Word: wizards
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...trend was Paul Mazursky's marvelous An Unmarried Woman; it grossed $62.5 million and made Jill Clayburgh a star. Some pictures did well but not very well, or at least not as well as their backers hoped. Chief among those was The Wiz, the black version of The Wizard of Oz. Just about to go into wide release, the movie will probably make a profit, and it appears to have made a crucial inroad among white audiences. But it will almost certainly not be the blockbuster Universal counted...
...style is not frenzied-he is notably calm, in fact-but it is unusually intense. It suits a man widely deferred to as a wizard, but it would not do, say, for a renowned comic performer, a wisecracking green frog. And the curious truth about this gaunt, bearded, rather ascetic-looking craftsman, as he admits, is that "my nature is not particularly witty." He is funny only with Kermit on his arm, and the same thing seems to be true of Frank Oz and the other Muppet people...
...were 423 possessions of the late Judy Garland. Among the items on the block: Garland's copy of the musical arrangement of Over the Rainbow, a pair of loaded dice given to her by Humphrey Bogart (purchased by Actress Lily Tomlin for $1,200), Judy's The Wizard of Oz scrapbook, and the beaded silk jacket she wore at Carnegie Hall. The highest sum -$60,000-was shelled out for Garland's 1953 black Mercedes-Benz 3005 coupe. Total take: $250,000. Would the star herself have approved? Says Sid Luft, Garland's third husband...
Suddenly the packed auditorium explodes in an ovation suggesting that this might be, as they say, "It." But no. Here, nonetheless, is the next best thing; that foxy wizard of Itmanship himself, est's own Werner Erhard, has materialized on stage. The roar of welcome goes on as he lays claim to the spotlight, hoisting himself onto a director's chair, a gray-flanneled leg tucked underneath him. The clamor trails off only when his words and pale gaze begin to spill across the crowd, conveying the improbable intimacy that seems to be the gift of all magnetic...
Worse, this technique turns Frodo, the wizard Gandalf and the other main characters into simplified humans. Their personalities do not come from within but from behind, and they rarely seem anything other than what they are: acrylic images superimposed on something more real. Only occasionally does the action flower into independent life: when Frodo and a friend try to row the same boat in different directions; when the intrepid hobbits meet up with Gollum, a creature reduced by his former possession of the evil ring into broad, burlesque servility...