Movie Nation

Let’s see if we remember how this goes.
“With a purposeful grimace and a terrible scowl, he pulls the spitting high-tension wires down.”
And soon enough, “Oh no, there’s go Tokyo.” Well, not this time. It’s “Oh no, there goes (San) Francisco.”
“Godzilla” belches back to life in a new Warner Brothers film that harks back to the kid-friendlier versions of these Japanese “Kaiju” (big monster) movies. It suggests that in  an increasingly radioactive world menaced by radiation-eating beasties, the return of the almost cuddly “King of the Monsters” may be the least of our troubles.
The opening credits cleverly revisit the 1940s and ’50s atomic testing that awakened Godzilla once. Gareth Edwards’ film then jumps to the late ’90s, where mysterious goings on in mining operations in the Philippines and near nuclear plants in Japan hint that something bad is about to go down.
Bryan Cranston is an American engineer working with his wife (Juliette Binoche) when a tragic accident means their little boy Ford will grow up without a mom.
Years later, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson of “Kick-Ass”) is a Navy bomb disposal expert, and Dad’s still hanging around the ruins of that Japanese reactor, a wild-eyed loon determined to get to the bottom of a cover-up. Something is awakening. Call it a MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism). And call in the military.
Dr. Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) has been following developments all these years. He knows what’s up. He’s seen the Toho movies. He’s heard the Blue Oyster Cult song.
Visual effects master turned director Gareth Edwards impressed Hollywood with his low-budget version of this sort of story,”Monsters.” Given a huge budget and hours to tell the tale, he delivers a lumbering movie that’s as bloated as this new roly-poly version of the Big Guy, whom we only see in all his glory in the later acts.
Cranston blubbers with emotion — “Something KILLED my wife, and I have a RIGHT to know!” He chews more scenery than the lizard. Taylor-Johnson doesn’t break a sweat or make any impression as beasts try to keep him from making it home to his wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and child in San Francisco. Watanabe runs through a panoply of “stricken” looks as he sees the menace, understands it and fails to convince the Admiral (David Strathairn) in charge that the natural world needs “order” and perhaps the giant lizard “will restore it.”
Sally Hawkins was wastefully cast to simply stand behind Watanabe as Dr. Serizawa makes another “What fresh hell is this?” face.
The effects are decent — warships tossed about like bathtub toys, trains trashed and torched, nuclear missiles munched. The movie’s never less than competent. But the fatigue of over-familiarity curses this franchise like few others. We’ve seen Japanese men in monster suits. We’ve seen digital kaiju, and gigantic robot-armored soldiers fighting them (“Pacific Rim”).
So in a tale this timeworn and a film this devoid of humor, with only a few moments of humanity, with tension frittered away by the tedious repetition of the fights, anybody who has ever seen “Godzilla” in any incarnation can be forgiven for asking the obvious.
“What else have you got?”

(Read Roger Moore’s interview with Ken Watanabe here).

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for intense sequences of destruction, mayhem and creature violence
Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Sally Hawkins, Bryan Cranston, Juliette Binoche, David Strathairn
Credits: Directed by Gareth Edwards, written Max Borenstein and Dave Callaham, based the Toho Studios “Godzilla” movies. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 2:03

