Oz The Great and Powerful is both fascinating and disappointing. It’s disappointing in the sense that most big films are these days. There are so many big moments that the small ones tend to get lost and the big ones are so frequent that none truly stand out. It is fascinating in the ways that it connects to the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz and in the ways that it doesn’t.

Oz The Great and Powerful is a prequel to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the first of eighteen Oz books published between 1900 and 1921, which was the basis for the MGM classic. Baum (1856-1919) was a prolific story writer and dramatist who authored many other works, none of which achieved the level of success of the Oz books, three of which were published posthumously, the third being an appreciation written entirely by another author. There was plenty of material for the screenwriters to work with.

Walt Disney had apparently wanted to make a live action film of Oz in the 1930s but the failure of the 1933 film version of the children’s classic, Alice in Wonderland kept him from obtaining financing. In the late 1950s he actually began working on a production, but it was scrapped. Now all these years later, his company has finally succeeded in producing a version that incorporates many of the characters from the Oz books but was contractually prohibited from re-creating anything specifically designed for the 1939 film. Those prohibitions included the ruby slippers, the design of the yellow brick road and even the shade of green of the wicked witch.

Warner Bros., which now holds the rights to the 1939 film, could not, however, prevent Disney from mimicking the structure of the classic film. Just like the Judy Garland classic, the film opens in black-and-white, the lead character is swept up in a Kansas tornado and when the winds grow come again, wakes up in the land of Oz in full color. The differences this time are that the lead character is the wizard himself and his mode of transportation through the tornado is not a house, but a hot air balloon. The other similarity is that many of the personages he meets in Oz are mirror images of the people he knew in Kansas.

The film is directed by Sam Raimi, whose films include Spider-Man which featured James Franco in one of his earliest successes, albeit in a supporting role. This time around, Franco is the lead. He is perfectly fine as the magician who becomes the wizard and Michelle Williams is more than that as his rejected girlfriend in Kansas and the good witch Glinda in Oz. Also of note are Rachel Weisz and Mila Kunis as the wicked witches; Zach Braff as the magician’s assistant in Kansas and flying monkey in Oz and Joey King as a sad little girl in a wheelchair in Kansas and a porcelain china doll with broken legs in Oz.

What it’s missing of course are the characters of Dorothy; the Scarecrow; the Lion and the Tin Man. It’s as if they had made the film in 1939 with the characters played by Frank Morgan, Billie Burke and Margaret Hamitlon the leads. Not a bad idea, but certainly not The Wizard of Oz as we know it.

Oz The Great and Powerful is available in Blu-ray 3D; Blu-ray 2D and standard DVD 2D. A 75th Anniversary Edition of The Wizard of Oz will be released in October in all three formats as well.

The Criterion Collection continues to upgrade its previous releases to Blu-ray. One worth catching up with is the newly released Blu-ray of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries,

Made on the heels of his breakthrough film, 1957’s The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries was one of Bergman’s most humanistic films, a tribute to the film’s star, actor/director Victor Sjostrom (1879-1960), the father of the Swedish cinema and Bergman’s idol.

Sjostrom’s 1920 Swedish masterpiece, The Phantom Carriage, also available on Blu-ray from Criterion, brought the actor/director to Hollywood where his name was Anglicized to Seastrom, the name under which he directed his best known Hollywood film, 1928’s The Wind which gave Lillian Gish the role of her career.

Nearing the end of his life, Bergman wrote Wild Strawberries for the ailing Sjostrom, whose unforgettable performance won numerous awards including the 1959 Best Actor award of the National Board of Review.

Sjostrom plays a cold, isolated retired professor who has been invited to the Cathedral in Lund in southern Sweden to receive a career achievement award. Instead of flying as had been the original plan, he decides to travel by car with his bickering son (Gunnar Bjornstrand) and daughter-in-law (Ingrid Thulin). Along the way they pick up several hitchhikers including a girl named Sara (Bibi Andersson) who reminds the old man of his first love, also named Sara. Various stops along the way remind him of incidents in his past, some good, some not so good. As he reaches the end of his journey he learns to reconnect with life even as his own is ebbing away.

Wild Strawberries remains one of the great films about old age.

Among the many TV series making its way to the home video market, HBO’s The Newsroom is like most cable series, not for everyone.

Conservatives will especially be put off by Aaron Sorkin’s latest show which pretends to be impartial while allowing only liberals to look good. The acting, though, is first-rate with Jeff Daniels at his best as a blowhard news anchor ably supported by Emily Mortimer, John Gallagher, Jr., Alison Pill, Thomas Sadoski and Sam Waterston. Jane Fonda is also on hand as a “guest star” in five episodes. She plays the CEO of a multi-media conglomerate not unlike that of one of her former husbands, Ted Turner. One episode also references another of her former husbands, sixties’ activist Tom Hayden.

The Newsroom is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

This week’s new releases include Jack the Giant Slayer and the U.S. release of Quartet.