ALICE IN WONDERLAND: ’twas not brillig
Mar 10
Let’s get this out of the way first: I’m not a fan of Tim Burton’s. I don’t find beauty in his ubiqutous and heavy-handed grotesque art style, I don’t think twisted dead trees scream “ROMANTIC DARKNESS,” I don’t dig women’s choirs yelling “LALA LALA LALA LALA” accompanied by high-pitched strings, and I don’t believe that the paler the skin, the more beautiful the character. Beyond the atrocious aesthetic trappings, his films aren’t very innovative or rich in thematic content either, they just seem like familiar old stories fed through a generic Tim Burt-o-matic that adds twisted dead trees and desaturates everything automatically. Oh and I’m not a huge fan of Johnny Depp’s, either. I’ve seen so much of him that his every mannerism and squint and growl has become too predictable. So let’s organise a big disclaimer first: if you like Tim Burton’s unique “style” and / or you love Johnny Depp no matter what he’s in, feel free to add 20 or 30 points to the my final score.
Now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s cut to the chase. Alice In Wonderland, which I viewed in 3D, is not a proactively bad movie, it’s just not very good. The first and biggest problem I had with the film was the story. If you were ever a child (statistics indicate this is quite likely) you almost certainly saw (or even read, if you weren’t an illiterate little humbug) some version of the Alice story, be it the Disney cartoon or some TV mini-series or some quasi-adaptation / sequel thing. In that case, you will be familiar with the world of Wonderland: shrinking potions and enlargement cakes and tiny doors and talking animals and game-themed Queens and “AWF WITH HER HEAD” and all that. Burton’s Alice is a direct retread of the original story, but it’s passed off as some kind of sequel, which as far as I can tell was decided upon for the following two reasons: 1) it means Burton could cast an older Alice, and not risk marketing the film solely to children, and 2) so Burton could use the passage of time as an excuse to run Wonderland through the Burt-o-matic machine, twisting and ageing the shit out of everything. Both weak excuses, and beg the question “Why bother making this movie at all?”
The familiar gang is here, playing by an impressive and varied cast, including the Cheshire Cat, Absolom, The Mad Hatter (with attendant March Hare and Doormouse), the Red Queen, the White Queen, Creepy Thin Guy (whose real name I can’t remember), Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and so forth. The performances appear to be pretty solid, and for once I didn’t find Johnny Depp’s performance overly predictable or distracting, probably because he kept changing accents at the drop of a hat. Alan Rickman and Stephen Fry are a blast in their underutilised roles as Absolom and Cheshire Cat respectively, but less fun are the Queens. In a film full of distorted physical features (more on that later), Anne Hathaway somehow comes away looking the most distorted, even though she’s had the least digital trickery applied to her face; the hard black-and-white make-up and costume thrown on her just jar with her otherwise quite attractive face, the poor thing. Then there’s Helena Bonham Carter, who isn’t nearly childish or annoying enough to play the Red Queen (that’s a back-handed compliment, I think). It’s like Burton’s obliged to invite his wife to play a major character in every single one of his films, even if she’s completely unsuitable. I wonder what his directions to her are like on set? How do you sculpt and mold (film-speak for “boss around”) your own wife and still get along at weekends? I dread to wonder.
Oh, and then there’s Alice, of course, who’s like an afterthought in the movie, played by Aussie newcomer (or so our media enthusiastically proclaim at the slightest provocation) Mia Wasikowska. Burton’s Alice is modernised to the point of cliche, and her hip behaviour jars violently with the stuffy Victorian reality she finds herself in. I try not to let logic into films like this, because logic isn’t treated very kindly in these circles, but in many ways the “real world” in Burton’s Alice is more surreal and unpredictable than Wonderland (hideously re-christened Underland in this film), mostly because Alice gets away with behaviour she would in reality have been severely punished for. I feel like I should also object to the heroic subplot applied willy-nilly to the Mad Hatter. The character is easily described with two short clauses: he is mad, and he is a hatter. He is, in fact, a hatter who is mad, as hatters often were, what with all the brain-clogging mercury they had to work with. This is reason enough for his eccentricity. There’s no need to flesh out his character. There’s even a flashback to the Hatter’s life before he was mad. This two-minute flashback contributes nothing to the film and could easily have been cut — maybe there were several more flashbacks that were shot but then cut because they didn’t fit, or something, but this flashback is lonely and completely unnecessary. Oh, and I nearly vomited when the Mad Hatter enaged in a one-on-one sword duel in the climactic chessboard showdown. Just because Johnny Depp is playing a character doesn’t mean you have to give him every opportunity to be cool. Oh and as cool as that mind-bending Michael Jackson-meets-CGI-madness dance scene at the end is, it completely ruins the tone of the rest of the film. I think it’s the music that breaks it. Leave it out, please.
