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.

“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.

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.

This one is fascinating – another TV production, this time by the BBC for the “Wednesday Play” series, and boy does that show: the word “pretentious” certainly comes to mind but I for one won’t be using it because this is one of the best adaptations of the book that I’ve yet seen. It begins by perfectly recreating the part of the story that has always been the most strongly evocative part to me: the simple, lazy image of Alice and her sister on the bank on a hazy Summer afternoon (“All in a golden afternoon …”). From there it launches into some of the most surreal, dreamlike progressions I’ve ever seen on film. It captures some part of the book that few other adaptations would dare. Through clever editing, it’s the closest and most prolonged replica of the dream experience I’ve seen.

I wouldn’t have thought it, as I’m quite attached to the innocent and gracious image of Alice in the blue dress with blonde hair in a bow etc, but I quite like this Hermione-haired, black-dressed, aloof version as played by Anne-Marie Mallik, too; I love how she’s always walking away from people with a “hmph!” flick of her hair. The look she almost gives the camera as the caucus-race “winners” gather around uttering, “prizes, prizes, prizes”, quite like zombies droning, “brains”, lol, is quite priceless, it’s the look of a person bemused by the herd-like behaviours of society.

In short, what it lacks in colour, effects, costumes and comprehensiveness, it makes up for entirely with the feeling it gives by the extraordinary stillness, both in the image and in the soundtrack, Mallik’s whispery distant voiceover, and that very BBC “Play for Today” type score (excepting the odd moment when it, like the imagery, goes a little mental). At 70 minutes, there’s no excuse to pass up the chance to see it.

I love Tina Majorino in just about anything so I kind of knew that I’d be comfortable through most of this despite some bad comments about it (Martin Gardner calls it “undistinguished” and “boring” in “The Annotated Alice” and considering how great his insights are in the margins of that volume, I couldn’t well not believe him). With the book very fresh in my mind (I just finished reading it minutes before putting this on), I was pretty dazzled by how faithful it is to the text (to “Wonderland” at least; I can’t speak for the episodes towards the end I’m assuming are from “Through the Looking Glass”, which I’ve not yet read). That, however, turns out to perhaps be the production’s singular problem. There’s a fine line between being faithful and too damn literal, and this certainly crosses that line eventually.

As expected, I found Majorino delightful as Alice (I don’t like the yellow dress though :P) – her English accent is a little too clipped at times but mostly it’s perfect, as is she. The rest of the cast is certainly impressive (how often do you find Ken Dodd, Martin Short and Gene Wilder in the same place, lol?) but often just plain annoying; for me nothing much compares to the fantastic supporting cast of the Fiona Fullerton version. The visual effects are fairly clunky at times and the production and costume design etc (I already mentioned the yellow dress) is some of the most garish and unappealing I’ve seen in any artwork based on the story – towards the end, in fact, it almost looks like they’re running out of money by the scene. For Majorino and the details in the script, however, it’s certainly worth seeing if you’ve read and enjoyed the source material.

I think I may have half-seen this before ‘cos some parts of it I recognised (and not from the original). What can I say … the guy’s wishes suck, the gender divide is too broad (though there really should always be a sex change wish in these things, whether intended by the wisher or not, I have to say LOL), and it makes the terrible, tired, terrible, tired gay musical-lover gag … but I can’t help it. Maybe it’s that you give me a movie like this and it doesn’t matter whether it’s good or bad because I’m happy enough for 90 minutes thinking up my own wishes and how I’d phrase them lol; maybe it’s that Brendan Fraser’s surprisingly good, reminding me at times of Trevor Fehrman in Clerks II when he’s the “real” Elliot; but I found this a surprisingly decent remake of the surprisingly fun Peter Cook/Dudley Moore version – I felt as much right from the “Big Mac and a Coke” version of the “sixpence iced lolly” scene. I really can’t think of a truly bad thing to say of it outside of those personal nitpicks above.

I’m not about to spoil this movie for you. The tagline for this movie is “What Makes Us Different Makes Us Beautiful”. It’s about Christina Ricci born with a snout instead of a nose. By the end of the movie, she has a normal nose. I really think that’s all I need to say but bear with me ‘cos I feel a rant coming on. Now, maybe with The Hottie and the Nottie going around those cinemas that can afford to show it, my nitpicks over movies like this and Enchanted having fairly depressing implications about society seem beyond nitpicky. But hey, if nobody else is gonna say it then I will; if I didn’t just say what came to mind while watching a movie then I wouldn’t write anything at all.

