By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to the beloved family classic The Wizard Of Oz.
One of the dumbest things (on a list of very dumb things) that movie lovers and critics do is base their appreciation of a film on how they felt upon first seeing it as a child. You hear it all the time: “I grew up with this film.” “Our family used to sit around and watch it together.” “I can’t wait to show it to my children.” Straight off the bat, The Butcher hates (a) children (b) families, and (c) family films. But that doesn’t change the abject stupidity of this practice.
If you love a film when you’re a child – when you are, let’s be honest, pretty much a complete idiot – shouldn’t that be ample reason to not love it when you’re an adult and, allegedly, older and wiser? Do you still watch Play School just for kicks, and find it fascinating and illuminating? Do you still think that Vegemite sandwiches are the pinnacle of culinary achievement? Do you still smear your faeces on the wall and give it an admiring nod? No? Then why do you still get all misty eyed about the crappy flicks that you watched when you still had to go to bed before 8:30pm?
The biggest culprit in the dewy eyed, “childhood favourites” brand of film appreciation is undoubtedly the hoary old 1939 “classic”, The Wizard Of Oz. This is a flick so tired and unimaginative that it actually uses the – spoiler alert! – it-was-all-just-a-dream conceit, surely one of the most irritating in the cinematic canon, no matter what Christopher Nolan did with the shitty concept in Inception. Though hailed by filmmakers and critics obviously experiencing a major case of arrested development, The Wizard Of Oz is nothing but a rattling cacophony of childish storytelling, ham acting, and sub-par singing, with an annoying dog thrown in for good measure. Two words, film fans: grow up!
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his chomping of Jaws, his trampling of Black Swan, his slaying of Gladiator, his bashing of Chopper, his scratching of I’m Not There, his exploding of Interstellar, his take-down of Marvel Studios, and his carve-up of that other cinematic shit-show Citizen Kane.
