Despite having been a fan of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney so long it actually makes me feel old (and, in the case of Hoffman, I’ve genuinely almost grown bored of him in his recent work lol), I couldn’t help putting this off and off so much did it resemble your typical indie “gem”. This aversion was almost immediately turned off by the beautiful series of random shots that open the movie. The look, the cinematography of this film is really gorgeous in places, bright blue skies and wide angles, the clean wide world ever present around the filthy reality the protagonists are being faced with, that reality we all tend to kick under the rug as much as possible, that we all grow old and die in frequently humiliating and degrading ways.

I don’t know if it needs to be nearly 2 hours long – it does wear a little thin in the end and could easily do what it does in closer to 90 minutes (shut up, I haven’t mentioned length in ages :P), but Hoffman and Linney are perfect – Hoffman in particular is the way I like to see him best after the costume and make-up ridden roles in Capote and gag Charlie Wilson’s War. It’s a subject that hasn’t been covered quite so well before and one that you kind of need to confront yourself with from time to time to stop shallow preoccupations swallowing you entirely.

I’ve gotta say, this really impressed me. I’ve been terrible about keeping up with my reviews this past week and it reached the point on this one that I was thinking for the first half hour how ever I was going to come up with something to say about it, so little did I expect to enjoy it. I knew the basic story that it’s based on – that a bank robbery took an unexpected turn when the robbers came across compromising photographs of a Royal – and due to my prejudice against Jason Statham I really didn’t hold out a lot of hope for coming out of the movie much wiser.

Sure enough, at the 30 minute mark they are breaking into said bank – but it’s there that I began to notice one of the film’s biggest strengths. Though it felt like quite a meandering set-up to that “finally in the bank” moment, once there, it’s surprising how fast they seem to have got there and how fast things begin to happen that are at once unexpected and occasionally quite nasty. The screenplay is pure, no nonsense, procedural heist material but I feel like it does “the guilty” as they are called in the end credits “justice” for want of a better word. The Statham factor slips ever so slightly in an action sequence towards the end (I think him kicking a brick out of a wall to throw at someone was where I drew the line) but he’s actually mostly okay here. The look and feel is more timeless than perfect period recreation like “American Gangster” and the like, but it works. It’s a movie I’ll watch again for sure.

As expected, though I’m certain I’ve seen this before, when I was way too young to appreciate it (we’re possibly even talking single digits, I think my grandma saw it was about Alice or something and put it on, lol, god bless her), this viewing, with all I know now that I didn’t know then, was far more rewarding. Considering even without that knowledge for most of my life it’s managed to haunt me all these years anyway, and I’ve long intended to watch it again, I think that alone speaks of how stunning a film it really is.

I guess there are three ways you could come to this movie that will profoundly affect the way you take it. Some will know the Alice story but nothing of its author, particularly of his attraction to little girls including Alice Liddell for whom he wrote it. Some will know the whole thing, and of that set of people there will be those who find the relationship between Dodgson/Carroll and Alice unsettling and those who find it as wonderful as wonderland itself.

If you’re in the first set, the movie will almost immediately come as a shock and it’s probably simply best to not recommend it – even if under normal circumstances the idea of a “relationship” developing between a young girl and a man who isn’t family doesn’t strike you as fearfully odd, the juxtaposition of that concept with one of the best-loved children’s stories, not to mention Ian Holm’s admittedly strange performance as Carroll, will probably be enough to tip you over.

If you’re of the second variety, and you long for the movie that “finally” depicts Carroll as the monster he “really was”, then for a while here you might think you’ve discovered the Holy Grail. Like I say, Ian Holm’s performance is very strange. He plays Carroll almost like the android in Alien, or more recently his character in From Hell – he gazes at Alice with seemingly empty eyes and he’s just not the kindly soul you’d ever expect to be so great with the little ones. For a good half hour at the start here I was cringing, thinking perhaps my memory of the movie wasn’t so hot afterall and I was about to witness just about the worst end to my “Alice” day imaginable, lol.

It amazes/saddens me that there’s a message on the movie’s IMDb message board that seems to paint our age in some way superior to the mid-Eighties in which this was produced because, if it were made today, Carroll would be painted as a paedophile monster simple and true. “In 1985,” they write, “you couldn’t do such things without getting into trouble.” Like, wow. Just wow. I’ve dreamt my whole life of the day when we all just saw the worst in things. No – they’ve got it the wrong way around – you couldn’t do this movie today without getting in trouble, that’s the sad thing. (It’s encouraging to note some of the other responses in that thread, though.) (Okay, I’ll admit: there’s Finding Neverland which does kind of address JM Barrie’s thing for little boys without ever going tabloid … but it’s somehow not the same …)

Anyway, consider me one who’s firmly in the latter set. And I’ve got to say, after that first half hour of fearing the worst about Holm’s portrayal of Carroll, etc, I really began to appreciate the obstacles the film makers had clearly thrown in their own way to their objective in the production. Nevermind “warts and all” here, both Carroll in Alice’s memory and Alice herself as an 80-year-old woman in New York are painted almost as nothing but warts at the start. And just as Carroll is seen through Alice’s eyes, writer Dennis Potter brings another character to New York with her, a young orphan called Lucy who seems to be in a wonderland of her own. We see the strangely cold and domineering Alice through her, as well as her interactions with the American entertainment industries.

