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 have some catching up to do so the next reviews might seem rushed, sorry bout that … I’m just gonna tidy up what I’ve already written and post.

Score 3 for the “movies I almost saw on my birthday this year but didn’t, thank god!” field lol. And this is the one that I really thought couldn’t fail for me. A movie like this should have my eyes unable to look away at all times, and frankly, this one didn’t achieve that at all. It rarely rises above its basic concept – War of the Worlds meets Blair Witch (or “there’s a visual effect loose in Manhattan and all I have is this lousy handycam!”). The only moderate surprise was Lizzy Caplan (Janis Ian from Mean Girls), who at first I thought was Zooey Deschanel’s sister. I was expecting a movie where if we saw the monster at all it would only be at the end; I think (ed.: hmm, I don’t know what I think, I left that sentence unfinished when I left off writing a week ago and I don’t know how it was gonna end LOL).

Its technical qualities lift it above most of what’s been released so far this year, though of course that isn’t saying much. The “wiping the tape” subplot is kind of as cute as it is hokey and leads to an ending that can’t fail to tug at the heartstrings. The whole message of the movie is clearly appreciate what you’ve got because it could all be gone tomorrow but I can’t help but think it could’ve been delivered better – dare I say it even, without the whole video gimmick that makes it remotely unique. I’d be amazed and depressed by the audience member who relates or so much as gives a damn about the characters here; and even if you were to start out with the blindest faith in them, the writer breaks the fourth wall horribly with misplaced humour like the Superman/Garfield dialogue, it’s just beyond hideously done. Even the second port of call, the visuals, isn’t really a department you can get too excited in – the monster itself is quite embarassingly reminiscent of the devil thing that appeared in the Season One finale of Torchwood. It’s probably cool to watch with a frenzied audience … but you know my feelings on that way of judging a movie’s true quality.

“9/11 … it’s the only thing real that’s ever happened to them.”

There’s something about this, kinda as with Hedwig and the Angry Inch, that made me certain at all turns that I shouldn’t have been loving it as much as I was. I’ve written far too often of how the world at large’s insistence on the binary separation of male and female as something ever-defining etc pisses me off (I mean, Jesus wept, today I had to tell a machine what was between my legs before I could sit in the waiting room at the dentist’s …), and on the whole, this movie (ironically, again like Hedwig) doesn’t have as much leeway on this matter as you’d think it might: in so many of these self-proclaimed open-minded pieces, you’re still either male or female or, if you’re lucky, inbetween – which is great; but ... if you are inbetween in movies like this, you’ve got to be somehow overly extravagant, flamboyant or offensive – I mean, whoever heard of a boring, down-to-earth deviant, right? All that said, as with Hedwig, in this case it works: because, as I’ll say over any cliché thing that should annoy yet doesn’t, the rules don’t apply if such behaviours come from believable characters; and this movie is among the most human I’ve seen.

I still think that anyone who lets sex rule their lives to this degree is really missing out on 10 times as much as I’m sure they’d think I’m missing out on clinging to my virginity … if I met these people in real life, I’d steer clear of them. But, put on film, I don’t know, it’s every bit as much a celebration of life and humanity and finding yourself as Hedwig was. There’s something about having this stuff laid bare in an undeniably artistic (as opposed to pornographic) context that makes it get seriously under your skin with a passion. I personally didn’t find it as explicit as I’d heard; though certainly there are things shown that I’ve never seen in anything so “mainstream”, I feel more offense is likely to be caused by things like the sexualisation of the Statue of Liberty and the shelf of dildos overlooking Ground Zero at the start.

I’ll watch it again if only for its raw beauty. Between this and Hedwig, I’m pretty sure one day John Cameron Mitchell is really gonna wow me – in fact, I have to admit, it’s probably only that hunch and a second viewing keeping this and Hedwig from that elusive 5th heart.

“I’m only 6.”
“You won’t always be.”

I’ve waited far too long to see this one and the longer I waited and the more excited I got about it, the more scared I got of how I’d react to it. That signpost quote above as to where the movie might be going told me that this dread wasn’t going to let up until the very closing scene. That it started up so much like the glorious Elf (which I’m amazed doesn’t dominate most reviews, btw, so glaring are the similarities) gave me hope … but egh, let’s just start with that beginning animation, shall we?

At one point Patrick Dempsey (as a quite typically joyless New York single father man man) tells Amy Adams (as the angerless Disney Princess Giselle recently transformed into a human in a very rushed set-up), “It’s like you escaped from a Hallmark card or something,” – and that’s what the animation at the start here resembles more to me than the classic Disney style one would think they were trying to emulate.

