“There are just so many stupid, annoying, worthless people on the planet. They just like, get in the way of what you want.”

The first thing this movie reminded me of was my most shameless personal fave, Slap Her … She’s French (especially considering that movie’s alternate title “She Gets What She Wants”) ... but it’s a lot more subtle, extreme and subversive than that. It’s funny I found myself watching it during the BBC’s “White” week, in a way. The moment Evan Rachel Wood starts her speech about how wonderful it is to be white being as she wants to be an actress, all of this told to a Muslim student, listing Asian as her second choice, then Afro-American, and finally Arab … it certainly makes you gasp if anything more than I remembered “Slap Her” did – and where that race line goes in the end … I still don’t know quite what to think of it except to compare it to the other stereotypes in the movie, like, yes, the male and female ones, and say that it is one of those movies where the stereotypes really never bother me quite as much as they should, basically because the script just oozes smarts and Wood delivers those smarts in a way I really think nobody else could. It seems like she gets better with every film I see her in, and the final shot of her here is just phenomenal. James Woods, Jane Krakowski and Selma Blair are the icing on the cake.

Lawd. I started watching this the other night but I was too tired in the end. I came to it today truly wanting to like it. I love the concept – I love the normality of the opening with Dorothy at the family get-together, it’s just so beautifully down-to-earth and the music is great there too (“Don’t know what I’m made of / Why am I afraid of … feeling?”)

But then Dorothy goes to Oz. Now, ever since Meet the Robinsons, I’m pretty careful about first impressions, and the “look” of Oz here certainly had the same effect as the future did there. The make-up (by Stan Winston no less) is hideous, the costumes wild but pretty lazy in all (like someone just went into a thrift store or a school’s theatre wardrobe and grabbed anything wild-looking)

My head just got buried more and more in my hands as the music got more indigestible and the Sesame Street quality just devoured the thing entirely. I don’t want to compare it to the 1939 movie – pretty much anything looks bad by comparison – but even coming to it with the highest desire to work with it and find the goodness with in it, I struggled painfully. I nearly died laughing when the lion lets rip with, “I’m a lion!” ROFL … I just kept feeling like Homer Simpson in the “Homer’s Phobia” episode of The Simpsons in the steelworks … “oh my god, what’s happening now?!” lol. Then it goes absurdly dark at the end! Then they all get naked? lol. It’s just a maddening mess.

I’m inclined to say it could be the worst film I’ve ever seen – but there are a lot of plus points that make me understand where its fans are coming from. The sets in themselves are often stunning. Some of the music is catchy, even in the case of “Can I Go On?” slightly moving. The rainbow in the sprinklers at the end is simply inspired, and Richard Pryor completely steals the movie when he finally appears. I’m interested in a review I read on the IMDb that says how the Broadway show was pretty spectacularly different. Whatever … it’s certainly a curio, worth watching if you’re a fan of cinema, musicals, or just plain Oz … but I personally found it pretty damn excruciating, in a geniuinely “Make it stop!” kind of way. I think the credits say it all – written by Joel Schumacher, produced by Rob Cohen, and directed by Sidney Lumet. Too many cooks spoil the broth indeed … especially when they’re that differently minded.

As a sports movie, this was obviously gonna be a hard sell for me – its sole achievement threatening to be that it makes Friday Night Lights seem even more pointless. But when I love a movie as much as I love Uptown Girls, I don’t let the subject matter get in the way of catching up on the director’s other work.

The complete lack of any conflict or drama in the movie’s first half hour doesn’t help. This is a movie about a mixed race school football team, and the set-up is that they put this team together and everyone is pretty much fine about it. Luckily there’s an “ah-ha” moment around 35-40 minutes, though, where they enter “the real world” and things get tough – but it’s Disney, so, not that tough.

It’s watchable. But knowing me I’m probably only being nice ‘cos Hayden Panettiere (who it took me a while to recognise but I got there eventually – I guess I just always figured she was older than she is in Heroes lol) is cleverly planted in just about every other scene – her football crazy daughter of one of the coaches is about as funky as the rock ballerina girls in Uptown Girls and a little of a lot of cuteness like that (especially when it’s unexpected as it was to me here) goes a long way in a movie like this, lol. I’m sorry but I laughed my ass off at the “nanana, hey hey hey, goodbye” ending That tops Shrek the 3rd’s use of “Live and Let Die” for most inappropriate funeral scene ever, lol.

Well I can’t believe I just teared up while a Classic Eighties Movie Slow Clap^TM was going on in the background

It somehow felt like it was finally time for me to watch this – a recent Channel 4 thing about the best family films brought it to the surface, and I’ve been noticing a lot of people on Facebook listing it as a fave – but within minutes I was questioning if that was a good idea. There’s an old me that would have been far from impressed with this movie for the exact same reason the me of now ultimately fell for it today. This is guilty of just about every cliché in the book of late-80s and early-90s cinema. It pulls every faux-pas that practically threatened to destroy the artform during that period. But, somehow, it works.

It didn’t make me laugh at loud much at all compared to some. But there’s just something else under it all – perhaps highlighted by the Dark Moment (let’s use the proper template terms here, it couldn’t be more by the book I swear) ... which is actually really dark, I mean for a movie that seems so silly and light from the outside that crash is nasty – it’s perhaps the fact that it does follow the old screenplay paradigms and wot-not so to the letter. I don’t know. All I know is, I wasn’t bored, I laughed a little, and I was embarrassingly moved by those final moments.