Thoughts on Alice in Wonderland
I came out of the cinema last night not really knowing what to make of this film, but the more I've thought about it, the more I like it.
I feel like I don't really have the vocabulary to talk about everything I want to with this film, so here are just a few things going through my head...
The gender stuff was really pretty intriguing. I was kind of worried when Alice started running around Wonderland in her underthings, looking frightened, but that thankfully didn't last for long and she got a succession of really cool outfits, climaxing in the most awesome suit of armour:
FIERCE!
She then slayed the dragon jabberwocky, saved the day, and went off to seek her fortune. I really liked the end \o/. What was interesting, though, was the way the Hatter almost seemed to take on the more traditionally female role -- captured, forced into servitude, escapes with an army of cute talking animals, and then at the end, makes an emotional plea to Alice to stay. It was unexpected, but cool (as was the whole quasi-romance thing there with the Hatter -- I wasn't convinced at first, but I think Johnny Depp made it work).
The race stuff, on the other hand, was... hmm. To start with, there were no CoC's at all -- even the doormouse was white. But I also think the White Queen was conceived (and acted) with a certain amount of irony. To start with, Anne Hathaway looked absolutely dreadful -- corpse-white skin, bleached white hair, with those thick black eyebrows and dark red mouth. The thing is, I think she was meant to. I think she's kind of a parody of the fantasy trope of the good queen being fair and golden and whiter than white. Coupled with all that hyprocrisy re killing being against her vows, said as she's adding severed fingers to a potion, I definitely think the character is intended to be satirical. So the fact that she is so white is implicitly a bad thing, or at least a frivolous, silly thing, and that I take as a positive.
This is one I wouldn't mind going to see again. So, anyone know where I can get an icon of Alice in her armour?
I feel like I don't really have the vocabulary to talk about everything I want to with this film, so here are just a few things going through my head...
The gender stuff was really pretty intriguing. I was kind of worried when Alice started running around Wonderland in her underthings, looking frightened, but that thankfully didn't last for long and she got a succession of really cool outfits, climaxing in the most awesome suit of armour:
FIERCE!
She then slayed the dragon jabberwocky, saved the day, and went off to seek her fortune. I really liked the end \o/. What was interesting, though, was the way the Hatter almost seemed to take on the more traditionally female role -- captured, forced into servitude, escapes with an army of cute talking animals, and then at the end, makes an emotional plea to Alice to stay. It was unexpected, but cool (as was the whole quasi-romance thing there with the Hatter -- I wasn't convinced at first, but I think Johnny Depp made it work).
The race stuff, on the other hand, was... hmm. To start with, there were no CoC's at all -- even the doormouse was white. But I also think the White Queen was conceived (and acted) with a certain amount of irony. To start with, Anne Hathaway looked absolutely dreadful -- corpse-white skin, bleached white hair, with those thick black eyebrows and dark red mouth. The thing is, I think she was meant to. I think she's kind of a parody of the fantasy trope of the good queen being fair and golden and whiter than white. Coupled with all that hyprocrisy re killing being against her vows, said as she's adding severed fingers to a potion, I definitely think the character is intended to be satirical. So the fact that she is so white is implicitly a bad thing, or at least a frivolous, silly thing, and that I take as a positive.
This is one I wouldn't mind going to see again. So, anyone know where I can get an icon of Alice in her armour?