Posts Tagged ‘Alice’

Alice in Wonderland [2010]

Alice in Wonderland [2010]

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Well, here we go. Anyone who knows me or follows my Twitter or whatever will know this wasn’t in any danger of becoming one of my favourite takes on Lewis Carroll’s story, but I swear I didn’t go into it entirely closed minded.

The problems start right at the top, and again I knew this well before watching a minute of the actual movie. This simply shouldn’t carry the title “Alice in Wonderland”, and the usage is clearly a marketing decision… “Disney’s Alice in Wonderland by Tim Burton” sounds like “Kerching!” right? You’ll know already perhaps that it is not the usual straight retelling of Carroll’s story but finds Alice 13 years later returning to the land of Red Queen, Mad Hatter, and White Rabbit Return to Oz/*Hook*-style etc. What you might not know is that Linda Woolverton’s screenplay has brought manic obsessive order to Carroll’s completely inconsistent nonsense land, now called Underland and populated with creatures and artefacts all of which have outrageous names, encylopedia entries and backstory.

In short, this movie not only substantially but literally removes the Wonder from Wonderland. I wish I was the kind of person who welcomed the substitution of Carroll’s imagination with Burton’s extravagant visuals but I’m not. This movie reminded me of watching Richard Kelly’s director’s cut of Donnie Darko which destroyed the original movie by telling the audience what it was supposed to mean. Everything looks as you expect from an Alice movie, the production design is up there with the best of them; but there’s such desperation to shed light on every nook and cranny, to explain everything so that your brain doesn’t have to work at all let alone a little, that even in 3D (I watched in 2D) it’s bound to come up flat to anyone who truly cares about art, to say nothing of the many fans of Carroll’s original work (it scares me, however, how many people clearly call themselves Alice fans without ever having actually read the text…)

The worst of this for me wasn’t any of this, however. The worst of it is, to my surprise, Mia Wasikowska is actually a pretty great Alice. Yes, she’s older, but we’ve covered why that is and it’s a problem all its own that isn’t limited to this production. She would’ve been a fine Alice even if they’d just told the original story age be-damned as so many Alice adaptations have (my fave, Fiona Fullerton, and the not-too-bad Kate Beckinsale Through the Looking Glass, eg). And though my love of Johnny Depp has slid with every Pirate sequel he’s added to his resumé, I didn’t find his Hatter at all as annoying as I expected (stupid WTF dance in the final reel notwithstanding). The scenes between the two of them, particularly the one where Depp questions, frightened, “Have I gone mad, Alice?” are almost all of them heartbreaking to behold. Here, Burton moves the camera in on his actors, he stops showing off his visuals… there are shadows both physical and psychological, and the movie actually starts to become something.

It’s not enough by far, though. I might just be set in my ways on the subject but I’ve seen tons of Alice adaptations and no take on the story has yet made me feel so utterly convinced as this one that Lewis Carroll would literally cry if he heard about it (particularly the action-packed finale in which Alice slays the jabberwocky amidst a Lord of the Rings like battle…really) which I’m sure many people don’t really care about anyway. It struck me when the movie flashes back upon Alice’s original visit to “Underland” and they use a younger actress of the correct age that it would’ve been nice if, while shooting these small scenes, they had just gone ahead and had a second crew film the whole original book/s as a side project. It then occurred to me that the problem then would be that I fear many kids falling for this new vision would view such a thing as a prequel. And that’s just about enough about how much this movie depressed me.



Alice in Wonderland [1933]

Alice in Wonderland [1933]

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

It’s kinda amazing I haven’t seen this rather lavish Hollywood version of one of my favourite books yet, especially in these past few years of being particularly enamoured of all things Alice. I was reminded of its existence while watching Dreamchild again recently so I finally decided to get hold of it… sadly, it was the shorter 75 minute version, not the 90 minute cut that apparently exists elsewhere. I didn’t have particularly high expectations of it, mostly because you don’t really hear about it much at all, and almost immediately as it started, I set myself up for a difficult hour, as Alice first graces the screen looking practically in her 20s or 30s, in any case the oldest looking Alice (not counting the elderly Liddell in “Dreamchild” of course) I’ve ever seen (the actress, I’ve since learned, was 19; the character claims 12 years and 4 months lol).