Alice is first averse to “playing up” her history as “the real Alice” for the American press but this shifts when one reporter reveals she could make money from it. In these scenes we always see Lucy backed away not quite understanding how the Alice who demands the best of manners and etiquette from her and others seems to shift into this almost monstrous way of interacting with the strange world of dollars and cents etc. But like Alice in Wonderland declaring to the royal court, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” Lucy too eventually stands up for herself, telling Alice in the diner to, “Shut up, shut up,” and finally ends up romantically involved with the reporter. It’s an incredibly clever subplot.

Coral Browne is incredible as the elderly Alice. There’s a moment right at the start when the main reporter first invokes the name “Dreamchild” to her and you feel the memories beginning to flood back to her over her face, at once joyous yet painful and unwanted. On occasion she almost looks directly into the audience’s eyes, even at one point saying something about feeling as though someone walked over her grave begging the question, is that us, watching this fictionalized version of her? At another stage she comments to the reporter about, “that strange feeling, like what you’re about to say has already been said before …” The movie just connects in such a way on so many levels that are usually left untouched by even the best of films.

As the younger Alice in flashbacks, Amelia Shankley is equally astonishing. The first thing that struck me is how much she actually resembles the real Alice as photographed by Carroll – but the performance soon displaces that purely aesthetic response to her. I wasn’t impressed by her in the Cannon Movie Tales Red Riding Hood which came later, but this is one of the best young performances I’ve seen – and considering the character, that’s particularly important.

The Jim Henson Creature Shop provided puppets for the segments where Alice (sometimes old, sometimes young) re-encounters her old acquaintances from Wonderland such as the Mad Hatter, March Hare, Dormouse, and crucially the Caterpillar (“You are old, Mrs. Hargreaves …”) They’re most certainly not the wacky, comic versions you’ll find in most other adaptations – think more Meet the Feebles than the Muppets. The Mad Hatter looks like he has a skin disease, the March Hare like his teeth are rotting. It’s another obstacle to us and Alice understanding the love that was behind all this.

It’s a miracle, then, how in the end (for me at least: I would hope though that the same is true for a least some in the first and second sets of viewers described earlier) it all works in favour of stuffy old Alice and creepy old Dodgson. The final scenes, again, have Coral Browne almost looking directly into our eyes, quizzically, as if to say, “What do you think?” as she finds herself experiencing her most important memory – the camera cuts by a 180 angle to show that she’s looking at Dodgson on a day when she and her sisters (and her husband to be, Reginald Hargreaves) humiliated him. We see the young Alice almost immediately regret her laughter and moving over to Dodgson, hugging him and kissing him on the cheek. It’s just love, that’s all, the movie seems to say. And quite ingeniously and beautifully it says it too.

Of course, as the Disney version, this is the best-known, most-loved, most stylised and standardised of all the adaptations. As far as I know, it was likely my only source of the story for a good chunk of my life, and by that I mean, I don’t even remember reading or being read the book (_sniff_ lol): I only realised this past week reading the first of the books that parts of this and the other adaptations, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee for example, were in fact taken from “Through the Looking Glass” which I’ve yet to read. In this version, in fact, they even pull in a couple of elements from Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”, as well as throwing in some genuinely clever characters and lines of their own (“You gave me quite a turn!” “She’s stark raven mad!”) ... all in 70 minutes. I still prefer the Fiona Fullerton version by a smidgen, and who knows what Tim Burton’s going to deliver, but this is one of Disney’s best, it’s eyepoppingly colourful particularly when you consider the year it was made, and the character designs etc certainly stick in one’s memory.

“You seem like such a nice beast. Well I certainly hope you are what you seem to be.”

I don’t know what it is about this movie. It’s undeniable how perfect an example of “bad” 80s moviemaking it is. It’s obviously comparable to “Alice in Wonderland” (you’ll notice a theme in the next few reviews, incidentally … it is a certain someone’s birthday this weekend, afterall …), not only in the “lost girl” theme but also in the rhymes and riddles she encounters along the way. It’s practically identical to “Wonderland” in fact – but for one detail, Sarah’s brother, the baby … the goal. The whole thing is set up like a video game. The wonder of wonderland, of course, was that Alice had no great reason to be there, it’s very much one thing after another (“Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”)

I guess the goal element comes from “The Wizard of Oz” – Jareth’s (has there ever been a sillier name for a villain? lol) castle as the Emerald City, you see the book (with a lot of other fairytales – not sure if Alice is there though) in Sarah’s room at the start – but it strikes me more as over-dependence on the Joseph Campbell mythology thing that started to dominate screenwriting around the time thanks to Syd Field and hand in hand with high concept and VHS produced hoards of horrors that still have my kneejerk thought on the Eighties as “the worst decade for cinema” even while movies like this always remind me it really wasn’t so bad.