There was a time when we felt safe assuming the course of our lives would be predictable — courtship in our teens and 20s — we’d align ourselves with a career, marriage and kids by our 30s– “settle down” by 40.
But maybe that’s changing, evolving right before our eyes.
That’s the larger subtext of “Chinese Puzzle,” the new French film, third in a series (we can’t really call it a “trilogy”) featuring those randy, open-minded Europeans of “L’auberge Espagnole” (“The Spanish Inn”).
Back in 2002, Xavier (Romain Duris) had his eyes opened by the diverse peers whose lives he got mixed up in while studying in Barcelona. By the time “Russian Doll” (2005) rolled around, Xavier had become a writer, just not the one he wanted to be, and catching up with his friends (Audrey Tautou, Cecile De France and Kelly Reilly among them) just reminded him of how unsettled life still was.
“Chinese Puzzle” captures this coterie as they hit 40. They’ve dug through the nesting “Russian Dolls” and settled down. With kids.
Xavier is now 40, a novelist struggling with his latest book. He’s married to Wendy (Kelly Reilly). They have two kids. He thinks they’re happy.
But just as his editor warns him that “Happiness is a disaster in fiction,” Wendy abruptly wants out. She’s taking the kids and moving to New York. A bit of mulling that separation from his children, realizing that he has a friend in New York already — Isabelle (Cecile De France) — makes Xavier pack up his laptop and narrate himself to The Big Apple.
“Pinned to the ground,” Xavier observes (in French, with English subtitles), “you see that New York’s obsession is the sky.”
Writer-director Cedric Klapisch revels in the uncivilized cacophony of New York, the vast array of cultures (Latino, Hasidic, Chinese) and subcultures (aged rockers) Xavier encounters as he tries to find an apartment.
The funny fish-out-of-water stuff comes from Xavier’s experience with a comically cut-rate New York lawyer, haggling over custody, figuring out whether to make his stay Green Card legal or on the down low. Xavier fantasizes himself a French Renaissance man, bickering with Hegel, but reality is kiddie play dates in the park, feuding with his ex over schools and school uniforms and trying to do the sperm donor thing for his lesbian pal Isabelle and keep her wandering eye a secret from her significant other, Hu (Sandrine Holt).
The “Puzzle” here is the interconnected lives and inter-woven cultures Xavier comes to understand living in Chinatown, trying to trick the Immigration and Naturalization Service and wondering what might have been as Martine (Audrey Tautou) comes to visit.
There’s nothing new in “Puzzle,” no new situations and only a few truly novel observations about New York, America, sperm donorship or turning 40. That makes the movie a bit of a drag at close to two hours. Some situations feel forced and arbitrary. “Let’s find an excuse to bring Martine into the story.” And the ending has a whiff of “How I Met Your Mother” cheating about it.
But what holds our interest and holds the story together is this winning cast in these familiar, lovable (somewhat) roles. A dozen years on and this exercise in globe-trotting, in “We’re growing older, but not up” reminds us that what’s true in life is just as true in casting movies — pick your friends carefully enough and they’ll entertain you for a lifetime.
　
　
MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, nudity and language
Cast: Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou, Cecile De France, Kelly Reilly
Credits: Written and directed by Cedric Klapisch. A Cohen Media release.
Running time: 1:57