"Dad?"
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, the CGI is awful. There isn’t a single convincing visual effect in the film. Alice shrinks and grows many, many times (usually an excuse to put a new Burt-o-matic produced dress on her, each one uglier than the last) and you can see preciesely the point at which the fabric is transformed into pixels, or you can tell she’s about to shrink because she’s wearing a digital dress, or as she shrinks the dress sort of swims around her like it’s not affixed in anything resembling time or space. I experienced some pretty annoying motion-sickness (technically simulation-sickness, because I wasn’t actually moving) when she fell down the rabbit-hole, because everything in the hole — Alice, various random items that miraculously never bump into and kill her, as well as the walls of the hole itself — seem to have been built by various different teams working in completely different buildings and then stitched together to create a “cool” 3D falling sequence that tries to evoke The Two Towers‘ nerve-jangling Balrog-opener, but succeeds only in creating a slippery, disjointed and thoroughly disorienting scene that goes on far too long and looks far too fake to be in any way useful to the story or enjoyable as a scene in its own right. Then there’s the physical distortion routines run on several actors – a good idea on paper, but extremely distracting in execution. The Mad Hatter’s bulging eyes and gap-toothed grin might be faithful to the book, but they don’t translate well to a relatable film character. There is noticeable flickering around the Red Queen’s chin during some scenes, and sometimes her eyelines are off, just to achieve the remarkable (and I’ll admit, narrative-mandated) big-headed effect. Creepy Thin Guy has trouble bending over or touching anything, and I felt a vague sense of distress and disconnection whenever he tried to interact with other characters, a problem which was doubled when he interacted with the Red Queen. The effects are competent, but they’re not good enough to sell the universe.
Besides the distracting character-alterations, the animated characters and environments of Wonderland Underland are even worse. They’re not even on par with the stylised animations of Up or Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs or something, and when you surround your live-action actors with sub-par visual effects you end up getting unfavourably compared with George Lucas. At least the over-saturated CG effects in the last two Star Wars flicks had some cool design behind them, and were lit in an engaging way. In Alice it’s all ugly and dully lit, on top of being completely unconvincing in every way. The Queens’ military forces look and move exactly like each other, and when the screen is full of them, you get the disappointing feeling that most of the movie was cooked from digital copypasta, like Burton couldn’t pull the bucks to flesh his universe out properly. Alice seems doubly shallow and cheap when compared to the monster of design and detail that is Avatar — and we all know how rarely I mention Avatar in a favourable light (just learned it was snubbed at the Oscars — huzzah!).
My final criticism comes back to the first point: the plot deviates from the classic Alice formula only to include some nonsense about a prophecy and the Jabberwocky. I’m not exactly a literary expert or fanatic, and far be it from me to proclaim authority in matters such as this, but I’m pretty sure the Jabberwocky wasn’t actually part of the original Wonderland narrative, it was just some trippy poem embedded in an already-trippy literary work. It’s like the screenwriter scanned through the book, found the poem, and immediately thought “climactic showdown with mythical beast!” So Alice has to be built up into some hideously cliched warrior woman with a magic sword to vanquish the evil dragon monster. It’s like the second half of the movie becomes a cheap Harry Potter knock-off, with all the shonky prophecies and heroic self-doubt that goes on. Plus there’s the design of the Jabberwocky itself. I remember a time when things that were supposed to be scary were actually scary. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are scary. The Wampa in Empire Strikes Back is scary. Hell, even the invisible monsters from the Id in Forbidden Planet are a little bit distressing. But that’s because all these vicious beasties were introduced early, built up, and then revealed in a weighty, dramatic scene that completely alters the plot of the movie. The Jabberwocky is this spindly top-heavy black dragon-ish mess that wouldn’t scare a half-blind six-month-old infant with a chronically nervous disposition, let alone the average moviegoing adult. It’s so glossy and overproduced that it fails to pop out of the screen and be anything other than silly. It even breathes lightning, for crying out loud, like it’s too silly and broken to figure out how to use a scary element like fire.
