April is one of the cruelest months for movie lovers — studios are off-loading turkeys and the early summer films are still in the pipeline. The pickings are slim and when my son and I decided to hit the local mini-plex last night, the only real options were Admission and Disney’s Oz: the Great and Powerful. I let him pick and he went with Oz — because he liked Sam Raimi, he said. I should have made him flip the coin again.

For there is no awe in this Oz, though I had been forewarned. When I see a movie this misconceived, that clearly costs so much money and involves so much acting talent, I wonder if anyone is called to account for it? It costs $215M to make, and has barely recouped that since it was released last month and small wonder: you could feel the air going out of the small audience as James Franco (playing the young Wizard of Oz) mugged his way through the movie. “It could have been so much better,” a kid behind me muttered as he headed for the exits.

Oz: the G&P probably owes more to the books written by L. Frank Baum than the 1939 musical, though it is sprinkled with gags and ideas that seem to have sprung from the mind of whichever studio hack wandered onto the set that day. When we first meet Good Witch Theodora (Mila Kunis), for instance, she is as sweet and trusting as Snow White — except she is wearing leather pants and dominatrix boots. (Presaging her later turn to the dark side, I guess.) And when Evanora (Rachel Weisz) engages in a climactic battle with the Glinda the Good Witch (Michelle Williams) it looks like one of those wand wars at the end of every Harry Potter movie. Why not?

I guess you could say that Disney was brave to try anything that reminded us of the original, which was a great example of Hollywood capturing lightning-in-a-bottle, combining vaudeville talents like Bert Lahr and Ray Bolger with great show tunes (by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg) and a truly witty screenplay (by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allen Woolf). But the little touches meant to evoke that film — a rainbow here, a frightened lion there — just remind us of how far we’ve fallen.

Personally, I prefer Walter Murch’s 1985 Return to Oz. While maligned in its time, and a bomb at the box office, it was far more faithful to the tone of the Baum books and may have even trended darker (with the spooky witch Mombi and her collection of heads).  At least Murch chose a lane and stayed in it. His movie gave my son nightmares then, and me too. This one only gave me indigestion.

I haven’t read much about last night’s season opener of Mad Men but I was struck by the mix of melancholy and comedy we have come to expect, in equal measure from this show. Don reading Dante on the beach in Honolulu seemed a bit heavy handed for an opening shot (what cheaper way to telegraph midlife crisis than have someone read the first lines of the Inferno?) — until we met the woman who lent him the book. And who amongst us hasn’t tried something difficult in the hopes of getting laid?

Don has literary aspirations, of course; remember him sending a volume of Frank O’Hara’s poems off to a mystery recipient in season two? (Turned out it was the widow of the real Mrs. Draper, the fellow whose identity he stole…) And his own conflicted soul finds some solace in Meditations in an Emergency. But he also wonders about the value of the pleasure he seeks, which is what makes him the hero of the show. Was there ever a more conflicted babe magnet?

Don has played the role of whore and mistress before himself, most notably when one of his conquests confessed that she had heard gossip about him and now wanted “the full Don Draper treatment.” For an adman he doesn’t appreciate being reduced to a brand and left her tied to a hotel room bed and then broke down while his daughter watched him shaving at the end of that episode — that damn mirror again!

Roger, as usual, got most of the best lines last night, calling him “Don Ho” when he returned from Hawaii, and then breaking up his mother’s memorial service by shouting, “This is my funeral!” He is more fun in the same sense Falstaff was, and seems just as doomed. Though Don might want to try that therapy stuff.

Post-LSD Mad Men runs the risk of parody at times — the hippies that Betty met on St. Marks weren’t that far removed from Blue Boy and the freaks from central casting that peopled shows like Dragnet when I was a kid. But as 1968 dawns at the end of the episode, Don seems to be changing only on the inside. He was the only one of the men whose sideburns had not crept past his earlobes, and I don’t think we have to worry about him appearing in paisley soon. Remember at the end of the last season, which took place in 1966 (the creators seem to have consciously passed over most of 1967, which is probably just as well), Don was listening to the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” with its lyrics inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, at Megan’s request. Except he lifted the needle off the record before it was done as if to say: Turn off your own damn mind. I will never relax.

Float downstream, maybe.