Robert Duvall may be 83, but he’s still up to playing a real Texas hell raiser on the screen. He can hold his own with bad hombres. He’s still got thoughts that he could “get the girl.” Not bad for an old man.
“Who’re you callin’ old man?”
That’s his mantra in “A Night in Old Mexico,” an amiable Duvall star vehicle in the “Hud’ meets ‘Blood Simple'” mold, a rough and tumble romp South of the Border.
He plays Red, a foul-mouthed, abusive old coot who is estranged from his only family, has lost his land but not lost his desire “for some singin’ and some dancin’.”
Bellowing and boozing, he uses the excuse of a visit from the grandson he never knew (Jeremy Irvine) to ditch his caregiver, flee the trailer park where he’s to retire to, take his ancient Cadillac and hightail it for Mexico.
The kid, Gally, has notions of taking up the rodeo. But being a slicker and a Yankee, to boot, he’s picked the wrong hat and cowboy duds that look like Nashville’s idea of a cowboy. He has a lot to learn.
“Am I right, or Amarillo?” the old man taunts him.
Meanwhile, a drug deal has gone wrong and the killers who pulled it off try to catch a ride with Red and Gally. That’s a notion the wily old man tires of in an instant. The problem? They left their stash of cash in the car. The bad guys are after Red and Gally. A badder guy, hired by the drug lord, is after them all, and the cash.
And the trail follows the old man and the boy as they cross the border, take up with a stripper who wants to be a singer (Angie Cepeda) and generally stir things up.
The melodramatic plot does nothing to spoil one’s enjoyment of Duvall’s performance here. Red is pushy, delusionally certain of his charms, quick to anger and quicker to tell tall tales of his mythic past.
“The older they get,” the kid learns, “the better they were when they were young.”
Duvall makes us believe that Red believes that he’s up for anything, that he has a shot with a woman one fourth his age.
“Better an ol’man’s darlin’ than a young man’s slave.”
Director Emilio Aragon, working from a William D. Wittliff (“Barbarosa,” “Legends of the Fall”) script, creates a vivid milieu of honky tonks and brothels where Jerry Jeff Walker singing “I Like My Women Just a Tad on the Trashy Side” is on the jukebox. Director and writer give the kid a more complete coming-of-age story arc, from tin horn to man, but wisely keep the focus on Duvall. Every insult, every gripe, every threat out of Red’s mouth is quotable.
“Watch it like it’s your own,” he growls to some Mexicans who park his car, “but ‘member it ain’t.”
Red is the very embodiment of the poet’s description of one who will “not go gently” into the coming night. “A Night in Old Mexico” suggests Red’s credo could be Duvall’s, and filmgoers are all the richer for it.
“I ain’t done yet. I got a few pleasures to go.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, adult situations
Cast: Robert Duvall, Jeremy Irvine, Angie Cepeda, Joaquin Cosio
Credits: Directed by Tom. A Phase 4 Film release.
Running time: 1:41

The sweep of recent African history is the backdrop for “Half of a Yellow Sun,” a romantic epic set in the decade after the independence of Nigeria. Tribal conflicts, the lingering effects of colonialism which forced disparate tribes together under one national flag, the cynicism of the ruling classes, the naivete of academia, all play out as Nigeria celebrates its freedom from British rule only to descend into civil war.
Thandie Newton and Anika Noni Rose play Olanna and Kainene, aloof, haughty and beautiful sisters, daughters of the ruling class who figure they can go their own way now that the yoke of British oppression has been lifted off their shoulders.
Not that they’ve been oppressed. Not personally. In 1960 Lagos, they wear the high fashion and sport the posh accents of the Brits. Like African Kardashians, they are giving “our fellow Nigerians something to aspire to.”
Kainene may pretend to rebuff the advances of a white academic (Joseph Mawle), this “modern day explorer of the Dark Continent.” But she’s curious, and figures she deserves no less than someone from her class, even a white man.
Olanna is smitten with the impeccable taste — French wines, Western furniture and cars — and fiery rhetoric of Odenigbo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), whom her sister dismisses as “your revolutionary lover.”
Odenigbo has a job at a provincial college and Olanna goes there to live with him and teach. But his traditional, village mother (Onyeka Onwenu) doesn’t approve.
“There is a WITCH in my son’s house!” She’s not being metaphorical, either. She thinks the city woman in designer dresses has bewitched her son.
But they all soon have bigger problems than the soap operas that make up their love lives. “Half of a Yellow Sun” is the symbol on the flag of Biafra, a breakaway state that fought a civil war for its independence from newly oil-rich Nigeria in the years after British rule. Odenigbo is the classic academic idealist, trumpeting the reasons for independence at wine-besotted gatherings with his colleagues.
“The only authentic identity for an African, is his tribe!”
He’s like those Spanish Civil War fans of an earlier generation. He blames the British for all his new country’s ills, insists “There won’t be a war,” and then there is.
Biyi Bandele’s film, based on the Chimamanda Ngozi novel, immerses us in the refugee’s plight in such wars — fleeing the front lines as the fighting closes in, witnessing the savagery of tribe-on-tribe (Igbo vs. Fulani) genocide, and getting by with the help of a loyal servant, simple servant (John Boyega ).
It’s a conceit of such stories — think of this as an African “Gone With the Wind” — that the female characters are more intuitive, expecting the worst from the politicians, instantly realizing when their man is cheating.
It’s a bit of a muddle and a touch too soap operatic. But Newton, Rose and Ejiofor give their characters and this story just enough pathos to make the history lessons sink in.
Whatever virtues that the novel lost making the transition to the screen, “Half of a Yellow Sun” has the authentic feel of history as it instructs us on the ways tribal prejudices were converted into class prejudices and how a Biafra, and more recently, a Rwanda can still happen on a map where the boundaries were drawn, long ago, by European rulers playing empire games with a continent.
　
　
　
MPAA Rating: R for some violence and sexual content
　
Cast: Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Anika Noni Rose, Joseph Mawle
Credits: Written and directed by Biyi Bandele, based on the Chimamanda Ngozi novel.
A Monterey Media release.
Running time: 1:51

