Recently in Entertainment Weekly (which I read cover to cover every week--O, how much more erudite I would be if I could say the same of The New Yorker!), Sidney Lumet was going over all of his movies, and he proclaimed The Wiz to be a disaster.
Leafing through this week's EW, I see that The Wiz has been rereleased on DVD. EW, generally not a very hard grader, gives it a D-. (Just as a point of comparison, the first two seasons of Perfect Strangers on DVD get a C+. So apparently EW thinks sitting through about 20 hours of Larry and Balki, which sounds like a Gitmo-esque enhanced interrogation technique to me, is preferable to The Wiz. Remind me not to go to movie night at these guys' houses!)
I gotta say, I'm puzzled by all of this. I saw The Wiz when I was in, I guess 5th or 6th grade and loved it. And all my friends loved it. I attended an urban public school, and it wasn't unusual to find kids walking down the hall singing "Ease on Down the Road." Even tough kids! (Though the '70's was a far less tolerant time than now in many respects, it was, I think, a little easier to be an urban kid then; there wasn't this dominant thug image that everybody felt like they had to live up to, so there were just more acceptable ways to be. And so it was entirely possible to sing a song originally sung by Diana Ross and Michael Jackson at top volume in the halls of or on the bus to Clifton Elementary without getting your ass kicked. I haven't set foot in Clifton Elementary in twenty-eight years, but I strongly suspect the same may not be true today.)
I saw The Wiz twice in theaters, because this was the era when only rich people had VCRs. (true! If you wanted to see the a semi-old Hollyrock movie, you had to stick your feet through the floor of your car and make it go to the drive-in, where your pet dinosaur would poke his head through the roof!).
But I grew up, and I recognized that things I liked as a youth may not have stood the test of time. (For example, I made the kids watch Twins with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Devito. "It's really funny!" I said. After about twenty minutes, they said, "This sucks! This is the worst movie ever!" and I couldn't really disagree, but that was only because I didn't feel like explaining about The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But you won't be so lucky: guy cheats on his wife. Three hours later, they die.)
So we got the DVD a while back (not the new fancy special edition or anything--just the bare bones, just the movie, no special features, what the hell do you want for ten bucks edition.) And I have to say the movie holds up remarkably well. Yes Diana Ross was too old to play Dorothy. I mean way too old. I mean like Stockard Channing in Grease too old. But Michael Jackson is really very good as the Scarecrow, and he sings wonderfully. Nipsey Russell as the Tinman proves there's more to him than Match Game, and Richard Pryor turns in a really great performance as the twitchy, craven Wiz.
Best of all, the movie looks great--every location in Oz is imagined as a kind of fantasy version of New York. (This element is singled out for scorn in EW: "Oz as New York slum", they sniff, but that's the whole point of the freaking movie! ) So the Tinman lives under the rollercoaster at Coney Island, and the flying Monkeys chase our heroes around the ramps at Shea (or possibly Yankee, and both are the home of New York baseball teams, so really who cares) Stadium, and there is a really creepy scene where the pillars in a subway station detach and start chasing everybody. Yes, it's a dark, weird, and vaguely threatening vision of New York, but having been to New York in the 70's, I can tell you that reality was darker, weirder, and even more threatening.
So it's a really cool-looking, imaginative movie with a great supporting cast (did I mention Lena Horne as Glinda), great music, and, okay, a lead who's a little long in the tooth, but still, what's not to love?
