I first saw and fell in love with Xan Cassevetes‘ Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. And during that festival I got to know Xan a bit through F.X. Feeney, who talks a lot about the late Jerry Harvey in her doc. And then I noticed Xan get mouthy with IFC topper Jonathan Sehring at a Hotel du Cap party, and I remember saying to myself at that moment, “Uh-oh…temperamental.”

The next film Xan directed, a segment for New York, I Love You called “Allen Hughes,” came out five years later. And now, four years later, Magnet is preparing to release her latest, Kiss of the Damned, which looks to me like a rather typical sex-and-blood vampire film. It’s showing at South by Southwest, which begins this weekend. Pic will open on 5.3.13 after being available on iTunes/On Demand on 3.28.13. I’m hoping it won’t take her another six or seven years to deliver a feature-length film.

Last week I wrote that the opening credits of Oz The Great and Powerful, presented in black-and-white 3D within a 1.33 aspect ratio, are inventive and beautiful and altogether quite masterful. I also noted that the subsequent 15 minutes, also in the same format, are quite good also and in fact deliver more allure than the rest of Sam Raimi‘s film, which is in widescreen color and loaded down with more emphatic, eye-soaking CG than Raimi or the audience know what to do with.

The film runs another 110 minutes after the black-and-white section, and at great cost. A recent N.Y. Times story reported that the total Oz tab is $325 million, including marketing. I wonder how much Raimi made?

The opener is more involving than the eye-candy stuff because it’s mainly about (a) echoing the beginning of Victor Fleming‘s 1939 The Wizard of Oz, which began in black-and-white sepia-tone, and (b) is all about character set-up. The shakedown on James Franco‘s Oscar Diggs, a low-rent magician performing in a travelling carnival in 1905, is that he’s a reckless flim-flam man who feels unfulfilled (he wants to be a Harry Houdini or Thomas Edison-level achiever) and can’t recognize or express love. So we’re presuming, naturally, knowing the original backwards and forwards, that Diggs will gradually recognize and solve these issues once he air-balloons into the fairytale land of Oz and all the “whee!” stuff with the shreaking witches and flying baboons and whatnot kick in.

A resolution happens at the finale, I suppose, but not in a way that felt particularly satisfying or whole or fused together in just the right way. Not for me, at least.

But you’re thinking early on that the newbie just might come together like the 1939 original, particularly after watching a black-and-white Franco get lifted up and whipped around by a huge, snarly, wild-ass tornado, which also propelled Judy Garland‘s Dorothy Gale into The Land Beyond Kansas. But then Franco lands in Oz and the color kicks in and before you know it a cute little CG hummingbird shows up and then some piranha-like fish with razor teeth and it’s like “oh, Jesus God…here we go with the cute family crap.”

The screenplay for the old Wizard of Oz — written by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf with uncredited rewrites by Herman J. Mankiewicz, Arthur Freed, George Cukor, King Vidor, Richard Thorpe, Jack Mintz, Victor Fleming, John Lee Mahin, Ogden Nash, Irving Brecher, Samuel Hoffenstein, Herbert Fields, Sid Silvers, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, E.Y. Harburg and William H. Cannon — was a personal tale about 12 year-old Dorothy’s angst and imagination. The movie is basically a dream she has after being knocked out by a flying window frame. The fanciful characters are all from Dorothy’s actual life (Margaret Hamilton‘s Wicked Witch, Frank Morgan‘s Wizard, Ray Bolger‘s Scarecrow, Bert Lahr‘s Cowardly Lion, Jack Haley‘s Tinman) and the issues are all about what Dorothy and her three comrades want in a personal vein, but which they try to solve, futilely, by asking for help from others. They had the power all along but they didn’t know it. All they needed to do was reach in instead of out.

Oz The Great and Powerful, written by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire, is only occasionally or incidentally about Digg’s character issues. It’s more precisely and often oppressively about excuses to turn loose the CG crew so they can go to town with this or that mindblowing digital landscape or magical effect or eye-candy fireball or waterfall or what-have-you. It’s about the same old game, the same old “let’s try and whip the easily impressed into a CG lather!”