Japanese actor Ken Watanabe is most famous for his work in such global blockbusters as “Inception,” “Batman Begins,” “The Last Samurai” and “Memoirs of a Geisha.”
At 53, he’s of a stature that Hollywood knows if there’s a movie to be made in Japan, Watanabe is the go-to Japanese star. Gus Van Sant called on him to co-star in his Japanese-set drama, “Sea of Trees,” and Martin Scorsese’s film of Shûsaku Endô’s “Silence,” about Jesuit missionaries in 17th century Japan, has Watanabe in a featured role.
And there’s probably a cinematic law that says you cannot make a “Godzilla” movie without a major Japanese star in it. In the newest incarnation of the “King of the Monsters,” Watanabe plays a Japanese scientist who seems to understand the monsters that have burst into the Pacific better than the American engineers, soldiers and sailors who are battling them.
Question: What was your first exposure to “Godzilla,” growing up in Japan?
Watanabe: “I was nine, ten years old when I watched four or five films on TV, Godzilla battles this creature or that one (“Godzilla vs. Monster Zero,” etc.). It was great entertainment for a kid!”
Question: As the chief Japanese member of the cast, did you feel protective of Godzilla, how he’d be presented, what he’d represent in this movie?
Watanabe: ” I met (director) Gareth Edwards and told him, ‘To me, Godzilla is symbolic of human cultures. His roar is like something sent down from the ancient gods, a mythic warning. I wanted to know from him what kind of story he had in mind for Godzilla, today. He admires Godzilla, and how much fun those movies were. He seems to love Japanese comic books, Japanese culture. He knew all about Godzilla, very deep knowledge of his background, the meanings of those early films when we learn how Godzilla was born. I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about what kind of Godzilla movie he would make. He gave me great confidence.”
Question: So, what does a ‘Godzilla’ movie need to be about, then?
Watanabe: “When I saw this movie, finished, I got the most excited whenever Godzilla let out his roar. That sound, ‘Rooooooooooarrrrr,’ filled me with pride. But also sadness. To me, it’s like Godzilla is calling out a warning to humanity’s foolishness. Radiation from bombs, from power plants. That’s what brings him back.
‘Godzilla’ was born out of fear of nuclear weapons after World War II. But after we experienced the collapse of our nuclear power plant in Fukushima, due to the earthquake and tsunami, it was like the fear was back — the same fear we had sixty years ago when ‘Godzilla’ was born. It made me, as a Japanese actor, want to join this project, be in this film.
“My character’s background made me want to play him. His father was a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. This guy ended up studying nuclear energy, nuclear power. What does that say about him? He hopes he is doing something meaningful for humanity with this very destructive energy. But he is still struggling with that issue. He sees this conflict as nature vs. science…He comes to believe that science does not have power over nature. We have a type of power we cannot control. That is what ‘Godzilla’ is about.”

“Neighbors” had a slight fall-off on Saturday at the box office, as is the way of things with films that aren’t children’s cartoons. R-rated comedies open Thursday night, have a rush on Friday by the “gotta see it first” crowd, and the Friday night date people, and that sucks away some of their Saturday and Sunday opening weekend audience.

