Alicia en el país de las maravillas

I was able to catch a prescreening of Alice in Wonderland tonight on March 2nd. Despite some pretty nifty visuals, and jaw dropping set pieces, I found the movie to be incredibly dull, flat, and utterly full of itself. The film is merely a vehicle for Johnny Depp to showcase his talents, and he portrays the Mad Hatter as an actor who can't quite find the right shoes to fill in the role. He rotates from a Scottish brogue, to a feminine lisp, and staggers once in awhile as the unmistakable character of Captain Jack Sparrow. Where the visuals triumph, the story lacks. The proposed 'sequel' to Alice in Wonderland is literally a rehash of most of the finer points of the original, except a lot more Johnny Depp- a character who the audience is supposed to sympathize with and root for, but who i found a bit annoying and tiresome after awhile. The plot is fairly simple. Alice (the stone faced, newcomer Mia Wasisoska whose acting is limited to mildly concerned, mildly puzzled, and mildly agitated) flees from an arranged marriage proposal from a wealthy lord. She follows a curious white rabbit and tumbles down a hole into Underland, referred to as Wonderland by Alice. She then meets a variety of odd characters, most of them familiar from the original Alice. The plot is fairly simplistic, and a tad boneheaded. The Red Queen (Bonham Carter, slightly overdoing it, but arguably the best actor of the bunch) rules the land, but is pitted against the tiresome goodness and light of her sister, The White Queen (Hathaway doing an air-headed imitation of, you guessed it, Captain Jack Sparrow). Alice is destined by some ancient scroll to defeat the Jabberwocky and end The Red Queen's reign of terror. Alice boils down to mere eye candy-something that is visually pleasing, but is only a piece of fluff. If your a fan of Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, this movie is right up your ally. I prefer Burton at his best with movies that attempt to involve the audience like Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and Big Fish. However, this bloated mess is sure to rank in hundreds of millions of dollars, but it tugs at our wallets rather than our hearts. It's a scary thought, but I hope that Burton's best work isn't behind him. 4/10

I can usually find something to engage with and love in any film. It is a sort of challenge and promise to myself to do so -- as a choice in building a life. But this movie was a nadir in my adventure.

The Alice stories are special, special absolutely and special to me.

For many people, the stories are simply amusing nonsense for children, something to be fuzzily remembered in the same way as, say, Peter Pan or a Grimm's tale. But it is anything but. Carroll advanced our ability to speak to ourselves when he polished the story and sent it to us.

One can hardly expect someone like Burton, or anyone making a big budget Disney- distributed project to understand the material. But if you cannot understand the soul of what you are working with, you cannot leverage or extend it. You will need to count on your own talents instead. But Burton's strength is simple: the imposition of disordered fantasy on relatively ordered reality. He has exhausted this and was finished as an artist long ago.

By any measure other than color intensity, this is a failure as a movie. When Depp isn't given a complex structure to support, he can at least be amusing. Here, we have not even that.

What is normally considered nonsense sequences in the books are anything but. Dodgson was the foremost theory of logic in Europe at the time. Based in Oxford, he created the story for the child of the Dean, the creator of the then great Greek lexicon. Dodgson/Carroll was a master of the inadequacies of logic within the medium of everyday language.

All the "nonsense" sections are really a catalog of all the strange ways in which logic breaks when it encounters the way we linguistically form thoughts. Many of these parody assumptions Dean Liddell made in his understanding of Greek, mistakes that have saddled us with flawed scholarship on Aristotle and his logic. They are great, great fun: puzzles that even a 6 year old can laugh about.

This is where playful narrative originates. Only Shakespeare, Joyce and Lennon-NcCartney have had similar influence on our everyday thought. Karl Rove, for example, stands on the shoulders of Charles Dodgson's trickery.

None of this is conveyed. None, even though the Marx brothers made this safe territory for film humor.