But it’s incredibly hard not to love this movie in the end. Indeed, if it had only been made a few years later and done the same “fantasy world in colour” trick of The Wizard of Oz and had only one song more memorable than the few it has, I’m almost certain it would be just as beloved as the Judy Garland movie.

Notably, despite the title, it is much more based in fact on the second book “Through the Looking Glass”, which if you know the books is indication itself of the film’s surprisingly intellectual aspirations. Though it’s perfectly possible to enjoy the movie for its surface sheen (the set design is certainly up there with that of the later Oz), the actual screenplay (by Joseph Mankiewicz, who later wrote All About Eve among other Hollywood classics) retains many of that book’s more complicated nonsense exchanges. I don’t know what was cut from the longer version, but this version hops around Carroll’s world in a frankly disjointed way but so long as you’re comfortable with the nonsense at the core (which, in Wonderland, you really oughta be), it’s not too much of an issue.

Anyhoo, it’s not up there for me with the likes of my fave musical version of the story with Fiona Fullerton or Disney’s eyepoppingly aesthetic 50s version (to say nothing of Tim Burton’s more recent take, as I still haven’t seen it), but I would say at the least that it deserves to be seen and known a lot more than I feel it has been so far. There’s barely an Alice adaption not worth seeing, as there are simply so many approaches and interpretations to be made (whether you like them or not), and this was no exception.



Alice [1965]

Alice [1965]

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

I’m sure I must’ve heard of this one previously in my ongoing Alice in Wonderland collecting but for some reason I had missed it where I found it today, perhaps mistaking it for the BBC adaptation that came just a year later. This is almost literally a trial run at the “past” section of Dreamchild … it’s written, like that film, by Dennis Potter, with whole scenes playing almost exactly as they turned out in the later production. It covers the relationship between Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell in much the same way, with a few additional points which I recognised I think from Katie Roiphe’s more recent book “Still She Haunts Me” (which I guess means these must be the few points about the story which are more agreed upon).

Being as Dreamchild is so superior in almost every way, this earlier version is really only of interest for interest’s sake. The Alice here is far too old, which I realise has been a common but often more acceptable problem in adaptations of the book (Fiona Fullerton is one of my favourite Alices) but when dealing with the “true” story becomes a little ridiculous. That’s not to say Deborah Watling (a Doctor Who companion! I must seek out her episodes…) isn’t a pleasure to watch, however. Likewise the actor playing Carroll, George Baker, is nothing compared to Ian Holm in the later version. I made a point in my Dreamchild review of talking about Holm’s strange approach to the character, and my reaction to his interpretation there is only enhanced by seeing Baker’s here which really does go too far in painting Carroll as practically a madman, most notably in a scene where he is arranging the engraving of a music-box as a present for Alice.

If you’re as interested in the whole story of Lewis and Alice as I am, however, it is certainly an interesting find, and certainly belongs at least as an extra if Dreamchild ever makes it to DVD & Blu-ray where it deserves to find a new audience. The version I found was highly degraded and it would be nice to see a more professional and official release. (Addendum: apparently this is already available on DVD as part of a recent DVD re-issue of the aforementioned 1966 BBC adaptation of the book… I don’t know what the quality is like, but I’ve put it on my Amazon queue…)



Phoebe in Wonderland

Phoebe in Wonderland

Saturday, October 25th, 2008

“I don’t wanna do those things, or say those things … but I have to. Except here. Everywhere else, I feel ugly.”
“I’m gonna tell you something which might not make any sense, but I should say it, so that one day you might remember it and maybe it will make you feel better. At a certain point in your life, probably when too much of it has gone by, you will open your eyes and see yourself for who you are … especially for everything that made you so different from all the awful normals … and you will say to yourself, ‘but I am this person.’ And in that statement, that correction, there will be a kind of love.”
“I’m so scared.”
“We all are.”

lol this review might just end up being all quotes so I think I better just accept that and get on with it …

“I can see myself wrecking and ruining, but I can’t stop.”

