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.

I won’t deny, this movie is practically batsh*t crazy, but it’s certainly not the mess I’d been led to expect (Mark Kermode said it was practically unreleasable). It’s actually pretty damn compelling with a phenomenal central performance by Tim Roth, a beautiful score, and highly memorable images, most notably the final one that took my breath away like few things do and made me almost immediately want to watch it over again.

It should really be 30 minutes shorter, and I’d recommend the slightly similar The Fountain (which, incidentally, is 30 minutes shorter) more … but this is far from the failure some have painted it as. I hope Coppola isn’t put off by the criticism, ‘cos this movie if nothing else shows him trying harder to use the medium for all its worth than most film makers dare.

Well, finally, I loved this one so much it went over A Clockwork Orange in my 1971 list and thus shot straight to the top of my favourite movies of all time … kinda knew that’d happen sooner or later. Again, there’s little to say that I haven’t said below or that others haven’t said before, but I noticed a couple of cute things this time around worth mentioning, both of them costume related; the way Harold is dressed exactly the same as the psychiatrist in their first meeting, and the way Maude is dressed almost exactly the same as a little girl walking in the same way as her behind her at one of the early funerals … Maude, though, carrying that bright yellow umbrella that makes her look more like the little girl, lol. It’s just an absolutely beautiful movie I could quote or talk about scenes from for hours. “For me, they will always be glorious birds …” – “Most of life’s sorrow comes from people who are this – but allow themselves to be treated like that …” I probably should’ve saved it for Valentine’s Day … though that’s reserved for Hannibal still this year One day I’ll write a much longer review … for now, just consider it an even higher recommendation, if you’ve not seen it yet, than I gave for Beautiful Girls a few weeks ago.

January 5th, 2006:

I’m surprised by how much I said in my first review of this (below). I really can’t think of much to say about it right now, I need to watch it so many more times. I want to know ths movie by heart. Everything about it is perfect. Its offbeat take on life, death, and love is beyond compare. Maude is one of the greatest movie characters ever.

18th October 2004:

Someone recommended this movie to me a while ago and I already knew about it and knew it was a movie I wanted to see, and after that recommendation, I wanted to see it even more. I don’t know why it took me till now to finally see it.

I was barely even in the right frame of mind to watch it, nevertheless it belongs forever in my top 100 movies of all time. It’s only just at 100 after a first viewing but I just know it’s going to rise and rise. These two characters are people I want to hang with forever. Harold and Maude belongs in that group of movies that just tell you to grab life by the balls. It’s almost terrifying in that aspect, Maude is so free-spirited she would make almost anyone on earth feel somewhat lifeless.

And the soundtrack by Cat Stevens … well, it’s awesome, but more than anything makes me want to hear more Cat Stevens. Why is this soundtrack never uttered in the same breath as Simon and Garfunkel’s The Graduate and Aimee Mann’s Magnolia? I see something of Cameron Crowe’s influence coming from this movie too, I wonder if he’s ever mentioned it on a commentary anywhere – I’m going to have to watch Almost Famous again.

Definitely one of the most romantic movies of all time.

It struck me while watching this for the first time in years (it having been one of those movies I feel like I watched on a loop when I first bought it on VHS all those years ago) that it’s one of those movies I should actually hate considering how much I tend to fly off the handle when it comes to overly typical presentations of the genders – I mean, this is about the most typical it’s possible to be, perhaps exemplified by the wonderful scene where Rosie O’Donnell goes on a huge tirade against men in a grocery store, leaving two of the guys at the door bewildered, looking as though they may have actually taken in what she said, before they break the silence with, “So whaddya think?” “Nice tits?” “Great ass.”

Anyway, I don’t know why it never bugs me like a lot of similar movies, but it doesn’t. Maybe it’s just that I’ll let such stuff slide just the once and this is the instance I picked. It doesn’t really matter anyway. What never fails to make me smile in this movie is Natalie Portman – I might like her in this even more than I like her in Leon, it’s such an alternately beautiful, hilarious, and crushing character … like Uma Thurman is this hyperreal version of the “hot women” in the world, she’s the embodiment of the “disturbingly tempting teen” and though Scott Rosenberg’s screenplay occasionally grinds like nails on a blackboard with its mushiness, he never resorts to the clichés on her, and all the kooky lines that emmanate from her ring heartbreakingly true (“I’m 13 but I’m an old soul,” “If I’m not mistaken, you’ve come back here to the house of loneliness and tears … to come to some sort of decision about life … a life decision if you will,” “I like to mash snow. It gives me a tremendous feeling of self satisfaction,” “Alas, poor Romeo, we can’t do diddly,” the quotable lines are endless). The thing between her and Tim Hutton is just one of the sweetest “love” stories ever – I hate to say that it’s “Lolita done right” because “Lolita” was anything but wrong, lol (I mean in artistic terms) ... but it’s all in that scene by the ice-skaters, the whole thing about Hutton being Pooh to Portman’s Christopher Robin, it’s so well played. The perfect exchange between her and Michael Rapaport lol – “So you’re the little neighborhood Lolita,” “So you’re the alcoholic high school buddy shit-for-brains.” – sends you out giddy. If you haven’t seen it all these 12 years, make it a priority, ‘cos it’s adorable.