Even the overall structure of the Alice stories is cool. Dodgson was not a pedophile, nor a drug addict, but he was something more dangerous to his soul. He was a charter member of Oxford's Psychical Society and a student of the inventor of mystical tarot, the self-named Court de Gebelin. The structure of the Alice stories, based on this, is our first structurally folded literature.

His ordination ruined by his guilt about this, he spent the remainder of his life writing a C S Lewis-like Christian allegory, Sylvie and Bruno to make amends. It was every bit as tepid and worthless as this. Every bit as wrong, as offensive to reality.

The movie also mixes in Jabberwocky. That was a poem written years earlier as a teen, to amuse his crotchety parson father, someone obsessed with the perversion of noble Saxon words by effete French. The poem is about the battle between true (Saxon) language and logical language.

(This comment is on the two-dimensional exhibition. I decided that the effects would be beowulf-like and cheaply distracting. I think I was right.)

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is a sequel and not a retelling of the original children's novels by Lewis Carroll. In this film, Alice is now 19-years old, and soon after the death of her father, is proposed to be married away. Feeling pressured, she runs off, following a white rabbit, which leads her to Wonderland, a place she only vaguely remembers from childhood. There, she meets past familiar faces as the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), the Blue Caterpillar (Alan Rickman), the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), and eventually the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), who has been terrorizing the land with her harsh rule and beheading of heads. Alice finds out that her destiny is to end the Red Queen's rule by slaying the queen's dragon, Jabberwocky, as written in the prophesy. Along the way she meets up with all sorts of colorful characters.

If you remember, Steven Spielberg's Hook was the live action sequel to Peter Pan. Similarly, Tim Burton's film is very much like a close cousin, except it's about Alice. The progression of the story is also kind of similar, where the main character, Alice, like Peter, must rediscover herself and finally defeat her nemesis. Likewise, both films are both elaborately staged, they are both about growing up and making choices, and there's a big showdown. Chances are if one liked Hook, one will find many things to like about Alice.

Tim Burton's version of the Wonderland's environments are gorgeous, imaginatively created, lots of colorful details, and breathes life. The castles are sleek and intricately designed. The creatures are generally live versions (CG) of the Disney's previous animated version, and they're even more odder and fun to look at. I particularly loved the portrayal of the Chesire Cat in this film, and the way he snakes through midair like water feels very natural, although it wouldn't feel so natural in real life. Only complaint I may have in terms of visuals would probably be where we see CG versions of natural creatures like dogs--they're not particularly stylized so their CG-ness can be more noticeable.

Danny Elfman's score fits the environment just right, giving added intensity when needed. This film is essentially Tim Burton's playground and even if there wasn't any story, it still would be plenty of fun to just watch the loony characters in their environment. I will add that 3-D aspect of it helped a lot.

Johnny Depp plays the Mad Hatter with usual gusto, as he brings much energy and quirkiness to such an oddball character. I suppose there is a mix of Willy Wonka and Jack Sparrow in there somewhere. Given that other characters are mostly or completely CG, Johnny Depp's character can feel a bit of out of place, as he still feels human. Helena Bonham Carter as the big-headed (literally) Red Queen is fun, expressive, and extremely likable for such a short-tempered character. Mia Wasikowska is particularly noteworthy as Alice, which she plays with free-spirited pluckiness, charm, and beauty.

The story, admittedly, is a simple one, although it is to the story's credit that Alice is now an adult--it helps since many happenings in Wonderland can be quite unfriendly, bizarre, and grotesque. Thankfully, no more worries about some dream causing some lifelong trauma to some poor child. I also appreciated the fact that her Wonderland, like dreams, is an extension of her frustrations with the "real" world, where she felt she had many "expectations" from outside forces. At the same time, it's not like Where the Wild Things Are, where other characters are actually projections of real-life people from the main character's life. For example, to read Mad Hatter as an extension of her father feels a bit like a stretch, although the Red Queen could possibly represent her future mother-in-law since they both dislike animals. Certainly, one can merely enjoy it at face value and the creativity of this world and be fine with it.