You could use your imagination and say it’s about commercial pressures (or some phantom or claw-footed gargoyle created by these pressures) standing behind poor Raimi and constantly nudging him in the ribs and going, “Sam…Sam! You’re a family man and you live in Brentwood and you’ve contributed to Republican politicians so you need to get paid the really big bucks, right? Which is why you’re making a relatively empty-headed CG-covered family-trade movie like this. And you know, or should know, that successful movies are not story- and character-driven any more, Sam…not really and not for years. They’re driven by wow effects, and so you really have to keep ’em dazzled, Sam…okay? Keep lathering on those FX, keep playing to the four year-olds.

“C’mon, Sam…we let you have your pain-in-the-ass black-and-white opening so do the right thing and make us the kind of soul-smothering, moron-level family flick that makes big money!”

Oz The Great and Powerful doesn’t really fit together or make a lot of sense. There are two witches…okay, one witch and a sister who’s under her influence (Rachel Wiesz, Mila Kunis)…who are seen as oppressors by the citizens of Oz, whose lives, they claim, are not “free,” whatever the hell that means. Believe me, these people are as free as you and me or Sam Raimi or any Anaheim Disneyland employee. They’re well-dressed and jolly and they sings songs and blah blah. And Glynda the Good Witch (Michelle Williams) is kind of half-assed in that she doesn’t seem to have much power. And the finale doesn’t involve Franco’s finding some kind of fulfillment (although he does, sort of) as much as it involves a kind of people’s revolution…you don’t want to hear this.

I know that if you’re going to include singing in a film, as in a singing or half-singing “musical,” you have to introduce it early on, certainly before the end of Act One. You sure as hell can’t can’t wait until the end of Act Two, I can tell you that.

“There’s neither a subversive nor even a gleeful bone in this film’s body,” wrote Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy, “which means there can be no fun in the evil or in villains being vanquished. Similarly missing is any zest to the storytelling. Quite the opposite of the great earlier film, the Oz here is a dull place to be. Given the choice, you might even consider going back to Kansas.”

It’s strange that Oz The Great and Powerful has a 63% Rotten Tomatoes rating among the general population. This obviously indicates trouble, but a film as bad and unfulfilling as this one deserves a negative rating in the 30s or 20s even. I don’t get why so many people who should know better have given it a pass. The top critic rating is 29%.

Repeating from last week: “Handsome naturalistic black-and-white 3D hasn’t been seen since…what?…The Creature From The Black Lagoon? (Tim Burton‘s Frankenweenie was animated.) “This is amazing…delightful,” I was saying to myself. “I haven’t watched anything like this ever on a big screen…the first time in my life!”

I picked up the Schindler’s List Bluray last night. It seems sadder and more horrific than it did 20 years ago. And it’s sheer black-and-white heaven. Rich, razor-sharp, super-textured. Plus I’d forgotten how tight, well-written and superbly acted it is, especially by Ben Kingsley and Ralph Fiennes. Virtually no trace of the man who made War Horse. And I’d forgotten how young Liam Neeson used to look.

“I don’t think of dying. I think of being here now.”

This is Valerie Harper‘s statement to People‘s Tim Molloy about her having been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and having been told by doctors she may have as little as three months to live. What kind of foul, fiendish manifestation is leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, “a rare condition in which cancer cells spread into the fluid-filled membrane around the brain”?

Love, hugs and empathy to Valerie, her husband, family, friends, fans. Hugs all around. Hugs forever.

Most of us, I’m sure, agree with and try to live by the famous title of Baba Ram Dass’s 1971 book. But the difference between being able to tell yourself you’ve got 10 or 30 or 50 or even 5 years left and looking at lights out within twelve weeks has to be a significant one. “Be here now” indeed, although I vastly prefer living with the general condition known as denial. Who, me? I’m fine, man. I eat right, feel great, never get sick.

I also feel a bit more kinship with Woody Allen‘s famous line: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work — I want to achieve it by not dying.”

Spartacus’s (i.e., Kirk Douglas‘s) answer to the above question: “No more than I was to be born.”

The WordPress version of Hollywood Elsewhere is up and running.  Disqus is also installed.  And yet, I’m told, commenting on previous posts (i.e., those composed before this very instant in the presently constituted space-time continuum, or the currently morphing version of same) are a no-go.  They can only be posted via “the old commenting system,” I’m told, except that’s not accessible any more so what the eff?