A Big Thursday night, a huge Friday and nearly as huge Saturday means it could hit $50 million. Sunday will be telling. It stands at close to $40 Sunday AM.

“The Other Woman” continues to appeal to its target audience, girls’ night out ladies. It will fall just short of $100, by the time it finishes its run.

“Heaven is for Real” will be around $75 million by Sunday night. That’s a huge take for a movie that didn’t cost much, the second biggest faith-based movie of the year (after “Noah,” which did not have nearly the push from the nation’s pulpits that the simpler tale of a little boy’s account of the afterlife).

“Amazing Spider-Man” did not plunge enough to doom this lucrative, cynical, yawner of a series.

“Moms’ Night Out” won’t hit $5, despite the faith-based Mother’s DAy push.

“Legends of Oz” won’t be keeping Disney or Dreamworks up at night. Under $5.

The R-rated farce “Neighbors” did well enough with the critics, considering its director’s track record. At the box office? It’s a smash, $45-48 million and climbing, far exceeding any notion that it wouldn’t open in “Bridesmaids” territory. Another Seth Rogen hit, a much-needed bust-out for Zac Efron.

The middling “Spider-Man” lost about 60% of its opening weekend oomph, maybe more. Saturday’s numbers will tell

“Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return” will be lucky to manage $4 million. Indian animators, vast numbers of investors, a decent voice cast. A deathly dull script cursed this one. Terrible reviews.

“Moms’ Night Out” doesn’t hit the faith-based angle hard enough to get that endorsement from the pulpit thing it needed to join the other faith-based hits this year. Some laughs would have helped.

Jon Favreau makes “Iron Man” movies and crummy blockbuster comedies. What’s he doing getting his cooking chops down and stepping in front of the camera, and behind it, for “Chef,” a mouth-watering culinary wish fulfillment fantasy?
Take this script, which he wrote, directed and stars in, as a metaphor for his film career. “Chef” is Favreau’s most personal film since “Swingers,” an overlong comedy full of his food, his taste in music, his favorite places and a boatload of his favorite actors.
And the actor Favreau brings his A-game patter to this romp about an embattled Los Angeles chef, once celebrated, now in a rut, who has to take a road trip in a food truck to find his soul, and his food, again.
Carl Casper’s big night at the swank Galouise eatery is ruined by the passive aggressive owner of the joint.
“Be an artist on your own time,” Riva (Dustin Hoffman) whines. Stick to “your greatest hits” menu.
That’s how Carl gets the bad review from the cranky online food critic (Oliver Platt). Carl’s kid (Emjay Anthony) introduces him to Twitter. Big mistake. Carl insults the guy.
That leads to a flame war and that, in turn, leads to Carl’s shout-down/meltdown in the middle of the restaurant. He’s out of a job and he’s infamous, thanks to the viral video of his hissy fit.
“I’m a MEME.”
It’s time to take stock, not make stock. It’s time to find what made him passionate about food, to remind himself that he can “touch people’s lives” with his cooking. It’s time to go to Miami and maybe crank up a food truck.
“Chef” has adorable, PG-13 worthy father-son bonding, with Favreau really clicking with the kid. It has a wonderful supporting cast, with fellow cooks played by John Leguizamo and Bobby Cannavale, the restaurant manager/hostess played by Scarlett Johannson, Sofia Vergara as Carl’s party planner ex-wife and Robert Downey Jr., leaning into the sort of eccentric word play that only Favreau brings out in him (He’s another ex-husband of the party planner).
All of it comes off thanks to wonderful early scenes that establish Favreau’s comfort in the kitchen, his steady hand with a knife. He seems at home in this world and relishes explaining what makes it special. He wants to seduce the hostess?
“Let me cook you something.”
The food is mouth watering — calamari to die for, squab, even a work-of-art grilled cheese sandwich which he stoops way over the grill to make, as we’ve seen Emeril, Mario and Gordon Ramsey do on TV — every one of his senses committed to getting it perfect.
Carl shudders at the idea that he’s now suitable for a role in a Gordon Ramsey reality show (“Hell’s Kitchen” is pitched, they must have meant “Kitchen Nightmares”).
And knowing what it means when a chef gives a young cook his first knife is touching.
The “wish fulfillment fantasy” here is the whole overlong rosy road to redemption part of the movie, which tries to sell us on Carl’s utter ignorance of social media and his ten year-old hooking him up and making him a star. That stuff, the idea that any true chef would not realize how hot the food truck movement is — and was give years ago — and several abrupt, illogical leaps in the plot are the only sour ingredients in this delightful, savory comedy.
It’s nice to see Favreau can still bring it once he’s put down the comic books and the soul-sucking blockbusters they demand. Welcome back. Now, let’s eat.
　
　
MPAA Rating: R for language, including some suggestive references
Cast: Jon Favreau, Sofia Vergara, John Leguizamo, Emjay Anthony, Scarlett Johansson, Bobby Cannavale, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Downey Jr., Oliver Platt
Credits: Written and directed by Jon Favreau. An Open Road
Running time: 1:53