Overall, I enjoyed this world of Alice. In one sense, that may be the important thing, if one were to stick to the flavor of the original novel. The story within the Wonderland, I felt, wasn't as poignant as "real life" moments, which were filmed with much love and detail. Given the fact that original story consisted of series of random events and character interactions, it was nice to see the characters work together a bit. The overall result isn't something beyond what one would expect from this style of work, but it's fun, and where it succeeds, it succeeds well, thanks to the consistency of Tim Burton's imaginative visuals. *** out of **** stars.

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Alice Kingsley (Mia Wasikowska) is, unbeknownst to her, on her way to her engagement party. Turns out this is the famous Alice who 13 years earlier ventured in to Wonderland. Surely there is a creative reason to pull her back into the zany world. Nope, she merely felt the urge to chase a rabbit who himself was seeking to fulfill a prophecy. And so, Alice in roped back into the world of fantasy/absurdity.

If you've seen anything at all on this movie, then the strengths are obvious. It's Disney, it's CGI loaded, it's in 3D. Everything visual is well appointed with lavish detail. It makes me wonder if director Tim Burton is better suited as a set designer since he is always given projects for his vision. I recall a time where his vision wasn't hampered by the concepts of others, at time when his films were so wholly original that nothing else compared, and sadly he's been stuck in a limbo of "revisions" for a decade.

For a girl who can't remember anything, Alice is never surprised. She sees giant creatures, she shrinks, flies on a hat, all without a yelp. The first person to blame would be Burton, since Wasikowska lacks leading experience. Still I wonder what's going through her head when she decided to play Alice as oppressively jaded. Outside the last ten minutes, she's the antithesis of Dorothy. Having a protagonist who's so down trodden in a beautiful world is counterintuitive.

Johnny Depp. You pay the man and he'll do his thing. I can't tell you that his character, The Mad Hatter, is an original. I'm sure it's a combination of other Depp figurines. With the Hatter he has carte blanche to do anything, anything at all, and somehow be considered in character. It doesn't matter that he's periodically possessed by a Scotsman—he's in character and he's Johnny Depp so it must be fantastic, right? More amusing are Helena Bonham Carter and Crispin Glover, the latter of whom you wouldn't recognize.

The White Queen (Anne Hathaway) was in position to be the most complex element of the film. I suppose her role is to assume power in the event that her sister is dethroned. For a character who talks a big game of peace, she sure does mix together an abhorrent potion to return Alice to normal size. Despite repeatedly saying she represents good, I didn't see any evidence. Toes would have been crushed I'm sure, but the vibe from Anne's portrayal suggested that she wanted to be the calculating nemesis.

I can't tell you how stupid this movie made me feel. For some reason it figured a major plot point would be found in determining the identity of Alice. If you are seated in the theatre watching a film called Alice in Wonderland you will not be surprised to find that the lead character of Alice is indeed the very same mentioned in the title. Why we spend most of the film getting to this conclusion feels like an attempt to recreate Hook.

By the end you realize that Alice is the problem with Wonderland. In the 13 years she's been gone, her friends seem to be in good health despite the Red Queen reigning over the land. Why are they looking for her now? The Red Queen was in power this whole time and they seem to be in good shape, but when Alice gets there the queen challenges them. I suppose she's just as upset to have such a lifeless young girl in her land. I for one am disenchanted.

It is still worth the high price of the 3-D admission to see some of the amazing animation and design, but the writing is extremely boring and clumsy, and the performances cannot save it. Too many liberties were taken with the originals here, and in no way improve upon them, it only barely resembles either of Carroll's books in theme and some specific scenes. There are some "Disney moments" that literally set off a gag reflex as well.

The animation is quite stunning and wonderful though, as is the costuming and set design (in so much as there were sets and not just green screens, I'm sure SOME actual props were used). There are some clever elements that owe only to good visual design and direction I'm sure, as the only other clever bits in the dialogue were the parts directly lifted from the originals.