7. Appear in a film.

Ian has finished up his latest web series as of today. It's called The Horror in the Eidolon Apartments. I have the role of the Stranger in it.

Ian's going to be helping me out with the music video. We shot the first part of it on Wednesday. It should hopefully be done in the next couple of weeks or so.

Last night I had dinner at the Imperial restaurant on Bank Street, located beside the old Imperial Arcade and Barrymore's Music Hall. I had the Chicken Parm Baguette with fries and a beer. The food took a while to prepare but it was pretty tasty. Good price reflected in the portion:


Four more restaurants to go.

Return to Oz

(Walter Murch, 1985)

Why does a person watch a film more than once? Why do they watch a film 10, 20, 30 times? Maybe it’s to have a film’s message reasserted at a time when it is most needed. Maybe it’s purely the love for a story or narrative, a particular sequence of events that registers in a certain way. Films don’t change over time. Or do they? Most likely, a film cannot be understood or appreciated fully on first viewing. There are always little intricacies that need to be unraveled. Of course, the viewer changes over time. They are exposed to new thoughts, new attitudes, new opinions and new films. They can revisit a film armed with new perspectives and make something else out of it entirely. Certainly, what a film means to a viewer changes, if not the film itself.

I know that I am not through watching “Return to Oz”. It is a film I have seen far more often than most others. Released in 1985 by Disney, most viewers paid it no attention. For me, it was a building block to my childhood. For many, it was a cause of kid nightmares, the source of which would never be traced until years later. I have read steady streams of comments on the Internet from viewers who see stills or clips from the film and exclaim, “Oh my God, it’s THAT movie!” with equal parts horror and fascination. People remember it but can’t place it. I grew up loving it.


I’ll admit that I still get a thrill from “Return to Oz” for all its unapologetic creepiness and attraction to the downright grotesque. To the souls who have yet to see it, I take a unique pleasure in sitting down and showing them how Walter Murch and the film’s crew took the world’s perception of the over-the-rainbow Oz and twisted it inside out. Gone are the singing munchkins, shimmering landscapes and joyful Emerald City townsfolk that populated the 1939 musical. Dorothy’s journey into Oz is a jump from one disturbing, colourless wasteland to another. Placed into an institution due to her persisting belief in the existence of Oz, Dorothy escapes electroshock therapy and nearly drowns before awaking in the middle of Oz’s deadly desert, inches away from turning to sand. Oz has been decimated by a tyrant known as the Nome King, played by Nicol Williamson, who has divested the land of its emeralds and turned the people of the Emerald City to stone.


That’s L. Frank Baum’s world. Murch and crew paid close attention to “The Marvelous Land of Oz” and “Ozma of Oz” in their formulations of setting and character, crossing over elements of the two books in order to make Dorothy’s trip back to Oz complete in scope. Baum was not afraid to confront his child protagonists with almost hellish forces to overcome, and they are on display here. Of particular unsettling presence is Princess Mombi, played by Jean Marsh, a conflation of characters from both books, who has 31 heads to choose from, on display in cases where she dwells in the usurped Wizard’s palace. In one scene, a headless Mombi feels her way to the case containing her original head in order to have eyes to pursue Dorothy with. It’s the stuff of not wanting to fall asleep at night.


There is a persistent fear of decapitation throughout the entire film that I only noticed on a most recent viewing. Dorothy’s room in the institution is numbered 31, the same number given to the case containing Mombi’s original head. The doctors want to shock the bad “waking dreams” that plague Dorothy from her mind. New friends Jack Pumpkinhead and the Gump are decapitated at different points yet continue to speak freely. Mechanical man Tik-Tok’s neural impulses are wound by dials attached to his body, which wouldn’t operate otherwise. The nomes of Oz appear as visages in the land’s sediment, and the incarceration into the inanimate of Dorothy and her friends prompts the Nome King to grow a body. The pressure on Billina the hen to lay an egg suggests a fate under the axe, and what a pity that would be now that she’s learned to talk. Maybe that one is pushing it, but it’s all meant to show how horrible the world would be without imagination, done on a scale that portrays it as a scary and complete loss of humanity.