So when you shove the age-old Alice tale through the Tim Burt-o-matic, you end up with a grubby, ugly, weightless, CG-heavy snoozer, with a plot and tone that borrows heavily from already dubious sources such as Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings flicks but fails to evoke even the basic heroism or escapism of either. Alice has its moments, but they are few and far between, and are usually sold with Danny Elfman’s predictable score rather than genuine narrative or emotion. Again, I’m no expert over here, but I’m pretty sure Alice In Wonderland was originally envisioned (and received) as a wacky, drug-fueled trip into a crazy place full of crazy and unpredictable things. How about instead of spoon-feeding us exactly the same goddamn thing over and over, take the universe and push it and pull it in new and interesting directions. It’s supposed to disorient and entertain the viewer, not bore him/her to tears with its familiarity. Get some new ideas, disorient us in new ways, don’t keep dipping into the same old well over and over again. Oh, and cut any characters you can’t afford to realistically animate or integrate into your movie. Oh, and please stop making gothic / romantic-styled movies if your name is Tim Burton. I’ve had enough of all the trees being dead all the time, and of all the faces resembling corpses. Try a thriller or a romantic comedy some time. Or better yet, judging by your Planet Of The Apes remake, maybe you should get a job in banking or architecture or T-shirt design or something.
Alice In Wonderland score
39/100
WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY promises to shed light on unsung Disney heroes.
Mar 03
If you asked a group of people in their twenties what films come to mind when you hear the word “Disney”, you’d most likely get responses along the line of The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King.
These films have managed to stand the test of time with all of them having reached, or nearing, their 20th anniversaries (how old does that make you feel?). But what is it that makes these films so special?
Like many great works of art, they were created under extreme pressure. The animation team at Disney was facing one of the worst periods in feature animation since it’s beginning. Their last few theatrical efforts left a lot to be desired, and audiences were making it known with their wallets (or lack thereof).
Executives being the fiscially focused group that they are, were eyeing the animation department very closely. Another flop, and they were at serious risk of being downsized or closed indefinitely.
Luckily for us, the team responded to this crisis by firing on all cylinders and delivering some of the most memorable films of all time.
Waking Sleeping Beauty is the real life story of how all of this went down. It looks to be a tale not only of artistic achievement, but of a group of artists banding together and doing what they love FOR the love of it.
It’s great to see the guys behind these films getting the recognition they deserve. Any praise that’s showered on animated films is generally only given to the studio as a whole (“That was a great Pixar flick” etc). Because of the sheer number of artists working on any given film, it’s very rare that they’re put in the spotlight. It’s a shame really, because many of these guys are tremendous artists whose names will never be known…hopefully Waking Sleeping Beauty helps to curb this effort a little.
People are quite happy to inform everyone that The Lion King is their favourite family film, but have no idea who made it!
It’s commendable too that Disney are releasing this film, as it apparently has a ‘real-world’ take on what was happening within the studio at the time. Very little sugar coating, in other words.
So while the film ultimately looks to be about a bunch of ‘great Disney artists who pulled together through a tough time’, it’s also not holding back on the darker, mistake ridden past of the studio.
Filled with footage from the 80s taken by the employees themselves (it’s pretty awesome to see a young John Lasseter, Tim Burton and Joe Ranft), plus interviews with some past and present Disney giants, Waking Sleeping Beauty looks to be an entertaining insight into the studio that managed to capture our hearts and minds all those years ago…and occasionally still does.
Waking Sleeping Beauty hits US theatres on the 26th of March, no word yet on an Australian release date.
