Oz the Great and Powerful - Movie Review

Starring James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams, Zack Braff, Joey King, Bill Cobbs and Tony Cox.  Directed by Sam Raimi.

★★½

Sam Raimi does to Oz what Tim Burton essentially did to Wonderland.  He's created a magical world more concerned with special effects and set pieces than in creating a timeless tale, and so as the years pass, most will forget it ever happened.

Don't get me wrong.  I enjoyed a lot of it. I liked meeting new sidekicks, like the talking winged monkey and the Little China Girl. The 3D effects were well-done.  But...

James Franco is miscast as Oscar Zoroaster, a carnival con-man who gets swept up by a cyclone one black-and-white day in 1905.  He lands in the land of color, in a lake where the good witch Theodora (Kunis) happens to be walking by. She mistakes him for the wizard, foretold by prophecy (whose prophecy?) to free the land of Oz from the reign of the wicked witch.

This is a prequel to the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz moreso than a prequel to the books, and when it comes to Oz prequels, Wicked had a better origin story. This movie leaves itself room for a sequel that'd still fit in between this and when Dorothy arrives. Since this one ends all happy-fuzzy, maybe that movie will show the Wizard of Oz regress into the cowardly agorophobe who sends a young girl off to go kill the Wicked Witch herself.

I liked Return to Oz more.

Ted - Movie Review

Starring Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Seth MacFarlane, Joel McHale, Giovanni Ribisi, Patrick Warburton, Matt Walsh, Jessica Barth, Bill Smitrovich, Laura Vandervoot and the voice of Patrick Stewart. Directed by Seth MacFarlane.

★★½

From the creator of Family Guy comes this movie... that feels a lot like an episode of Family Guy.

For those not familiar with Seth MacFarlane TV shows, they feature a family, and there will be a plot, and then someone will make a pop-culture reference, and then we'll see that reference played out for a few seconds.  Someone could say "I haven't felt this uncomfortable since Paris Hilton appeared on Inside the Actor's Studio" and then you'll see ten seconds of just that, like we've popped in the middle of a skit, and then it'll go back to our regular story.

Ted does that a couple times.

This is about John Bennett (Mark Wahlberg) and his teddy bear (MacFarlane).  Ted magically came to life in 1985, and John and Ted have been best friends ever since.  I like that the movie acknowledges that Ted had brief fame in the 1980's do to his whole magical-talking-teddy-bear existence, but then like Corey Feldman, he grew up and his fame vanished.

John and Ted now hang out and smoke pot and live in arrested adolescense.  John works a terrible job at a car-rental service; Ted freeloads.  Living with them is Lori (Mila Kunis), John's girlfriend of four years who is fine with Ted, but after coming home to Ted and four hookers, she decides maybe it's time for Ted to move out.

Since the movie is substance-free, it lives or dies on how funny it is.  Well, some of it is, and some of it isn't.  Once the initial shock-laughs wear off of a pot-smoking teddy bear, where do you go?  I don't find pot humor that funny, maybe because I've seen most of Judd Apatow's movies, or maybe because I don't smoke pot, and you apparently need to in order to find all of it funny.  But it made me think: Ted's full of fluff.  Why would smoking pot affect him?  Why does he eat and drink?  How does Ted have sex since he's anatomically... a regular toy teddy-bear?

There are some funny cameos, and the entire Flash Gordon subplot is well-done.  Wahlberg's good at comedy, lest we forget his work in The Other Guys and Date Night, and Kunis is game, even if too much of her role is patiently waiting for John to grow up.  The CGI on Ted is flawless.  I just thought its joke-to-laugh ratio wasn't that high. (See what I did there?)

Friends with Benefits - DVD Review

Starring Justin Timberlake, Mila Kunis, Woody Harrelson, Patricia Clarkson, Richard Jenkins, Jenna Elfman, Bryan Greenburg, Nolan Gould, Andy Samberg and Emma Stone. Directed by Will Gluck.
★★½

Yet another movie that tries to teach us that sex can be business-like between friends without any of that yucky emotional stuff. I'm sure nothing will get complicated.

Timberlake and Kunis start off with a professional relationship and then they become friends, actual friends. Somewhere in there they decide to have sex but make a promise that if either one starts to feel emotional about it, they stop it, because they like each other too much.

And for a while it works. And then they hit a point where they stop as they decide to see other people. And that works for a while. Ah, but those pesky emotions...

Kunis has the right rhythms for a rom-com lead without feeling like we're ever going to venture into sappy territory. She's a genuinely funny performer. Timberlake's been good in supporting roles (The Social Network) but here, he's just fine.

I didn't like the main plot at all. I did like some of the detours it took, like with Timberlake's father (Richard Jenkins) having signs of Alzheimer's and how the family deals with that. But really, this is basically the same movie as No Strings Attached.