The new commenting universe begins this morning.  Hollywood Elsewhere’s ten-thousand-mile journey begins right now.  As William S. Burroughs once said in a Felt Forum event that I attended in the early ’80s, “We are here to go.”

I shared my final thoughts last night about Venezulean president Hugo Chavez. He died a few hours ago. This N.Y. Times video commentary by former Venezuelan correspondent Simon Romero sounds fair and balanced, but my heart agrees with what Chavez’s former friend and friendly portraitist Oliver Stone told TheWrap‘s Tim Kenneally.

”I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people and those who struggle throughout the world for a place,” Stone said. “Hated by the entrenched classes, Hugo Chavez will live forever in history.” Notice that Stone didn’t call Chavez a “great hero” by his own standards — he called him “a great hero to the majority of his people.”

“His life was in a manner of speaking gentle, and the elements so mixed in him that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, ‘This was a man.” — William Shakespeare‘s Julius Caesar

Hollywood Elsewhere will become a WordPress site sometime after midnight. Preparing for this has distracted my energies to some extent over the last few days, and especially yesterday as I felt I needed a little tutoring. WordPress is obviously not that big a deal, but I frankly prefer posting with HTML code rather than the purely visual option. (For now anyway.) I’m told that readers won’t have to re-register for the newly installed Disqus commenting software. I know that one way or another I’ll retain the power to delete certain comments and/or ban commenters outright. HE wouldn’t be HE without that.

A couple of hours ago Coming Soon critic-reporter Ed Douglas graciously agreed to do a brief Oscar Poker chat about Oz The Great and Powerful, which opens on Friday. Ed is more of a fan than I am, and has actually called Sam Raimi‘s film “as entertaining” as Victor Fleming‘s The Wizard of Oz (1939). My review will post sometime tomorrow. We mostly compared the two films. I decided that the ’39 version is more personally motivated and character-flavored while the Raimi is more conventonally genre-ish and CG-driven and even socio-political.

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming is reporting that Paramount has bought Allison Schroeder‘s screenplay of Agatha, about the 1926 disappearance of the famed mystery writer Agatha Christie. With Will Gluck (Friends with Benefits, Sony’s forthcoming Annie) attached to direct and Fleming calling the script a “female Sherlock Holmes meets Romancing The Stone,” there’s a clear possibility it’ll turn out to be coy, shallow crap.

Christie’s’ still-unexplained disappearance was the basis for Michael Apted‘s 1979 Agatha, which costarred Vanessa Redgrave as Christie and Dustin Hoffman as American journalist Wally Stanton. For whatever reason Fleming, who rarely misses a trick, doesn’t mention the Apted version. I haven’t seen it in ages, but I recall a decent, so-so drama that at least made a serious attempt to convey authentic 1920s period, dialogue, costumes and interior design. It was certainly a feast for the eyes with the darkish but oh-so-carefully lighted cinematography by Vittorio Storaro and production design by the great Shirley Russell.

I’ve no excuse for missing Robert Redford‘s The Company You Keep at last September’s Toronto Film Festival. Except that I said to myself when reviewing the schedule, “Okay, I’d like to see the Redford but not right this second because I need to see this, that and the other film first. But I’ll get to it.” And here it is March and I still haven’t seen it, although there are L.A. and N.Y. screenings happening as we speak. The NYC junket is just around the corner. Sony Classics is opening it limited on 4.5

The Rotten Tomatoes score stands at 63%. I’m told it’s not all that riveting in thriller terms but is otherwise intelligent and smart written and impassioned as far as it goes. And you know Susan Sarandon will be rock-solid as Bernadine Dohrn, so to speak.

For me the Iron Man franchise went belly-up 2 and 3/4 years ago during that ridiculous Monte Carlo duke-out between Robert Downey‘s Tony Stark (who wore too much eye make-up) and Mickey Rourke‘s Ivan Vanko in Jon Favreau‘s Iron Man 2…God, what an endurance test! And to think what a pleasure the original Iron Man was. Even I, a hater of almost all things geek, was more or less happy with that 2008 film. But I’m off the boat now. Who’s actually enthused about seeing the third installment? Please.

Magnolia marketing deserves a salute for creating this undeniably cool and catchy one-sheet for Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder. Yes, Brad Brevet — it owes a certain debt to the poster (or was it the Bluray jacket?) for Malick’s The Thin Red Line. Wonder opens on 4.12.