The Super Bowl movie TV spots of 2010
Feb 10
For an American-only event, the worldwide reception of the NFL Super Bowl, now in its 44th year, is remarkably impressive. This is thanks to the attention it receives reaching far beyond the game itself and into the spectacle that surrounds it, particularly the half-time entertainment and the lucrative advertising opportunities. If you have a few million sitting around and you have a product you want to push, the SuperBowl is a sure-fire way to guarantee millions of people are tuning in to see it. The event has a reputation for launching landmark advertisiments and the product campaigns they pushed.
Who has millions of dollars ready and waiting in advertising budgets? Hollywood studios. The Super Bowl is a great time for movie buffs to enjoy an onslaught of (usually) kickass trailers promoting films that will be coming out during the course of the year as Hollywood studios pounce on the guaranteed audience. Big players who had their films flashed before television audiences this year included Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Others included The Wolfman, The Crazies, Brookly’s Finest, The Back-up Plan and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.
Notable popcorn blockbusters missing from the commercial onslaught included Iron Man 2 and Clash of the Titans. It wouldn’t have been surprising to see other upcoming flicks like Kick-Ass or The A-Team crop up during the game, but it wasn’t to be. I guess at over $2million for a 30 second grab, it’s understandable.
Anyway, for your pleasure (and in case you missed any during the week), here are the TV spots that aired during the Super Bowl in 2010. The New Orleans Saints won, by the way…
Shutter Island
The Last Airbender
Robin Hood
Alice in Wonderland
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
The Wolfman
The Crazies
Brooklyn’s Finest
The Back-up Plan
KOYAANISQATSI review: words are insufficient
Dec 24
I had no idea what was about to go down. We were killing time, browsing a friend’s sibling’s DVD collection, and at one friend’s insistence, we put on Koyaanisqatsi (none of us knew what the hell it was, let alone how to pronounce the damn thing), in order to hear a song that was apparently featured in Watchmen, or something. We were going to listen to the song, and then stop the film and put something else on (Tim Burton’s Big Fish was on the menu — eurgh).
At first my lack of comprehension intensified and led to mild irritation. Oh no, I thought, it’s one of those stupid artsy movies with preposterous opening sequences full of meaning and all that other artsy, avant-garde bullshit. Miraculously the disc stayed in the player beyond the inital confusion, and the film played in its entirety. After the first ten or so minutes we were all absorbed by the film, and it became the centrepoint of our conversation for the next hour and a half. It wasn’t just the opening that was surreal and unique — the whole damn thing turned out to be the same way. Awesome.
Koyaanisqatsi is an hour-and-a-half of footage with purpose-composed “minimalist” music overlaid. I don’t know why they call it minimalist, because it was pretty busy, but I guess the hypnotic nature contributes to the definition. Or something. So anyway, it’s hard to define what the film’s about. There’s a few hints in the translation of the film’s title, but that kind of ruins the fun of building your own reaction to it. It’s just footage of various things — explosions, mountains, countryside, buildings, cities, human activity, machinery, factories, more explosions, and so on — that’s presented in an utterly unique, compelling, and somehow meaningful way.
I almost hate myself for that last sentence, but it’s true. The film manages to build meaning out of its disparate elements. Some of the footage is disconcertingly mind-blowing (New York traffic in ultra-fast time-lapse, for instance) while some of it is supremely soothing and relaxing (the realisation, as humans scurry about like ants in super-time-lapse, that nothing you do has any real effect on the cosmos is somehow divinely reassuring). The music draws you in superbly, gluing your eyes to the screen and giving your brain room to move and think and comprehend and assemble things into meaningful patterns. There is enough variety of footage, pacing, and music that you are never overwhelmed or bored by what goes on, it’s all perfectly constructed in such a way that it just all works.
I don’t know why, but I absolutely loved this movie. Seeing the world in such holistic detail is a unique experience, and I found myself thinking that Koyaanisqatsi is probably more informative and interesting than a dozen random documentaries selected from the Discovery Channel combined. There are no words, no narration, no plot, narrative or characters, but you feel more connected to it because of (not in spite of) its blankness, almost like you’re being invited in to project your own internal thoughts and feelings onto the blank canvas of the film. The lack of traditional coherence and reliance on plot devices is a welcome change, a breath of fresh air, and the way Koyaanisqatsi seemingly falls fully-formed from the sky into your TV is miraculous, worthy of the question “Where the hell did that come from?”
