Wicked

Rating: 9/10 (15 January 2007)

Some sixty plus years after it was released (in that extraordinary year for Hollywood movies, 1939) The Wizard Of Oz is back (albeit temporarily) where it belongs, on the Big screen and digitally remastered to boot.
It's sad to think that the children of today will probably scorn its simplistic message and computer sophisticates to a man laugh it 'effects' off the screen but that is their loss and the current re-release only serves to remind us how modern children have been deprived of childhood on virtually every level.
The film does a nice line in irony; after kicking off with one of the most potent 'want' songs ever written, Somewhere Over The Rainbow with its built-in yearning, longing for a better world the movie then negates this with its famous epitaph 'There's no place like home'. Arlen and Harburg didn't write a song to cover this and had they attempted to do so they may have found it a tad difficult because it had already been written: Back In Your Own Backyard. All that remains is to sit back and delight in the familiar story, performances, music and recall the first time you saw it and how far away you have journeyed from the child you were in the years between.