Watch The Wiz For Free

One of my all time favorites.

Great Film overall

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Back in the day when "The Wiz" had left theaters and could be seen on newly popular cable TV I watched about fifteen minutes of it one morning when I had a few minutes before departing for work.I was like the proverbial deer-in-headlights. I had never seen anything so awful. No, not awful...appalling. The music was trite, the acting was unspeakably bad. So bad in fact that for the first time that I could remember I actually felt sorry for the people who were performing it and wished that there was some way that I could comfort them and tell them that perhaps there was hope that their careers would somehow outlive it. Diana Ross? REALLY??? Was there NO ONE in Hollywood whose brains weren't addled by drugs who could veto such a decision???Didn't anyone actually SCREEN this thing before they released it?"Plan 9 From Outer Space" is an artistic masterpiece compared to this POS.

I watched "The Wiz" again, nearly forty years after my first exposure to it in 1978. I didn't hate it, as many posters on this title claim to, but I didn't like it either at the time. It just sat there on the screen, oozing diffidence in every frame. I use the word diffidence since that seems to best describe the entire movie (def: hesitant in acting or speaking through lack of self-confidence 2 archaic : distrustful 3 : reserved, unassertive). I noticed this same feeling watching the movie again after so long. Suddenly, it dawned on me that the movie lacks any tension at all. It simply moves along at a snail's pace to an ending that's suddenly rushed beyond belief. The use of Diana Ross to play Dorothy never bothered me. Anyone paying attention to the screenplay knew even in 1978 that the story had been reimagined in nearly every aspect except for the basic plot line. It seems that the real reason Miss Ross isn't regarded very highly by many is not that she's "too old", but rather, not very good. She's alternately whiny or frightened, which doesn't make for much of a performance. Only when she sings "Home" do we get to see her range; those very real tears are worth waiting for. Director Sidney Lumet treated her cruelly, sweaty armpits in "Brand New Day" and the unflattering closeup of her feet in the Silver Slippers. Given great direction, Miss Ross could have been brilliant. We cannot blame her for working with someone who seemed to have no interest in her. So, that's that. Everyone, all major characters. suffer from being underwritten. That's the fault of screenwriter Joel Schumacher. There's so little information about anyone that we can't care very much. It's as if Schumacher thought we all know the basic story and players so well that it wasn't necessary to flesh them out while throwing them into new territory. The actors do the best they can here but cannot overcome the poor screenplay. For instance, why does Glinda send the "snowclone" that brings Dorothy to Oz? We're never told. Has she been watching Dorothy from afar or something? This simple scene is crucial to the plot, yet we're given nothing to base the activity on. Here is what I feel is the biggest mistake made by Shumacher: since the source material for "The Wiz" came from a children's story, a great villain is necessary to move the protagonists along in whatever quest they're on. "The Wiz" throws away it's greatest asset, Evillene. The director Victor Fleming (for the 1939 "Oz") understood that the threat of the Wicked Witch was very important to the story. He used the incomparable Margret Hamilton exactly right, allowing her to underscore the lighter parts of the story until her denouement brought the story to a great climax. "The Wiz" hides Evillene until the last third of the movie, making her show stopping "...Bad News" number less potent than it should have been. There's no sense of relief as she goes down. She's been dispatched with with no real sense of urgency, so let's all dance around. Mabel King was pretty much robbed of what should have been the juiciest role in the whole production, but it's a testament to her talent that what we do have is so memorable. Evillene's wickedness is handed off to that weird peddler and his puppets, and never explained at all. It's supposed to be frightening, but is so random there's no real fear. Everyone screams and runs around until the bad trash cans are defeated. The ending of this whole unfortunate film is a shouting match between all the characters. Richard Pryor is simply dropped once he's discovered and screamed at by everyone. The elegant Lena Horne is saddled under a gigantic glitter-covered shower cap surrounded by babies hung on wires. "Believe in Yourself" is belted out for people in the cheap seats, a real misfire on what should have been a great ballad. Again, very poor direction. Miss Ross says bye-bye to all her pals, belts out "Home" and hey presto, she's back. She runs in the house. The End. That's all folks. No tying up loose ends with the family, or resolution. It all feels empty. The visuals set up by designer Tony Walton look better than you remember. His vision of Oz as NYC is memorable in many ways; it's always great to remember the Twin Towers as they were. Enough years have gone by for the patina of time to soften the hard edges of the mistakes made. So, for what it's worth, "The Wiz" is still a viable watch. The blame for this misfire can be laid on the shoulders of Lumet and Shumacher. They took out the magic and wonder, which is the lifeblood of such tales.