“I know this face repulses you,” Penelope (Christina Ricci) tells Max (James McAvoy complete with pointless US accent) ”... And I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t dream of asking you to accept it. But this isn’t me, the real me is inside here somewhere just waiting to get out and you can make that happen and once the curse is broken I’ll be just like anybody else.”

“What if the curse doesn’t get broken? What if the curse can never be broken?” Max replies.

“Then I’ll kill myself. I promise, I promise I will. Marry me, Max. Marry me.”

And there’s the rub. If you happened to like Enchanted, honestly, I couldn’t recommend a better double bill companion than Penelope more whole-heartedly. Personally, my luck amazes me that I resisted seeing both on my birthday in February because either one of them would, to be blunt, have put a damper on my day. Though this movie didn’t upset me quite as much as Enchanted did – duh, it’s Christina Ricci with a snout, frankly that alone is worth my 90 minutes – I spent all those 90 minutes, as I did in Enchanted, dreading how it all would end, hoping the film makers would explain why every man who looked upon The Nose had to jump through glass or cause a scene, why not one of them would even hesitate a moment and consider the rest of her. Is she supposed to look as grotesque as what these guys seem to be reacting to? In which case it’s bad casting and makeup, and I hope that’s the case. Otherwise, it really upsets me that apparently little girls across the land have gone cuckoo for this movie that is telling them this is what they should expect if they don’t look like Reese Witherspoon.

I’m sure I’m not just being my strange and kinky self … seriously, Christina Ricci with a snout is almost even cuter than just plain Christina Ricci. I know it’s a story and the movie would end pretty quick if someone just walked in the room and said, “Hey! Cute nose!” ... what I’m saying isn’t as simple as that at all and you maybe need to see the whole movie to get the full sweep of how badly I feel it’s handled, I don’t know … it just basically sat badly with me. Maybe it’s as dumb as I’ve a feeling my response to everyone so rapidly believing Briony in Atonement was … but when something doesn’t sit with me, it doesn’t sit with me: all I can do is share the response.

I don’t have as many problems with it as I do with Enchanted – that movie had its wonderful moments and this one has even more on top of the simple fact of the Ricciness who can really do little wrong in my book. Joby Talbot’s music is gorgeous, one of those scores that, if I still bought soundtrack CDs, I’d snap up in a flash. Peter Dinklage is always worth the watch – he has one of the more interesting lines in the movie, perhaps moreso coming from him, when he says, “She’s out there on her own. Declaring her independence.” It even makes me happy enough that Christina Ricci even chose to do a project like this, it’s the kind of thing that made me go psychocrazy over her all those years ago. It’s quirky, it’s silly, it’s particularly indie-spirited even while being particularly appealing to the mainstream by its sheer freakshow nature.

But I’m loathe to sound too enthusiastic about the whole thing, because the overall message of it really makes my tummy squirm – from Grease to She’s All That I’ve always been sick of movies that basically tell people, especially girls and women, “Hey! You don’t have to be beautiful on the outside! But it helps ...” and again, even though it comes from character and is a perfectly logical part of the movie, I have to say, the moment at the end here where Catherine O’Hara (being even more loathsome than she was in For Your Consideration) starts suggesting even more “work” on Penelope’s nose even when it’s back to human form, it actually almost made me feel physically sick. Given I’ll take any opportunity to tell people my own insane dreams of magical transformation, I know how this sentiment probably makes me a big hypocrit. I don’t know what to say to that. Maybe we’re all a little hypocritical sometimes, but with me these days honesty overrides everything, and like I said, this just did not sit with me.

As I’ve said on many an occasion: any movie that can get me in such a twist as this has gotta be worth the time somehow … it just depresses me if this is what it takes nowadays. It depresses me almost profoundly. Gimme Elphaba proudly getting in people’s faces with her green skin any day over this kind of thing. She had the good sense to leave the world entirely when it turned its back on her. Nobody should have to change to fit in. That Penelope’s transformation here comes right after and as a result of her own admission that she’s “happy the way she is” just adds insult to injury in my opinion.

“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.