There was a point almost 5 minutes into this that I suddenly realised how much I wanted, no, needed to love this movie, and how shattered I’d be if it let me down at all. I don’t know if it was the obvious Alice in Wonderland connection that makes me want to love any related movie so; or the cast list in the opening credits that just makes it progressively more tantalising; maybe just the fact that we’re in mid-October and I’d yet to see a movie that really touched me personally (the “Slipping Through My Fingers” scene in Mamma Mia notwithstanding) and this seemed to so perfectly fit the bill despite my really not knowing anything about it beyond the title and the basic set-up of Elle Fanning’s character Phoebe wanting to be Alice in the school play.

“If I had a dress like that I’d never take it off.”
“You’d have to … to wash it.”
“No … cos maybe if I wore it long enough, I’d become that person.”
“You’d have to pick your part carefully.”
“Oh … I would.”

The first surprise is Patricia Clarkson’s character – I loved Carol Kane’s quirky drama teacher in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen – I love all such characters, great teachers going against the grain and waking young minds is one of the great movie things to me – but this is something else. If you don’t perk up exactly the way Fanning does here when she burst into the classroom and recites the opening line of The Jabberwocky, this may not be the movie for you. Clarkson is better than ever in this role to the point I almost leave the movie more in love with her than Fanning, lol.

It’s hard to describe in a nutshell the rich tapestry of things this movie is “about”. On the one hand there’s a kind of Donnie Darko aspect to it, the possibility that what is happening to Fanning’s character is a little supernatural or plainly the product of a child’s imagination; on the other, it’s a very considered study of a girl with a particular form of Tourette’s. None of it is easily pinned down and that’s where the wonder of the story comes from. Through Fanning’s parents we encounter an open-mindedness that addresses the quickness of society to label problem children and quite probably on a number of occasions mis-diagnose and medicate willy-nilly (”“When I was a kid I counted telephone poles from the car. If I missed one we’d crash. Nobody labelled me …”) … Phoebe’s mother here is terrified of her daughter’s wild mind being “numbed” the way she’s seen countless other minds go. She tells a psychiatrist who she ultimately fires, “Your profession just doesn’t like kids to be kids,” and there’s a shocking ring of truth in these moments even as we slowly realise that, actually, this particular kid does have something wrong with her – even in the end when there is no doubt as to her condition, there’s the important suggestion that such a thing needn’t be as big a problem as people tend to make it. The movie points the finger at the failings of modern teaching, the risk averse society; Campbell Scott’s hilarious principal almost causing more danger by his fearful reaction to drama class “trust falls” than the perceived threat he’s preempting. It’s really one of those movies that to me is about everything in the end – there’s just so many of the things I’ve been thinking about lately that it addresses to perfection.



Alice Through the Looking Glass [1998]

Alice Through the Looking Glass [1998]

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

I really cringed at the start of this, I’d been looking forward to it ever since mid-May when I started reading the two books by Lewis Carroll and it happened to be on TV early one morning. I decided to save it till I’d actually finished the second book, though. First of all, obviously, Kate Beckinsale at 25 is way too old to be Alice. But that in itself didn’t worry me – I loved, for example, Fiona Fullerton in the Seventies version of the first book (okay, she wasn’t quite so much older, but she was still no pre-teen). What made me cringe is that she’s presented here at first as a mother reading the Looking Glass story to her daughter (who, incidentally, is far more suited to the Alice role though you don’t really get a great sense of her acting ability).

But despite the inexplicable bookending (which, I’ve gotta say, even that’s saved by Beckinsale calling the little girl “Humpty” in the end like Alice in the book calls Dinah, though it doesn’t have the same tight connection to Humpty’s line about looking upon a King, re: “a cat may look at a King” from the first book – sorry, can you tell I’ve been reading the annotated version much? lol), and despite the at times awfully cheap and shaky TV production values, this is stunningly faithful to the text – in fact to the point where I genuinely wonder who it was made for. Virtually none of the nonsense and talk is diluted, and it’s a kind of blessing and curse at the same time.

But whether I enjoyed it or not (the jury may still be out), it still deserves a lot of respect – and that it even ends on that mesmerising acrostic (“A boat beneath a sunny sky … Still she haunts me phantomwise … In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die … life, what is it but a dream?” – I’m absolutely crazy about this poem right now), read alternately by Beckinsale and the little girl, really almost made me want to go and read the book again.



