Alice
3d movies are starting to annoy me a little. The glasses make my eyes hurt, probably because I spend a lot of time focusing on subtitles and they are too close and my eyes are not used to focusing to that distance or something. Also, they tend to feel like Viewmaster reels where each actor or set or prop is a flat cardboard at different levels of depth. You get a sense of their relative depths but the things themselves don't have depth to them and often end up looking like flat cardboards against a background.
The Alice movie itself, it was such a typical well executed Burton movie and if you know what his movies are like you can probably make a pretty educated guess on whether you'd like this or not. I was kind of hoping for a twist of some kind, something that would have made the story a little more interesting than the basic black and white (red and white) good and evil, it would've been cool if the white queen would have turned out to be a bad guy manipulating Alice. Alice did look totally super-hot in the armor though! :D
The real world segment was sort of polarizing for me. For one I thought it was lame how the suitor was made to be such a dweeb, because that made Alice's choice way too easy and predictable. It would've been much more interesting to me if the suitor had been (Brad Pitt / Hugh Grant / Tom Cruise / insert whoever you think is super-hot) played hotly instead of as a schmuck, because then there would have been a real difficult choice involved instead of a lame no-brainer. It would have made Alice's ultimate choice much more meaningful if she chose to pursue a career of adventure instead of a hot guy. Now, her choice is basically something everyone agrees with and that's just dull. It doesn't say anything about her character because any personality type would have picked her choice. It only says something about her character if it's a choice where certain personality types would have picked one way and other types another way. But I did love how she did pick the adventurer's career in the end, I think it's really nice to see female archetypes in fiction who aren't all about the goal of finding the right guy and getting married but wanting something else out of life. I think they're pretty rare and it's really nice to see one of those.
Overall I think it's a perfectly serviceable Burton movie but nothing particularly special except for maybe the special effects. For example I'd definitely rate Chocolate Factory over this.
The Alice movie itself, it was such a typical well executed Burton movie and if you know what his movies are like you can probably make a pretty educated guess on whether you'd like this or not. I was kind of hoping for a twist of some kind, something that would have made the story a little more interesting than the basic black and white (red and white) good and evil, it would've been cool if the white queen would have turned out to be a bad guy manipulating Alice. Alice did look totally super-hot in the armor though! :D
The real world segment was sort of polarizing for me. For one I thought it was lame how the suitor was made to be such a dweeb, because that made Alice's choice way too easy and predictable. It would've been much more interesting to me if the suitor had been (Brad Pitt / Hugh Grant / Tom Cruise / insert whoever you think is super-hot) played hotly instead of as a schmuck, because then there would have been a real difficult choice involved instead of a lame no-brainer. It would have made Alice's ultimate choice much more meaningful if she chose to pursue a career of adventure instead of a hot guy. Now, her choice is basically something everyone agrees with and that's just dull. It doesn't say anything about her character because any personality type would have picked her choice. It only says something about her character if it's a choice where certain personality types would have picked one way and other types another way. But I did love how she did pick the adventurer's career in the end, I think it's really nice to see female archetypes in fiction who aren't all about the goal of finding the right guy and getting married but wanting something else out of life. I think they're pretty rare and it's really nice to see one of those.
Overall I think it's a perfectly serviceable Burton movie but nothing particularly special except for maybe the special effects. For example I'd definitely rate Chocolate Factory over this.