If nothing else, the scope of the story of the West Memphis\Robin Hood Hills
murders should have given “Devil’s Knot” director Atom Egoyan pause. A 1993
tragedy compounded by a laughably incompetent police investigation and the
efforts of the cops, the ham-fisted prosecutors and an already
made-up-his-feeble-mind judge to railroad three heavy-metal-loving young men
accused of a Satanic/witchcraft ritual murder, this decades-long case was
notorious without a feature film treatment.

The intrepid filmmakers/activists behind “Paradise Lost” made three long
award-winning documentaries that covered the crime, the trials, and efforts
afterward to raise questions that eventually got the accused set free. Peter
Jackson even parachuted in for his own documentary.

But Egoyan, perhaps reaching for some of that sublime, understated grief that
earned him kudos with his most acclaimed film, “The Sweet Hereafter,” plunged in
with a truncated, perfunctory and utterly straightforward version of this “true
story.” The last thing it needed was that sort of treatment.

Reese Witherspoon stars as working class Pam, whose adoring eight-year-old
son Stevie was one of three who rode his bike off the end of their West Memphis,
Arkansas, street, into dense woods, only to be found naked, murdered in shallow
“Devil’s Den” creek.

And even though, right from the start, clues pointed them elsewhere, the cops
started looking closely at a bunch of goth-minded teenage boys.
They had the wrong addresses– trailer parks. They wore the wrong haircuts,
listened to the wrong music, read the wrong books. They had the wrong names — a
“Damien” and a “Jason” among them.

They had to be guilty. Of something. As a detective admits, with no
consequences for his stupidity, the murders were destined to happen because
“We’ve been expecting something like this to happen around here for quite a
while.”
Elias Koteas is a probation officer who has listened to one troubled teen’s
many stories of witchcraft sacrifices with the gullibility of a backwoods rube.
Bruce Greenwood is the judge who saw nothing wrong with botched evidence
handling, mail-order college certified “experts” on the occult and massive
evidence of police and prosecutorial misconduct.
And Colin Firth is Ron Lax, the recently-divorced local private detective who
makes this case his cause.
“I think three dead kids is enough,” he says, throwing himself into the
defense team’s efforts to save three boys from the death penalty for crimes they
almost certainly did not commit.
Firth’s character might have been the focus, as Lax and Witherspoon’s mother
character come to a meeting of the minds over what is being done to the accused,
and who might be getting away with murder. But Egoyan got lost in the casting
and editing, struggling to find screen time for Dane DeHaan as a kid who was an
earlier suspect, for the fathers of two of the boys ( Alessandro Nivola, Kevin
Durand), whom the documentaries frame in a sinister light.
Egoyan does well by the awful, sad search for the kids and the distraught
cops and grief-stricken parents when they discover them. He struggles to find
any heart to the story once the clumsy cops and bad police work come to dominate
the story. And he loses track of Firth’s PI Ron Lax, who should be the moral
center of the piece.

