(no subject)
I saw Alice in Wonderland this morning.
I didn't like it.
I'm a fan of Tim Burton, no doubt. But his imagining of the Alice stories just seems like another entree for the Hot Topic set to appropriate (even more than they already have). There was nothing new or groundbreaking with the story; strip away the Alice veneer and all you get is a pretty standard "save the land from evil" fantasy story. "Through the Looking-glass" is my favorite out of the two Alice books and it has always annoyed me that they mash up the two stories in seemingly every movie iteration.
-Alice was boring. She didn't seem to have any personality and there wasn't anything about her that made me care about what happened to her. Her refusal to wear corsets and stockings (in Victorian England no less!) is movie-shorthand for her being an outsider, but really I think it's just lazy writing. I'd much rather have an Alice who can subvert the status-quo while working from inside society's rules.
-I hate all CGI sets. "Alice" suffers from the same affliction that "Mirrormask" did: CGI has no heart, no soul, so you know it's not real. There's nothing there you can touch; it lacks feeling. It was hard to suspend disbelief when the set makes it so obvious that it doesn't exist.
-The White Queen annoyed the shit out of me. Every time she showed up on the screen I wanted to tell her to put her damn hands down. If the Red Queen was so evil, why did she, once she got into power, allow the White Queen to live? It wasn't as if the White Queen went to hiding and that's why the Red Queen couldn't get rid of her. The bitch was pretty much living across the street from the Red Queen.
The whole thing was pretty much a jumbled, technicolor mess from beginning to end.
I didn't like it.
I'm a fan of Tim Burton, no doubt. But his imagining of the Alice stories just seems like another entree for the Hot Topic set to appropriate (even more than they already have). There was nothing new or groundbreaking with the story; strip away the Alice veneer and all you get is a pretty standard "save the land from evil" fantasy story. "Through the Looking-glass" is my favorite out of the two Alice books and it has always annoyed me that they mash up the two stories in seemingly every movie iteration.
-Alice was boring. She didn't seem to have any personality and there wasn't anything about her that made me care about what happened to her. Her refusal to wear corsets and stockings (in Victorian England no less!) is movie-shorthand for her being an outsider, but really I think it's just lazy writing. I'd much rather have an Alice who can subvert the status-quo while working from inside society's rules.
-I hate all CGI sets. "Alice" suffers from the same affliction that "Mirrormask" did: CGI has no heart, no soul, so you know it's not real. There's nothing there you can touch; it lacks feeling. It was hard to suspend disbelief when the set makes it so obvious that it doesn't exist.
-The White Queen annoyed the shit out of me. Every time she showed up on the screen I wanted to tell her to put her damn hands down. If the Red Queen was so evil, why did she, once she got into power, allow the White Queen to live? It wasn't as if the White Queen went to hiding and that's why the Red Queen couldn't get rid of her. The bitch was pretty much living across the street from the Red Queen.
The whole thing was pretty much a jumbled, technicolor mess from beginning to end.