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The WizRating:
Release Date: 01 April, 2003 Retail Price: $14.98 OUR Price: $13.99 You SAVE: $0.99! Cast: Complete Cast (10 total) |
The Wiz Reviews
prejudices aside now
love the movie.......laugh, cry, sing, dance, embrace, reminisce, discuss, dissect, listen.
this film is a spectacle which i have seen hundreds of times.....at least once a month.
A bad reinterpretation of a magical original movie
Awful and so strikingly awful that I felt compelled to write a review. What's wrong with this movie? Here's a short list:
The songs by the overated Quincy Jones, with several exceptions, are boring, disco-funk knockoffs without a wit of intelligence or originality about them. The ballads are overblown and over sung. Sorry Quincy most are far from your "best" work. The exceptions being the songs Brand New Day and Ease on Down The Road which are both good and appropriate to what was happening in the movie. Unfortunately the characters break into song far too often even for a musical.
The dance routines that usually acompany the songs are overlong, silly, and almost completely pointless. For the most part they are meaningless spectacle. On stage they may have been exhilarating, on the big screen, they fall completely flat. Seriously a lot of this looks like an overblown Sid and Marty Kroft TV show. HR Puffenstuff anyone?
Diana Ross is MUCH too old for the role by at the very least 10 years. Her voice which was never that good to begin with is weak. She was chosen as lead singer of the Supremes over Mary Wells because of her looks, not her voice. And her "acting" is by turns unbelievable, creepy and text book over acted. I found her Dorothy to be a thoroughly unsympathetic character. I just didnt like her. You think they should have used a professional actor who actually had the voice and emotional breadth to pull off the character? Stephanie Mills played the role on broadway to great success and should have had the movie role but Ross threw her weight around and got the part much to the detriment of the movie.
The less said about Richard Pryor as the Wiz, the better. Without a doubt his worst movie role. His cringing and whining when found out as a charlatan is unseemly at best.
In fact I felt no connection to any of the characters with the exception of the Cowardly Lion and Nipsey Russell's Tin Man. Both actors did quite well with the offal handed them.
Michael the kid-toucher Jackson was at best OK as the scarecrow but often came across as whiny, unsympathetic and creepily efeminite, no big suprise there.
The Wicked Witch of the West now a sweatshop owner called Evileene isn't so much scary as loud and obnoxious but her vocal numbers are fun. Margaret Hamilton's original Wicked Witch was much more frightening and other worldly by comparison.
Lena Horne's (Glinda the good witch) mugging for the camera especially during her final song is just hilarious. The song is also completely bombastic and vulgar in its stridency not to mention filled with idiotic platitudes about believing in yourself, yuck. On stage it might have worked because you need that bombast to fill up a theatre and reach the back rows, in the movie it's just over the top.
There is no classic or slightly classic or even memorable dialog, not even the stuff paraphrased from the original movie. Well maybe the ironic Michael Jackson speech about fame: "fame fortune and success are all illusions." I fell out laughing in light of his history, but in general the dialog is at best forgettable and filled with cliches as are the characters who are all cut from the big book of New York urban stereotypes.
The greatest fault though lies with director Sidney Lumet. His direction makes the movie look like a stage play caught by a static camera. There's almost no camera movement or life in his choice of shots and as a consequence I couldn't get into the movie as a movie. Rather it felt like watching a document of a live performance of a broadway play with lots of dancers and costume changes. While the sets and costumes are quite good with the exception of the laughable Wiz head which is more silly than scary, the movie just doesn't work at all as a movie. What works well on stage is not directly transferable to the movie screen. You have to make changes in order for it to work both in the music, staging and dialog and those changes weren't made. The play may have been magical, but the magic is missing from this movie.
I can't imagine wanting to buy this thing, let alone wanting to see it twice. Buy the marvelous original which is worth repeated viewings and leave this cliched train wreck of a movie on the shelf. As a play it might have worked especially with the original cast, as a movie it's a toxic bomb.
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