The triumvirate of director, cinematographer and composer (Godfrey Reggie, Ron Fricke and Phillip Glass, respectively) works like some kind of holy trinity to dictate the ebb and flow of the film, and to deliver completely undiluted the high concept promised at the outset. You don’t know where one’s input ends and another’s begins, the convoluted threads of vision, sound and meaning intertwined to a place beyond distinction and definition. The music alone would be hypnotic and transcendant, but coupled with the equally powerful images it takes on a whole other meaning. It’s like simultaneously hearing and seeing music. It’s strange, unique, and — I’m running out of superlatives here. The best thing I can compare it to is Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, except Koyaanisqatsi is more pure because it doesn’t dally in distractions like character and plot, and comes off as less boring and clinical than Kubrick’s masterpiece.
The movie remains completely impersonal until right towards the end, where, juxtaposed against the bustling fast-forwarded footage of cars and pedestrians in overpopulated metropolises, we get a pair of slow-motion shots of pure human emotion: a patient’s hand being held in a hospital, and a homeless man gazing forlornly at the miniscule collection of coins in the palm of his hand. This comes at just the right time, and in just the right quantities, to ignite the dormant emotions carefully set up by the previous hour’s worth of footage, and helps push the film into the surreal realm of pure emotion. The theme of hands is important becase as the film’s subtitle suggests, the future and condition of the world, civilisation as well as the physical planet, are in our hands. How we treat our lowliest members — the sick and invalid — is an important idea.
If humanity as a civilisation were judged by the way we treat our ill relatives, the homeless people on the street, our helpless children, the uneducated poor, and all the other rock-bottom, desperate people of our society, we would almost certainly be found wanting. But it’s in our nature to be callous and indifferent to all those not directly related to us or incapable of returning our favours. It makes sense from a cold, biological and psychological standpoint, but as we stumble out of the tribal infancy of our species, isn’t it about time that we stepped up to the plate and consciously defied the shackles of hardwired instinct? One of the many factors that differentiate us from the other animals is our ability to reason. We’ve built science, technology and medicine with this wonderful tool of logic, isn’t it about time we turned it on that other pillar of civilisation — society? We’re stuck in the proverbial woods of despair and confusion until we do.
I can understand why the vast majority of people, weaned on Disney and Star Wars, will rebel and rail with all their will against a movie like this. It’s not a traditional movie, and in an age where Transformers 2 sells like gangbusters, it’s clear that unique thought, progressive qualities, intelligence and humanism are not what the people want any more. But it’s definitely what I want, and I loved it.
Score: 90 out of 100
Second ALICE IN WONDERLAND trailer has more going for it
Dec 19
I’ve cringed at the idea of a Tim Burton-fuelled Alice In Wonderland since the project was announced. My disliking of the idea has been slowly confirmed as each piece of new media is rolled out – the images, posters and first trailer all revealed cheesy and typical Tim Burton touch that seems to smack of being dark and gloomy for the sake of it. Like he doesn’t know and refuses to explore any other way.
Then I saw this damn international trailer (recently released) and I have to admit– I do believe I’m hooked. I have a sense of urgency telling me that I have to know. I have see it. Yet I wasn’t overlly impressed with the trailer. There just seems to be an aura of occasion growing around this film now.
This trailer shows some extended moments that actually reveal some of Depp’s performance for the first time. I’ve ragged on him as the Hatter in the past, but now I have to admit (and indeed I always hoped that) I might be wrong. There are moments in the trailer that had me borderline impressed. It might still be more of the same but at least it seems there will be an elegant twist. Depp has gone with an accent and a lisp.
While there are moments to raise an eyebrow at with great interest, there are also some very blatant moments that are going to be utterly cringe-worthy in the cinema. Some of the CGI is clearly too much– to the point where it feels like complete animation and nothing more (see the floating cat head and tell me you didn’t tilt your head like a confused puppy). But hey, of all people, I guess Tim Burton can get away excessive animation.
Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland is scheduled for release March 5 2010 in 3D. Of course.
OPINIONS COUNT