Alice aka Neco z Alenky

Alice aka Neco z Alenky

Monday, May 5th, 2008

Last Alice movie for now, lol, I promise – normal service will resume soon. Oh and I did watch this yesterday – well, early this morning – I just, y’know, had to sleep eventually :) Most of this was written while watching anyway.

I was worried at first here because I have an horrendously dubbed version of this perhaps the creepiest of all Alice adaptations. Luckily, it’s really more about the images and sound effects than anything, the dialogue being mostly either sparse or redundant (I’d say at least 50% of it consists of “said the rabbit” lol which in the end becomes very annoying) – which makes the very first line, “this is a film for children. But remember to shut your eyes, or else you won’t see anything!” deliciously ironic in addition to being a fine warning for those of a sensitive disposition (I’ll just say it was probably unwise of me to add this to the schedule at the last minute as the last thing I watch before bedtime at 4 in the morning, lol – I’m writing this while watching because I’m sure in the morning I’ll either plainly think I dreamt it or will have merged it inseparably with whatever nightmares I might have after a full afternoon and evening of Alice …)

In short, it’s “Alice: The WTF Edition” – the images are so arresting and nightmarish that you genuinely can’t take your eyes off them; the sound and pace so visceral that you genuinely fear for the actress in the lead, for example when the mouse (actually it’s more like a rat here) in the pool of tears sets up camp on her head thinking it’s an island, hammering sticks into her scalp, her only protest “That’s too far!” coming as he tries to set fire to her hair. Perhaps surprisingly given the wacky means by which it’s done, the movie actually stays pretty close to the story – which makes it even more amazing that it feels so unpredictable compared to other adaptations. Each time, for example, that Alice breaks into one of the tiny desks that litter her journey, I found myself seriously not knowing what might come out of it or where she might be taken next or what might happen to her. It somehow lulls you into a state of anxiety, something that’s perfectly understandable when it comes to Alice but that none of the other adaptations really do so well as this one.

At 90 minutes the jerky motion and incessant sound effects certainly start to grate towards the end – I’ve a feeling this might be something that’s not so bad in the original Czech language version with the truly horrible dubbing girl’s voice taken away … in any case, it’s still another great interpretation of the story that’s worth watching if you like seeing things you’ve never seen before.



Dreamchild

Dreamchild

Monday, May 5th, 2008

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.



Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Monday, May 5th, 2008

“The me I never knew
Begin to stir sometime this morning;
The me I never knew
Appeared without a word of warning.”

I’d forgotten entirely how this version, too, replicates that “golden afternoon” feeling at the start so well, also that it begins in such a fashion in a framing device of “Mr. Dodgson” (Lewis Carroll) telling the three Liddell sisters the story. All bonus points in my book.

What I always remember about the movie are the songs, John Barry’s score, and Fiona Fullerton, who is absolutely beautiful in the central role – I don’t care what people say about her being too old for it, she’s young enough in spirit and appearance for me. The visual effects, it bears repeating from below, I still find absolutely stunning. The slow shrinking over “Curiouser and Curiouser”, ending with the trackback to reveal the pool of tears, is simply perfect, as is the later growing in the White Rabbit’s house.

It’s certainly still my favourite adaptation (so far). It also has the benefit (I think – as I’ve said in other Alice reviews today I only discovered this past week) of being one of the few to focus solely on the first book (hence the title, presumably).

September 8th, 2005:

This movie has a beautiful look to it, the kind they simply don’t do anymore, all foggy and mysterious like The Water Babies, not slick and perfect like today’s fantasy adventures. There’s some great music by John Barry (slightly dodgy lyrics by Don Black though) and an enchanting performance by then 16-year-old Fiona Fullerton as Alice. What’s most wonderful about the whole thing is its infectious innocence. The cast is packed with stars, from Peter Sellers to Spike Milligan and Michael Crawford, if you can recognise them under all the make-up. The effects are flawless, too. For a 90 minute movie, it tires towards the end, but overall it’s a fairly fantastic adaptation.