6 Reasons I'm NOT looking forward to Alice in Wonderland
NOTE - Before you freak out, Kirsten, yes i'm still coming to see it. I'm always up for being plesantly suprised. Plus its your birthday and you'll be needing a buzkill.
(1) I didn't enjoy the book, and i'm only part-way through Through the Looking Glass. Yes, glare at me all you want, but I kind of agree with Terry Pratchett on this one - it's weird without being at all charming, and trudges along until it just ends.
(2) I'm getting a little sick of Tim Burton's style TBH. He's good at (Read: gets away with) making films ostensibly for kids, but "secretly" made for grownups. Except not secretly. Seriously I can't think of a single film of his I would take my (hypothetical) kids to at any age below 14, and i'm a (hypothetically) pretty liberal parent. I read The Melancholy Death of Oysterboy and it was the same problem - if he isn't writing for kids then the whole "dark fairytale" thing got old a couple of movies back. If it IS meant for children, then Burton just doesn't seem to understand how kids work. Speaking of which...
(3) Why so dark all the time? As far as I recall Alice in Wonderland was meant for children, specifically A child, Alice Liddell. Making such Grimdark fairy stories has becoms quite a common thing these days, from Burton to Gaiman to Alan Moore's the Lost Girls (with in his case a hefty dose of Lesbian Paedophillia thrown in). Okay guys, it was a fun idea at first, but in most other genres if you consistently write against the genre you're considered Bad At It(TM). Plus there's only so much you can do with it before you're feeding soley on your own perceived ideas and not on the plot. Remember all those people who read drugs imagery into Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, only to find out it was based on a children's drawing? Apparently that was why Shatner's version was so damn freaky. Apart from, y'know, the other reason. Yes, I know the Grimm Bros etc were pretty dark to begin with, but if you feel the need to "update it" with so much modern stuff, then write some modern fairy tales!
(4) HOLY FUCKING SHIT HAVE YOU SEEN HBC IN IT? Her head is like a goddamn Easter Island statue. The next time i watch Fight Club and start admiring her burnout-chic hotness this movie will pop into my head and MY DICK WILL DROP OFF AND DIE. Although aparently there's a reason its so huge - in a preview article from the other month one of the writers said it was because she has a brain tumor. Oh. Goody. Speaking of which again...
(5) In layering all this Grimdark and extra-plot on top of the original story, there's a strong chance Burton is *going to* (remember, i'm open to being suprised) over-egg this pudding. In, say, American McGee's Alice, there wasn't any incentive to make the characters likeable - Alice herself is Insane and all the characters are trying to kill her. But here there's the problem of us having to like Alice, the Mad Hatter (it's Johnny Depp, of course we're supposed to like him), all of them to some extent. That's going to be a difficult one for them to pull off.
(6) The actual film itself is looking pretty dark too - I remember having to squint at the screen at some points in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and once I could make it out, all the spindly lines, bizarro colour schemes and weirdness for the sake of it. Back to the Burton-Style Bashing, it looks like this is going to do the same thing - I saw some of the screenshots of the garden and random mushroom-y pathways and it just looks rather drab, and in a movie as psychedelic as Alice can be that's a bad sign.
...In a nutshell. Let the Wank begin!
(Apologies for sloppy editing - i'm cackling with glee internally as Kirsten weeps at having to kill Wesker in Resident Evil V)
(1) I didn't enjoy the book, and i'm only part-way through Through the Looking Glass. Yes, glare at me all you want, but I kind of agree with Terry Pratchett on this one - it's weird without being at all charming, and trudges along until it just ends.
(2) I'm getting a little sick of Tim Burton's style TBH. He's good at (Read: gets away with) making films ostensibly for kids, but "secretly" made for grownups. Except not secretly. Seriously I can't think of a single film of his I would take my (hypothetical) kids to at any age below 14, and i'm a (hypothetically) pretty liberal parent. I read The Melancholy Death of Oysterboy and it was the same problem - if he isn't writing for kids then the whole "dark fairytale" thing got old a couple of movies back. If it IS meant for children, then Burton just doesn't seem to understand how kids work. Speaking of which...
(3) Why so dark all the time? As far as I recall Alice in Wonderland was meant for children, specifically A child, Alice Liddell. Making such Grimdark fairy stories has becoms quite a common thing these days, from Burton to Gaiman to Alan Moore's the Lost Girls (with in his case a hefty dose of Lesbian Paedophillia thrown in). Okay guys, it was a fun idea at first, but in most other genres if you consistently write against the genre you're considered Bad At It(TM). Plus there's only so much you can do with it before you're feeding soley on your own perceived ideas and not on the plot. Remember all those people who read drugs imagery into Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, only to find out it was based on a children's drawing? Apparently that was why Shatner's version was so damn freaky. Apart from, y'know, the other reason. Yes, I know the Grimm Bros etc were pretty dark to begin with, but if you feel the need to "update it" with so much modern stuff, then write some modern fairy tales!
(4) HOLY FUCKING SHIT HAVE YOU SEEN HBC IN IT? Her head is like a goddamn Easter Island statue. The next time i watch Fight Club and start admiring her burnout-chic hotness this movie will pop into my head and MY DICK WILL DROP OFF AND DIE. Although aparently there's a reason its so huge - in a preview article from the other month one of the writers said it was because she has a brain tumor. Oh. Goody. Speaking of which again...
(5) In layering all this Grimdark and extra-plot on top of the original story, there's a strong chance Burton is *going to* (remember, i'm open to being suprised) over-egg this pudding. In, say, American McGee's Alice, there wasn't any incentive to make the characters likeable - Alice herself is Insane and all the characters are trying to kill her. But here there's the problem of us having to like Alice, the Mad Hatter (it's Johnny Depp, of course we're supposed to like him), all of them to some extent. That's going to be a difficult one for them to pull off.
(6) The actual film itself is looking pretty dark too - I remember having to squint at the screen at some points in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and once I could make it out, all the spindly lines, bizarro colour schemes and weirdness for the sake of it. Back to the Burton-Style Bashing, it looks like this is going to do the same thing - I saw some of the screenshots of the garden and random mushroom-y pathways and it just looks rather drab, and in a movie as psychedelic as Alice can be that's a bad sign.
...In a nutshell. Let the Wank begin!
(Apologies for sloppy editing - i'm cackling with glee internally as Kirsten weeps at having to kill Wesker in Resident Evil V)