In the end there’s just something mystical about it that defies explanation – if you know and love the movie, you just know what I’m talking about – it’s there when the opening credits music strikes up, in those shots of Jennifer Connolly running through the rain to “Underground”, at the strange diversion of the masked ball where she dresses older and dances with Bowie, and at the end with the upside-down staircases; ironically, somehow it just wouldn’t be the same without the tacky Eighties synth music and hairdos, lol. It makes you feel like a horrible wish like the one Sarah makes at the start – the kind we all half-heartedly make from time to time – really could be granted and turn our world on its head. It’s bizarre and silly and fun, but in the end it’s somehow a lesson that never gets old, perhaps because it never quite gets learned.

“If it’s not on camera, it’s like it never happened …. right?”

It sounded a little dodgy and I certainly didn’t want to be too hasty about being excited about this latest “official” installment in the Romero Dead series after Land (which I’ve watched most of again recently … in short, it really didn’t warrant a new review, it’s pretty unremarkable) ... but at the same time I kind of couldn’t help myself. Even though this mockumentary horror thing has been done almost to death now since Blair Witch leading through to Cloverfield, bringing the technique to the Dead series sounded pretty fascinating, and any time Romero returns to this series it’s exciting, as they’re always among the most important horror movies, if not always quite the best.

Overall, it works. While it’s not quite the “zombies in a mall” of the masterful Dawn, the social commentary here (though perhaps a little obvious: just about anyone who documents the dreary details of their life in a blog or who has neglected to truly experience a vacation because they were behind a camera the whole time will understand what it’s saying well enough) is certainly more pointed than that in Land.

It gets a little dull towards the end, the whole thing just isn’t as awash with the message as Dawn was, and it frequently becomes “just another teen horror movie”. But the end (“Are we really worth saving? You tell me.”) sends you out with genuine chills running down your spine. It’s in your face and feels like a hammer on the head, but it does the job of “implicating the audience” a million times better than, for example, Funny Games U.S.. There is some humour to counter this depressing stuff, however: I don’t think I’ve laughed more this year than I did over the “Hello, I’m Samuel” sign

“There ain’t no Santa Claus!”
“Don’t say ain’t! Say isn’t.”

Okay, this is more like it. I was surprised as I checked about 10 minutes into this that it, too, like the three Shirley Temple movies I watched at the end of last week, was released in 1934. She looks a year or two older to me as she appears at the start here, marching down the road in flying leathers hitching a ride to the airport, and she looks a lot more comfortable too.

But just 15 minutes later, I discover, yet again there’s something in this Shirley Temple movie that overshadows pretty much all her contribution. It’s Jane Withers, a screen brat who certainly predated but possibly also exceeds the likes of Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed. It’s astonishing given the clear value Temple held for Hollywood at the time that nobody seems ever to have stepped in and put a damper on Withers’ performance – if it can be called that even. Where Temple is as controlled and directed as ever, Withers seems simply to have been placed on the set with her full knowing that if anyone’s going to notice her over her co-star, then dangit she’s gonna have to scream, lol.

Anyway, the story worked for me and even moved me, despite Shirley’s complete inability to stir empathy in me. James Dunn as the godfather Loop is fantastic, particularly when explaining to Shirley about her mother – and the ending is one of the most beautiful ideas I’ve seen in a movie so old … early in the movie, Loop asks Shirley “how much do you love me?” and she gives him the tightest of hugs, and this he repeats in order to make her hold on as they bail out of a storm-wracked plane with one parachute. There’s some funny business with the Uncle in the wheelchair too. Well worth the watch, and I’ll likely bring it out at Christmas some time as that’s where the movie begins.

My first Shirley Temple movie in years (and I’ve only seen a handful at most) and one of my first truly “old” movies in far too long. I was pretty apprehensive on both counts but I probably couldn’t have picked a better movie to re-introduce me to old Hollywood.

There’s little to speak of by way of story – it’s the Depression and the White House appoints a New York theatre man as Secretary of Amusement (great idea, right? I thought so too, lol). There’s a slight love story in the mix. It’s really more an excuse for 70 minutes of lavish song and dance numbers, a lively comedy duo called Mitchell & Durant pre-empting Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson by decades throwing each other around an office, lol; even a talking penguin at the end. What it comes down to is, it’s a lot more than just a Shirley Temple movie, and considering the runtime that’s pretty impressive. I enjoyed every second of it and would certainly watch it again.