It amazes me that so many people have felt nostalgia for the classics watching these early scenes; have they even watched them since they were 6? It’s like the years of producing second-rate sequels (don’t get me wrong, some of them are good as I’ve said time and again; but notice how few of them feature human characters …) have blurred the old style out of the animators’ muscle memory. The animated opening feels more like another studio, like Fox or Dreamworks, doing a very corny and tired mickey-take of everything everybody always thinks is “wrong” with the old Disney animations. If this is what Disney animations would look like were they still producing theatrical hand-drawn pictures, then I’m honestly kinda glad they stopped.

Though I’ve always jokingly said, “It’s all Disney’s fault,” when it comes to the subject of depression and woes of the world etc; I did it only last week, in fact, watching a show about self-help books – like, Disney told a whole generation, or two, or even three, that “dreams came true if you follow your heart” and, yes, in most cases that’s just not true and such lofty ideals can lead to crushing disappointment. Don’t even get me started on, “what if the dreams your heart contains don’t fit society’s pre-ordained plan for your demographic?”

But more recently, I’ve gotta say, I’ve started to believe even more that the failing is really just in people at large following the same rules and making the same mistakes that society jokingly excuses as the unavoidable norm. That old thing that we’re beautiful and perfect little children and then we grow up and that there’s no reclaiming innocence once it’s lost so you might as well just accept misery as a fact of life. I no longer buy it – humans are much more capable than that if – like a better movie Bridge To Terabithia, which I watched for the umpteenth time just last night, says – they just keep their mind open. The moment where Giselle fails to sing back to the Prince here made me feel like I was dying inside because the movie was suddenly taking just exactly that horrible turn I’d feared from the start. It’s amazing to me that a movie like this takes such a stance while even a movie like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the one praising the power of the imagination to overpower every sad restraint the world can impose on us.

Enchanted certainly has its moments. I can’t deny Amy Adams’ wondrousness, even though it all gets mostly stripped away in the end; like my mum gasped, “she looks so … ordinary ...”; Giselle seems “happy enough” as do Morgan and Robert in the end. But, and I apologise to those who will surely think I’m overthinking this and desperately looking for a problem, for me it’s all just too real; dare I say even, too “mature”. Do we really want Disney suggesting that “happy enough might be as good as it gets” as someone said in that show I mentioned earlier? Like the opening animation, it all just feels horribly revisionist (not “delightfully” so as one review I’ve read put it): like Disney is “correcting” things that other people told it were mistakes in its past work. Nothing needed revising here; the girl saving the day isn’t a challenging surprise anymore in 2007 … at least, it shouldn’t be. Disney really shouldn’t be so ashamed of their dreaming in the past, and I’m worried they may have ruined their whole catalogue of classics for the current generation of children exposed to this cynical ribbing of the formula.

I’m sure others will think the exact opposite; that this approach is probably a good thing; and I guess they’re probably right, since in the world as it is, it probably, unfortunately, is the most lucrative option. Me, I’ll follow Idina Menzel and the Prince back down the manhole anyday, thanks kindly. Honestly I wish the movie could’ve convinced me that “getting real” was a thing worth doing … but personally I wanted to be more, I don’t know, enchanted? Was that a weird thing to expect given the title? Now I have to wait 20 years for a Girl on the Bridge type sequel. Let’s call it “Disenchanted” ... wherein Idina and the Prince come back from Andalasia just in time to rescue poor Morgan about to jump off the Empire State such woe is future modern life. Can we please start telling our children they can change this nightmare instead of just training them to put up with it? A credit card as fairy godmother? It’s a cute gag, and I laughed, so great is Rachel Covey’s delivery … but thinking back on it, I find it deeply troubling.

I was sure I already had a review of this so this might end up a little on the short side. I’m pretty sure I’ve said something about Erzsebet Foldi before, that’s why I thought I’d reviewed it already … ‘cos what I thought I’d written was, how is this movie the only thing she was ever in?! An amazing dancer, beautiful to behold, so natural before the camera, and perfectly cast as Scheider’s loving, precious, brotherless, generous (“underlined 3 times” lol) daughter … yet this is her only film credit, it’s incredible.

Anyway, clearly the reason I watched this this weekend is due to the sad passing of Roy Scheider this past week. Of course, at 76, he had a great innings – certainly better than Bob Fosse, who he basically portrays here – but it still saddened me to hear of it. This movie already had resonance outside of its surface appearance due to just how much Fosse put himself into it. Now – at least, this week, I find it serves as a perfect farewell to Scheider. It struck me during the last scene how it might strike some as a tad tasteless to watch it at such a time, ‘cos I know there are a lot of people who prefer death be confined to grave grief, black suits, hearses and mourning; but I think it’s perfect in its attitude to death … that celebration scene of “Bye Bye Life” countered so slapfaced by the snapback to “the only reality” at the end, the body bag being zipped up.

