Monday, March 15, 2010

Now Playing: Alice in Wonderland

I don't care what anyone says, I liked it! I heard a lot of rumours that Alice in Wonderland was panned when it came out. Being cut off from TV and newspapers, I didn't really know the details (or veracity) of this statement. Turns out, some people agree with me: the movie was frabjous! But all this is retrospect. I went into the movie with nothing but my fierce love for Tim Burton's Gothic style and all-things-Depp.

As I said, I loved it. Everything from making this Alice's second visit, many years later (indeed, she is not the same Alice at all; this Alice is not quite so small). There's a lovely frame (her impending nuptials) from which the clock-bearing rabbit pulls her forcefully. And when we get to Wonderland, we realise it too has changed, becoming Underland. A tyrannical Red Queen, an idealistic White Queen and an entire cast of characters gone madder than usual. There's lots of liberties taken with the story, but with any classic reimagining, I find that by not treating the story with reverence, we get so much more out of it.

And, as always, it's Burton's details that really sell the whole thing. The Red Army is made up of bullyish playing cards while the White Army is made up of chess pieces... when they finally face each other across a checker-board-battlefield, you know who will win, don't you? The fact that no one questions a slip of a girl being the White Queen's champion? - love it. Mia really wore that suit well. A wonderfully slimy Crispin Glover plays the Knave of Hearts so convincingly, that I actually wondered how the movie kept its PG rating (btw, the answer is with clever directing). Did anyone else notice that his eye patch changes colours, depending on whether he's in audience with Big Red or not? Isn't that a wonderful piece of foreshadowing?

The only thing I had some small issue with was the pacing of the dialogue. Some of it just went by too quickly to be understood - which is really unfortunate, because i think I missed some witticisms or fancy in there. And, while I liked that the Hatter's crisp English accent morphs into a Scots brogue when he's, er, agitated, I think I lost all that dialogue too. I'm usually pretty good with accents in general, and I found it disconcerting that I kept missing whole lines of dialogue.

Oh, and the 3D - I don't think it was worth the extra $3 really. I mean, it's not like it's Avatar and needs some sort of technical wizardry to keep it from being just another Sci-Fi/Fantasy flick. Alice is a genuinely good movie. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

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