There’s too much tragedy, grief and outrage here for a single movie. Egoyan
may realize that now. And there’s scant hope that Monte Hellman, who directed
“West Memphis Three,” starring Chloe Sevigny, due out this November, made out
any better with this long, convoluted and ugly saga of small town justice’s
shortcomings. It’s a epic tragedy, and summing it up in under two hours does
nobody justice.

MPAA Rating:  unrated, violence, partial nudity, blood
Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Colin Firth, Dane DeHaan, Bruce Greenwood</P>
Credits: Directed by Atom Egoyan, screenplay by Paul Harris Boardman and
Scott Derrickson, based on the Mara Leveritt book. An RLJ Entertainment release.
Running Time: 1:54

“Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return” is a harmless but almost charmless adaptation of a book by L. Frank Baum’s grandson. It’s a derivative hash of grandpa’s story, set in the present day, given forgettable new tunes by pop songsmiths such as Bryan Adams which are sung by the likes of Lea Michele, Martin Short, Hugh Dancy and the operatic Megan Hilty of TV’s “Smash.”
And it’s in 3D. Of course.
But lest this child’s play be written off all altogether, let’s look on the bright side. The bottom rung of big screen computer-generated animation’s ladder, entry level stuff, is decades beyond where it used to be. This work, animated at Prana in India, has decent production design — a dark, abandoned Emerald City, a shiny, porcelin sheen its scenes set in “Dainty China Country” and luscious-looking 3D sweets in Candy County.
And the animated characters are beautifully rendered, even if their faces don’t have the expression and plasticity that Pixar, Blue Sky, Disney and Sony have managed in their recent films.
Dorothy (Michele), Toto, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry survive a tornado that trashes their corner of Kansas. An unscupulous real estate hustler (Martin Short) is ready to buy out the whole, shattered town. But before Dorothy can stop this foreclosure fraud, a rainbow snatches her and drags her back to Oz, her and her little dog, too.
Scarecrow (Dan Aykroyd) has smartly summoned her to save the land, which is under the thumb of The Jester (Short, again), the evil brother of the Wicked Witch of the West. And Brother carries a grudge.
Dorothy, on arrival, teams up with Wiser, the chatterbox owl (Oliver Platt), the candy soldier, Marshal Mallow (Dancy) and the haughty China Princess (Hilty) and sets off down the ruined Yellow Brick Road to save her old friends.
Kelsey Grammer plays a mercurial Tin Man who now has a heart.
“I had no emotions before,” he wails. Now, “I want to try them ALL out!”
Jim Belushi voices the lion, and Bernadette Peters is perfectly cast as Glinda, the Good Witch, now just a puppet of Jester.
“No good can come from the reign of a fool,” she trills.
With unknown animation entities, the rule is that the more impressive the voice cast, the weaker the script. Hire Great Brits Patrick Stewart (as a boat), Brian Blessed and Dancy (who croons a tune or two) and maybe you can cover up the startling lack of humor on the page.
These films — even the bad ones — are gold mines. So there’s no point in complaining about the cynicism that exists in this genre. Not with Disney, inexplicably releasing a sequel to its embarrassing fiasco “Planes” later this summer.

MPAA Rating:PG for some scary images and mild peril
Cast: The voices of Lea Michele, Martin Short, Hugh Dancy, Oliver Platt, Bernadette Peters, Megan Hilty, Dan Aykroyd, Patrick Stewart, Jim Belushi
Credits: Directed by Will Finn and Dan St. Pierre, written by Adam Balsan and Randi Barnes, based on a Roger. S. Baum book. A Clarious/Prana Studios release.
Running time: 1:28