Movie

Can the major studios still make magic? From the looks of “Oz the Great and Powerful, ” a dispiriting, infuriating jumble of big money, small ideas and ugly visuals, the answer seems to be no — unless, perhaps, the man behind the curtain is Martin Scorsese or James Cameron. The Walt Disney Company is the studio lurking behind “Oz, ” and, as usual, it is banking that it can leverage this 3-D prehistory of the Wizard of Oz (James Franco) for its wonderful world of cross-promotional marketing and ancillary revenue streams. With so much riding on this “Oz” it’s a surprise that the results are so uninspired — or given Disney’s recent run with the likes of “Alice in Wonderland, ” maybe not. The bigger bummer, though, is that the studio that has enchanted generations with Tinker Bell and at least a few plucky princesses has backed a movie that has such backward ideas about female characters that it makes the 1939 “Wizard of Oz” look like a suffragist classic. — Manohla Dargis