Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Fresh and Exciting

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

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 just thought it would be good but I just was left annoyed and disappointed because Diana Ross & Michael Jackson were on this. I didn't think their characters were that bad but the songs they were singing and dancing weren't at all that great. It's like this, the songs were meant to be all happy and cheery, I didn't feel that. I felt the songs are just there to forget about. Years later, you wouldn't hear them mentioned at all on any media you use today. It must've been a bad start for Michael Jackson's film career. He should probably have saved himself by saying no to this film even if the fans wouldn't want that but it's not a good movie really..I wouldn't be wasting time looking at this movie for 2 hours straight!

I still can't get over how bad this film was, I only watched it as I thought it may be some forgotten gem that's underrated... I was so wrong!! The camera work is awful, it just doesn't move at times, no close ups on faces, dialogue is not understandable, it's just a mess. It's so bizarre that things like this didn't get picked up on at the time of filming / editing. And it's over 2 hours long!! Not a comfortable watch. It was really bad. And the songs are bad too! Not catchy and go on for like over 5 minutes!! Really bored me. I had to give it a 1. Nothing redeeming about it. Shame. The 5.1 rating it currently has is too generous.

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.