A movie set in the land of Oz is tough to make, and maybe another successful one will never see the light of day. “The Wizard of Oz” is, of course, a masterpiece in its own right. It has permeated the consciousness of the culture so thoroughly that it perhaps may never be tampered with without coming off crass and second rate. It meant a lot to me as a kid, who was feverishly addicted to all things Oz and knew exactly where to raid the Peterborough Public Library for every volume it carried. I have memories of sitting at the kitchen table writing a letter to the long-deceased Baum, and of a dream in which I was given a jewel-encrusted pendant by Ozma that I tried to recreate with construction paper and markers the next morning. The first substantial bit of writing I ever completed was a story set in Oz. As fanciful as I found the world, “Return to Oz” revealed a dark side to being young that I also took great delight in. It’s a delight that is currently appealing to viewers in the Harry Potter films and countless imitators. In that respect, “Return to Oz” was 20 years ahead of its time.

Walter Murch hasn’t directed another film since. An award-winning and accomplished editor and sound worker, he would later come to my attention as the man who put Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” back together the way Welles might have wanted it. There’s an admirable character trait there, expressed by a desire to remain true to what originally inspires us. “Return to Oz” continues to inspire me with its originality, its faithfulness, its darkness and imagination.


Six more reviews to go.

I finished another original song, my eighth. It's called "Born a Ghost". It's up on the myspace, right...... here: http://www.myspace.com/wireandlight

Now we're talking. The Man with the Golden Gun is a step up from Let and Let Die. This time around, the Bond franchise takes a large kung fu flick influence and makes it work. Christopher Lee plays the titular bad guy and in all his bad-assery actually challenges Bond to a duel. A DUEL. Classic. The action sequences aren't as in your face as LALD, but they grow out of each other more smoothly. In addition, the plot is a hell of a lot easier to follow. I know these are supposed to be brainless action films, but it annoys me when I can't figure out why Bond is in one country in one scene, then on another continent altogether in the next, pursuing an overly elaborate trail towards an evil mastermind for some ridiculous reason. This one goes nicely from A to B to C. It's also the first of anything I've ever seen Hervé Villechaize in, after growing up watching him in commercials for Fantasy Island. About the only thing it doesn't have going for it is the Lulu theme. Blah. Despite that, this one's definitely in my top five.

Live and Let Die is the first film to star Roger Moore as Bond, without so much as a Lazenby-esque "This never happened to the other fellow." I found Moore kind of wooden in the role, though he stars in more Bond films than any other actor, so maybe he gets better. All of his reactions are in his eyes. If he had Connery's smirk, he'd be the total package. Wings does the title theme, of course, which are still a highlight of the films.

The movie plays pretty close to the Dr. No formula, throwing in some blaxploitation elements and a bit of what was to come in the Dukes of Hazzard. Geoffrey Holder plays the creepy Baron Samedi, and I knew I'd seen him somewhere before. That somewhere was in Annie, where he plays Daddy Warbucks' Indian servant Punjab. My sister would get a kick out of that.

The chases are pretty bad ass in the film, including a hugely excessive boat chase and a chase around an airfield that prompts what I think is the first curse word in a Bond film so far. I'm continually getting the impression that the Bond films are little more than a string of ideas for action elements strung together, no matter how opposite they may seem. Like, Bond will be jumping a speedboat over a land mass and I'll be thinking, man, just yesterday he was narrowly escaping an exploding building, or jumping on the backs of crocodiles. I know that's how these movies work, but it really feels like such a random grab bag of sequences sometimes.

Overall, some neat visuals and situations, but it drags a bit. Putting Bond in Harlem is kind of interesting and the New Orleans funeral procession killings are pretty great. I'd place it squarely in the middle. A step up from Diamonds, for sure.

Today I am 29 and a quarter.

That was a close one.