This was supposed to be my first movie of this year but I had technical problems. I can’t not mention Mark Kermode on this review, I’m afraid (so it’s a good thing I didn’t make a resolution to mention him less, I guess, lol), ‘cos this was one of the first movies I heard him review on his podcast towards the end of 2006, and he’s mentioned it many times since (not to mention interviewing Young early last year on The Culture Show). This was the movie that “converted” him to a Young fan having pretty much despised him previously.

I was never so passionate about my basic apathy towards him and his work – when I was starting to really get back into music a few years ago, I tried listening to most of his stuff and I later listened to “Prairie Wind” (the album that forms most of this concert) and “Living With War” but didn’t get a lot out of them. For me, it was his most recent album, “Chrome Dreams II” – which I thought was by leaps and bounds the best album of last year – that finally made me “get” Neil Young. I don’t know, maybe it’s just ‘cos Kermode told me to like him, lol. But anyway, what I’m saying is, I came to this show already primed to love it.

I wasn’t quite “moved to tears” as Kermode has repeatedly said he was; but I can see where it touched him, I think. This was a very philosophical album, with lines like, “this old guitar ain’t mine to keep, it’s mine to play for a while,” and “when god made me, did he just make me in his image, or every living thing?” and the whole matter and God thing is clearly big on Kermode’s mind. Then there’s the whole age thing that pervades the whole concert, and I’ll admit even got me; though I have to say, I was pleased by the anecdote about writing “Old Man” (”... look at my life, Twenty four and there’s so much more, Live alone in a paradise …”).

One thing I was worried about in watching this was the sound sync problems I’d heard about. Things like that can really make me hate a movie. I don’t know if they fixed this when it went to DVD, but I barely noticed any such problems. If there are any, it’s down to the fact that they shot over 2 nights and obviously picked the better shots at times, sync be damned. It really didn’t bug me at all, and those who are whining oughta pick up a copy of The Phantom of the Opera.

In the end, it’s a filmed concert of Neil Young – you kind of know what you’re gonna get, especially if you’ve fleetingly touched on his music at some point; and I wouldn’t expect it to have the “conversion” effect on many people other than Kermode. It has a really nice “pre-concert” sequence with a few mini-interviews and even a cute little POV shot of someone handing in their ticket at the door. It really would’ve made a good start to a new year, it’s a shame … but there are plenty more years to follow that plan, and I’ll probably relax to this on many late nights / early mornings to come.

I would’ve watched this eventually just for the presence of Julie Christie, but I stepped it up the to-watch list after hearing a brief summary of the plot on (of all things) Smodcast (never let it be said Kevin Smith doesn’t talk about mature things, lol) ... I figured this could be something like The Notebook. But this movie is much more complicated, difficult, possibly even cruel, than that or just about anything that’s come before it. Right from the start, the quietness, the stillness, the focus on age in this movie, almost reminded me of some Ingmar Bergman movies I’ve seen – Christie almost even has the look of Liv Ullmann at times. It’s too much for me to say anything but it’s a beautiful movie after one watch – everyone is focussing on Julie Christie as the star of the movie but really everyone else in the cast deserves as much attention and I found the movie to be more the story of her husband, played by Gordon Pinsent. Thinking about it now, in fact, it’s quite stunning how Sarah Polley as writer-director handles the POV of both characters, and I think that’s why the movie left me so confused. Christie’s performance is so good because sometimes the movie is seen through Pinsent’s eyes and his view of the situation is at times quite disturbingly paranoid. I left the movie more on this viewing on his side, but at the same time finding it hard to believe what seemed to be the case, that Christie’s disease wasn’t entirely what it at first seemed. One thing’s for sure, this is a stunning debut for Polley which will have people talking more frankly about what is perhaps the most difficult of diseases for many years to come.