You can see Scheider’s Gideon so many ways – ego is always mentioned in reviews of the movie; it’s easy to sense he has no self-awareness, doesn’t know what he’s doing or who he’s hurting etc. I think he has total self-awareness; he just doesn’t care. And to me the film’s biggest comment is: why should he, when death is so inevitable? It’s a kind of Fight Club / American Beauty type message, as dangerous as it is profound. I still don’t know what to make of these movies entirely, some days I love them and some days I realise what an ass I am to love them so; I know that when I’m watching they are fun though; that Scheider’s performance is incredible; that the song and dance numbers start brilliant and only get better as the movie goes on; that we’re lucky to even have one movie featuring Erzsebet Foldi; and that anything that can make me get in such a twist reviewing is pretty much always worthy of 5 hearts.

I really should hate this with all my heart. It’s yet another 2-hour comedy, like we needed more of those (to those who say negative reviews of movies like this are “missing the point” – one question: since when did points like this need 2 hours to make?!), and even though it’s Adam Sandler and I’ve fully warmed to him by now, the set-up just sounds as horrendous as it is. This movie sets about the entirely paradoxical task of making it okay to laugh about not only homosexuals but firemen again while still revering their heroism in the face of … blah.

I should be going into my whole gender stereotypes spiel/rant again here, but I’m not, and not just because I can’t be bothered anymore. I will repeat that it disturbs me massively that there are clearly vast numbers of people who think these movies portray some kind of status quo to aspire to – like, when Adam Sandler wakes to a “hot” nurse, and then is swarmed by Hooters girls outside the hospital, that this is like the height of fantasy for most men watching. And isn’t it hilarious that a little boy does the splits and plays with his sister’s easybake oven? “It’s so wrong!” ... but, no, really, it’s okay! Sigh. Make up your mind, guys.

But in the end, kind of like Good Luck Chuck, it has fleeting glimpses of a conscience, and ultimately left me just a little warm and fuzzy inside. It’s Dan Aykroyd’s speech in the end, which pretty much puts to bed all my whinings above and nails just about exactly something I’ve been trying to tell people for years – that gay, straight, bi, tran, or yes even that thing where she tinkles on a balloon, anything, it has nothing to do with who we are as people. People have different aspects and they don’t have to intersect. They’re totally separate things. Likewise it’s possible to have habits and urges and wants and needs, but just because they happen to coincide with some stereotype, doesn’t mean we are that stereotype. You can like Barbra Streisand and women. You can enjoy a bloody slasher movie and actually be a doctor! And so on. Like I said, it saddens me that there are clearly still people out there who require this Mrs Doubtfire ish “Sandler’s gay, but he’s not, but he punches people who diss him anyway!” hammer on the head to realise all this … but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t as pleased to hear that Aykroyd speech at the end here as I was by the whole “Lady! Gentleman! Lentleman!” thing in Anger Management, lol – it’s just a shame I guess that the rest of the movie didn’t make his point better. The kids are really cute, though, so more tiny positives. Would I watch it again? Only if they released a 90 minute cut.

Again, this was a Christmas Eve viewing hence I’ll take the opportunity to say here, and this applies for everything over the next few days, expect even more inconsistency, weirdness, and nonsense than usual

Okay, an apology may be necessary. ‘Cos I’ve whined about this version of the musical just about every time I mention it, but though I cringed as soon as the credits started here, by the time it got half way through “Hard Knock Life” I was practically swooning over it. And no matter how much I’ve grown to like the substitution, “only” definitely still works better than “always” in “Tomorrow” for me.

But all the while I was waiting for the end, which I knew was where it went awry. The family were talking about it as it was on and my mum was saying how she was sure she’d seen it before without a lot of the “gumf”, as I’d call it – and looking at the IMDb I see there’s a 90 minute cut that was made for US TV. I’d kinda love to see that cut. I still think the helicopter action etc is a bit much and it reminds me a lot of the overly dramatic second act of The Sound of Music which I also find unnecessary. “Annie” just ain’t that big a show, and the Disney remake understood that.

But, for the record, Aileen Quinn is not so garish as I’d thought all these years. I was surprised by how many of the costumes and designs etc. match up between the two versions, and of course the Depression look here is better than anything a 90s TV production could muster. I love the girl who plays Molly, I love Tim Curry, Bernadette Peters, Carol Burnett and Albert Finney, of course. This is one case where I will say, it just about gets over the overlong problem with the sheer wondrousness of its basis.

Again I’m just really gonna repeat and elaborate on what Mark Kermode said about this recently, though I’d planned to watch the original again first so I can’t comment on how it compares except to say I’m sure I’d agree that this version is better. And it is because of Richard Attenborough. Just take the early scene where he tells the stuffy legal types about the Easter Bunny. He tells that story in almost exactly the same manner as you’ll find him in any given recent interview telling a story about Richard Burton or David Lean. He just leaves no room for doubt in Kris Kringle. These days there’d be no hesitation in nominating him for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. The rest of the movie has its flaws but they won’t be discussed here. This is really one of the best this time of year. (sorry for the shortness of review … catching up …)