Alice In Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010)

[DrPepper]

The slightly hideous theme is available for streaming here: http://www.myspace.com/avrillavigne.

[abuckley89]

I don't understand how Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland gets a shitty-emo pop soundtrack with Avril Lavigne and Twilight gets original music by Thom Yorke. Sometimes the world makes no sense.

[godardslave]

Sometimes the world makes no sense.

Nearly all the time the world makes no sense. [-X
If you still not sure, go read ... Alice in Wonderland.

[domino harvey]

Tim Burton's already lined up his next film

[Highway 61]

Tim Burton's already lined up his next film

So true. The Elfman bit is brilliant.

[Polybius]

I feel quite validated after watching that.

I was starting to wonder if I was the only one.

[carax09]

The slightly hideous theme is available for streaming here: http://www.myspace.com/avrillavigne.

Here's who I would've chosen for the theme. I mean, she's already using children's literature as inspiration, in an unsolicited way.

[Kirkinson]

What an unbelievably ghastly film. Who created this robot that's been walking around pretending to be Tim Burton for the last few years? The College Humor sketch is too generous, as he's not even repeating his own cliches anymore. Every last trace of personal identity has been purged in this disaster. Aesthetically, it looks exactly like every other ultrabudget blockbuster-of-the-week from Greenscreenistan, and the "narrative arc" they've grafted onto the story is even more rudimentary and paint-by-numbers than I could have imagined. Even worse, the film utterly wastes its only redeeming quality by giving its splendid cast nothing to do. Timothy Spall, Michael Sheen, Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover, Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry...these are precisely the people who ought to be in Alice in Wonderland, but their talents are mostly squandered. Johnny Depp survives on sheer charm, but I came away with a distinct impression that charm was all he had this time, as he seemed to be flailing a bit to find something he could actually build a character around. Mia Wasikowska seems to be quite talented and I look forward to seeing her in films where she can bite into something more substantial than the stale, dry wafer she's treated to here.

Also well below average as compared to other Wonderland adaptations. The Hallmark miniseries from 1999 is honestly better than this. Even the Syfy Channel's conveniently-timed "reimagining" from a few months ago was better, and that was terrible.

Must put on Jonathan Miller's production soon to wash this awful taste out of my head.

[hangman]

Tim Burton's already lined up his next film

The brain storming session was pretty dead on with the stuff you could expect from Burton's films as of late, the make up part was genius XD.

[Brian C]

I bit the bullet and went to see this last night, more out of misguided residual youthful loyalty to Tim Burton than anything else. I wasn't expecting to like it, but an early pre-Wonderland scene with Alice attending a party wasn't terrible, and I began wondering if maybe I had pre-judged it too harshly.

Well, once she gets to "Underland," the bottom drops out pretty fast. I don't think anyone here needs to hear how staggeringly bad the movie is, so I won't waste a lot of time on a general critique. Suffice it to say that it's arbitrary and pointless, and not in a Lewis Carroll sort of way, but in a "we're too lazy/incompetent to make anything of this" sort of way. It's the worst movie of Burton's career.

I do want to make a more specific critique, however, of the film's treatment of Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I had, of course, seen them in the marketing materials and was appropriately wary, but seeing them in the actual film put me on immediate notice that Burton was far more interesting in lazily conceived grotesqueries than anything else. They look horrible, with no apparent wit or imagination in their design, and no purpose other than to make us laugh at the sight of them. There was a time when Burton made movies that related to characters like this, but now he sets up scenes like one in which the Red Queen (who is actually modeled on the Queen of Hearts)

Spoiler

brings them out just to mock them.

While the Red Queen is made to be the villian in the film, I don't see how Burton's treatment of the two is any different. He doesn't give them a role in the narrative, he doesn't develop them as characters, and he doesn't give them any meaningful part in the film at all. He just makes them fat.

Maybe I'm making more out of this than is there, but it's hard not to think back to Pee-Wee's Big Adventure or Edward Scissorhands or Ed Wood and think that Burton in a way has become exactly what he hates: the one who's pointing fingers and laughing at the outcasts.