twitter (both of those links are in the sidebar) where I’ll generally be posting that info later in the day.
As a kid, I suppose I loved The Wizard of Oz. It was one of those movies that would come on television every year, and watching it was, as it was for many families at the time, something of an annual ritual.
As I’ve gotten older. however, I seem to have very much fallen out of love with the movie, to the point that when it was re-released to theaters this year in it’s 3D’d IMAX’d version, I didn’t even bother to go see it. Sorry, I told those who invited me to come along with them, I’m simply not interested.
It’s not that it’s really become a movie that I “hate”, though I suspect I have probably expressed myself that way from time to time as a kind of shorthand rather than go into all of the flaws that I find with the film, and I certainly can appreciate the beauty and artistic mastery of the film, it’s just that I find nowadays that its flaws, especially at the script level, overwhelm my enjoyment of the on-screen spectacle, and I can’t really accept the “it’s all a dream so logic doesn’t have to come into play” excuse as one that works for me.
Of course, this is one of those movies the phrase “your own mileage may vary” definitely applies to.
So, if you are a lover of this film, that’s fine with me. I’m certainly not going to try to talk you over to my point of view. If it’s one that you hate, well, in my opinion, that’s fine, too, I can certainly see that emotion, and have, as I noted above, claimed that myself at times. At the moment, though, I will simply say that for me, it is a film full of technical brilliance and beauty, but ultimately one that I no longer really enjoy watching.
Anyway, here’s the trailer
and as an added bonus, here’s a special feature from my good friends over at Cinema Sins (and I mean that literally, as one of the guys behind this particular YouTube channel is someone that I used to work with and whom I still see from time to time):
So what are your thoughts on The Wizard of Oz? Is it a movie that you’ve seen or would like to? If you have seen it, is it one that would make your own Top 10 list? Or would it not even crack your Top 250? Let me know below.
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