There are some moments in the movie version of "The Wiz" that are truly magical, but the truth of the matter is that it was not a wise idea to make Dorothy a 30-something Harlem school-teacher who is swept away during a snowstorm (along with her dog Toto) and taken to the Land of Oz where the entire city of New York is transformed into her own nightmare as an analogy of her pathetic life. That is a betrayal of L. Frank Baum's original novel and to the musical version where Stephanie Mills' Dorothy was still a little girl and things that scared her about her city were used to make her learn to be unafraid. Ego and pretentiousness became abundantly clear in a film that lead its leading lady to a film career stand-still and helped to kill the movie musical for the second time in a decade.Fairly recent box office flops and disasters at that time like "Paint Your Wagon", "Hello, Dolly!" and "Man of LaMancha" had made producers truly afraid of making movie musicals, but they had begun to creep out as the 1970's wrapped up. "Grease" was a box-office triumph; "Hair" took on a cult following, and the cast of "The Pirates of Penzance" would turn their surprise hit into a cheery film that may have come and gone at the time, but is a faithful rendition. For each of those (and the wonderful "Little Shop of Horrors") came "The Wiz", "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas", a misguided "Annie" and a poorly directed "A Chorus Line" that would pretty much end the Broadway musical on film craze until years later when "Evita", "Chicago" and "Dreamgirls" came along to bring it to what we have today.In the case of "The Wiz", there is an amazing talent behind the scenes, and certainly seeing a subway station come to life, the lion of the New York Public Library break out of its concrete cage, and various bridges and sky-scrapers utilized for the setting of Oz. Diana Ross maybe miscast, but oh, she can sing, and her dancing is credible as well. Toss in her Motown pal Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow (just beginning to break in as an adult performer) and you see the start of his successful music video career. Nipsey Russell is the shining star of Dorothy's pals, his Tin-Man very funny as he sings "Slide Some Oil to Me". Ted Ross gets to repeat the role of the lion with proper gusto, and he spoofs the characterization of rough and tough city folk who in real life are either cowards or pussy-cats.Lena Horne is a glamorous Glinda, her "Believe in Yourself" the triumph of the film, showing her to still be beautiful and a strong performer years after barely making waves at MGM. Mabel King is an imperious Evilene, her "No Bad News" a true show-stopper. "Brand New Day" tends to go on a bit too long, however, and leads to the confrontation with the titled Wiz, played with comical poppycock by Richard Pryor who seemed to be maligned at the time but actually brings back the spirit of the book's character. Theresa Merritt as Dorothy's Aunt and Thelma Carpenter as Miss One ("Witch of the South") also add spark, with Carpenter really making me crack up about the dead Witch of the East "She put the Ug in Ugly".So while it is easy to dismiss this as a flop of its time (and there are justified reasons to do so), there's a lot to love. I used to refer to this as "Cheese Wiz", but to look back at it and see the art inside it and what is good, I can truly rate this a bit higher than I did in my mid adult years, yet not as high as I did when I first saw this in the theater as a teenager.

An overstuffed movie musical and a major blunder by the great Sidney Lumet. This urbanized version of THE WIZARD OF OZ stars a far too old Diana Ross as Dorothy, an inner city school teacher whisked off to a very late 1970s fantasy land (which looks like a disco-fied Manhattan)...she encounters a scarecrow (Michael Jackson), a lion (Ted Ross) and a tin man (Nipsey Russell). There's very little fantasy in this monstrosity and what should have been an enjoyable experience is in fact a lumbering bore. Ross, who proved her acting mettle with LADY SINGS THE BLUES is miscast to the point of distraction. This pretty much ended her movie career. The usually enjoyable Richard Pryor plays "the Wiz" as a bumbling fool. Nevertheless, the film is not without merit. A big plus is a couple of the musical numbers. Michael Jackson is dynamite as the scarecrow and as "Evillene", Mabel King performs the show-stopping "Don't Nobody Bring Me No Bad News." The stunning cinematography by Oswald Morris earned an Oscar nomination.