“The Wiz” (1978) – Sidney Lumet
One can safely argue that whenever the great Sidney Lumet left New York, his films felt unmoored, out of place or uneven (his Southern trip with Brando, “The Fugitive Kind” never quite gels, for example). And while the 1978 musical “The Wiz,” was still set in and around a magical Big Apple, this major detour for Lumet just didn’t have enough Gotham grittiness to anchor the filmmaker. A famous disco, funk and Broadway-made soul remake of “The Wizard Of Oz,” this ill-conceived fantasy musical stars Diana Ross as Dorothy, Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, a beguiling Nispy Russell as The Tinman (perhaps the finest of all the players) and Ted Ross as The Cowardly Lion. Composed in a variety of rather bland and wide master shots, Lumet never seems comfortable during the dance and musical numbers and thus most of these moments are rather flat. While Russell, Ross and Richard Pryor as the Wiz(ard) are diverting, Ross melodramatically seems lto be on the verge of tears in every sequence whether happy, sad or scary, and Jackson is so suited to play a childlike simpleton, it’s almost scary. Joel Schumacher’s — yes that Joel Schumacher — script is enervating and by the numbers, and poor Quincy Jones, who only acted as a music supervisor as a favor to Lumet, can’t give this picture any cooking grease. While not as dismal as some of these failures — there’s a harmless sweet joy to some of the picture that’s marginally charming in spots — it’s certainly not Lumet’s best work and would remain the only genre exercise the filmmaker would tackle in his career. A commercial and critical flop at the time, the film still managed to earn itself four Academy Awards nominations.
“The Lovely Bones” (2009) – Peter Jackson
Our hearts weren’t broken when Peter Jackson moved from the world of gross-out horror and shock cinema when he made the haunting “Heavenly Creatures.” The picture still stands up today as his finest hour, a moving, grisly but ultimately life-affirming story of two young friends who never want to be apart. So he should have been a perfect fit, post-“Lord Of The Rings,” to tackle Alice Sebold’s tragic story of a dead girl observing the lives she’s left behind from beyond the grave. Except something had changed in Jackson’s approach. Perhaps his previous attention to detail had morphed into a grandiose, perverse ease with death that saps “The Lovely Bones” of its weight, maybe it was hubris: the film did not need a budget in the realm of $100 million, but with the then-looming writer’s strike, studios desperately to acquiesced to filmmakers demanding even the most exorbitant budgets. And maybe it was just an embarrassment of riches — Jackson had yet to work with such a starry cast of Oscar winners, nevermind a composer like Brian Eno or a best-selling work that didn’t generate the ferverent following of his last two adaptations, “LOTR” and “King Kong.” Whatever the case, “The Lovely Bones” is borderline tone-deaf at times, notably excising the rape experienced by our lead character while pumping up the pedophilic tendencies of Stanley Tucci’s nightmare-house creep (nominated for an Oscar, simply because some people just love camp). Moments of questionable tact are dialed up to eleven, as the narrative is juiced by wacky montages, jacked-up race-against-time sequences, and explosions of garish CGI that drown out the humanity provided by a typically strong turn from Saoirse Ronan. It’s no wonder Jackson has since retreated back to Middle Earth, licking his wounds: his time spent with fantasy worlds may have left him cold to actual human emotions.
“Village of the Damned” (1995) – John Carpenter
John Carpenter had considerable success, if not financial, then at least artistic, when he remade the hoary sci-fi film “The Thing From Another World” into the balls-to-the-walls “The Thing.” He probably reasoned that he could pull that trick off again, borrowing from 1960’s “Village of the Damned” (and to a lesser degree that film’s sequel, “Children of the Damned”), for his 1995 remake. He figured wrong. The movie has a killer premise (which originated in a 1957 science fiction novel, “The Midwich Cuckoos,” by John Wyndham) – a small town’s female population is mysteriously impregnated all at the same time. The children grow up to be white-haired ghouls. Eventually, the children, using some inherent psychic powers, force the grown-ups of the town to kill themselves. Spooky, for sure, and who doesn’t love a movie in which the “heroes” attempt to massacre children for the good of mankind? Well, when the script is this dopey, you want everyone to die (especially when the decidedly B-rate cast is anchored by a pre-injury Christopher Reeve and populated with puffy has-beens like Kirstie Alley and Mark Hamill). More troubling is that the film is punctuated by extreme violence, another hallmark of “The Thing” unrealistically transported here, and the overuse of embryonic computer generated special effects. Every time one of the kids is doing something fiendish, a computerized, whirlpool-ish flame ignites in their eyes. The sensation isn’t exactly one of otherworldly terror, but rather that someone has left the light on in the electronic jack-o-lantern. For a man who, in the previous decade, defined nightmares, this effectively signaled the end of one of filmmaking’s premiere visual stylists.