amatyultare (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
amatyultare) wrote2010-04-02 02:41 am
amatyultare) wrote2010-04-02 02:41 am
Entry tags:
If it was, than it would be, but it's not, so it ain't!
1. Celtx is awesome. Free script-writing software that is incredibly easy to use? Yes please.
2. Once you get into the swing of it (and actually decide on plot points, cough cough), script writing is actually not too difficult. I have just under 4 pages so far. Whee! As a movie, it will be terrible, but as a script-writing exercise, it's kind of fun.
3. So. Alice In Wonderland. Jason was teasing me that my 'review' of it was quickly becoming irrelevant since it's been out for weeks now. So I finally sat down and finished it.
I was really happy that was that I was able to watch Wonderland with my sister, although Erica and I have very different tastes in movies; I respect her taste immensely even when I disagree with her. I have a higher tolerance for campiness, self-conscious humor, and 'typical Hollywood' (romantic subplots, glitz, etc). Erica, on the other hand, has a much higher tolerance for gratuitous violence, sex, and drug use, low-budget films, and general grittiness. I like to think this means that, if we both like a movie, it's a good sign of that movie's quality. On the other hand, when we turn to each other after a movie and tell each other earnestly, “That was AWFUL”, it's a pretty good bet that movie is bad.
You can see where I'm going with this. People who really liked Burton's Wonderland...may want to stop reading now.
The short version: The latest Alice In Wonderland is Tim Burton with zero respect for his audience and precious little respect for his source material.
With any film adaptation of a book, there are two ways to evaluate the movie. One is as a retelling – how true it stayed to the plot/theme/characters/feeling of the book. The other is as a movie on its own merits – if you went into the movie without any knowledge of the original story, would you understand and enjoy it? Frankly, Burton's Wonderland fails by either of these measures.
Since I'm a born purist and I reread both Alice novels right after watching the movie, let's start with the movie as a retelling. The problem is, neither Alice in Wonderland nor Through the Looking Glass have a plot, exactly. In the former, Alice wanders through Wonderland and takes various people's suggestions about places to see: that's about it. In the latter, Alice wants to get to the last square of the chessboard so she can become a queen and have a delicious feast – and, apart from some distractions, she makes it easily. Plotless wandering is a difficult sell for what was clearly meant to be a A Big (Financial) Success of a movie, so a plot was generated. It has extraordinarily little to do with either of the books, so I'll discuss it later as a part of the Movie as a Movie section.
How about the characters? Er. I actually am cautiously in favor of the woman who played Alice; in fact, the more I think about it, Alice was one of the better parts of the movie. Granted, she's got some of those traits that are obnoxious due to sheer ubiquity – she hates corsets! Just like every protagonist female in a period piece, ever! - but she does retain the flavor of the Alice of the books. When the mother of her fiance-to-be asks her rhetorically “Do you know what I'm afraid of?” and Alice responds, almost absently, “The decline of the aristocracy?”, you see the innocently tactless girl who once offended a mouse by starting a conversation about her cat catching mice, then changed the subject to her dog killing rats. (Unfortunately, the plot requires Alice to be astonishingly stupid at times, which frustrates. More on this later.)
The Wonderland denizens are a mixed bag. As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
deliriumdriver insightfully pointed out, the movie feels a bit like fanfiction. Certain characters are completely reimagined (the Dormouse as a Reepicheep knockoff, hee!) and characters who didn't even know each other in the books are suddenly comrades in arms and all know each other's histories and are friends.
My favorite of the bunch by far are the Cheshire Cat and the Caterpillar, simply because Stephen Fry and Alan Rickman rock my socks off. If they ever made a spin-off TV sitcom about these two characters (played by these actors) just being snarky, I would watch the hell out of it, no question. And yet, it's the delivery I like more than the lines. The caterpillar in the book has all of the arrogant obtuseness of the lotus-eater who believes his (ahem) altered consciousness truly gives him hidden insights. In the movie he becomes the Wonderland equivalent of a lifestyle coach, advising Alice to, well, just be herself. Similarly, the Cheshire Cat goes from “it doesn't matter which way you go...you're bound to get somewhere if you go long enough” to “here, I'll bring you to the Hatter, they're all waiting for you.” This goes back to the fanfiction comment, actually – the characters are no longer people with their own (skewed) logic and motivations, but plot contrivances to get the heroine where she needs to be.
Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. Oh dear. First of all, strike the mad part. Depp's Hatter is, at worst, mildly eccentric (think Helena's father/the Prime Minister in MirrorMask, and he plays a similar role in the story); it's made clear that his and the March Hare's madness is a deliberate front to protect them from the Queen's evil henchmen. Sadly, the 'mad' characteristic is not replaced with any other personality traits, so the character becomes yet another plot device, the Heroine's Expository Character and Designated Sidekick. (And also, possibly, love interest? If this was intentional and not just Johnny Depp having sexual chemistry with everyone, I am perhaps unfairly creeped out by it. Alice is of age now, but half of the total time that he's been acquainted with her, she was six. It's weird.) I must also add that the Scottish brogue was a misstep. And then there's the break-dancing. Actually, I don't know that I can discuss the break-dancing without sputtering, so: Johnny Depp sorta break-dances at one point in the movie. It is as stupid and four-wall/mood-breaking as you might imagine.
Possibly the most disappointing character is Helena Bonham Carter's Red Queen. She's supposed to be an amalgam of the Red Queen from Looking Glass and the Queen of Hearts. I say 'supposed to' because she has absolutely nothing to do with the Red Queen, who was strict and occasionally high-handed but not unkind. The Queen of Hearts in the book, meanwhile, was rendered disturbing yet funny because her constant 'off with their heads' edicts were so rarely enforced. HBC's Red Queen has no restraints and her orders are followed to the letter, so we can no longer laugh at her shrill off-hand executions. Yet she has become no darker for it, as you might expect she would – we don't see her, for example, having developed a taste for sadism or even particularly enjoying her power over others. This gives her character a certain flatness; we've lost the enjoyable points of the caricature without gaining a fully fleshed bad personality in return. The character felt real to me for exactly five seconds in a single scene near the end of the movie - this is not a good sign.
I suppose I should mention Anne Hathaway, the beautiful White Queen to HBC's evil (and ugly) Red Queen. The White Queen, in the Looking Glass, is mostly sweet and fairly ditsy. Hathaway chooses to portray this by playing the character as if she's standing in chest-deep water throughout the movie (no joke, I don't think her hands went below the level of her sternum in any scene) and looking politely puzzled most of the time. This is a valid interpretation of the character, I guess, but the White Queen is so clearly a figurehead in every way that I find it difficult to care about the character in any case.
So much for the characters. How about thematically? Underneath the alarming yet charming nonsense of Alice's wandering, there is a lot going on with the books. You've got levels of social commentary, not to mention tons of playing with logic and logical fallacies (I took a logic class once and the teacher mentioned that Lewis Carroll was a logician – and rereading the books, you can really tell). The movie, on the other hand, has some fairly simplistic messages:
1.Corsets and other 'stuffy Victorian traditions' (thanksdeliriumdriver!) are bad.
2.Ugly, evil monarchs are unpleasant. Beautiful, kind monarchs are preferable.
3.Be yourself! Even if people think you're crazy!
4.You may find friends in unexpected places, so keep your eyes open.
5.You may think that it's impossible to be as awesome as you'd like to be, but believe the impossible because you totally canslay the dragon do great things. (Yes, they bastardized 'six impossible things before breakfast' to deliver this particular Aesop.)
Yawn.
Why does this all matter? As I said, I'm a purist by nature. I personally believe that, if you like a book (or other franchise) enough to re-tell its story, you ought to, well, actually care about it. If you're using the setting or characters to do something completely unrelated or even antithetical to the original, you're basically using the original as a marketing gimmick to sell a new story. I think that's disrespectful to the source that you claim to like, and usually doesn't bode well for the movie that you apparently didn't think could stand on its own. (Granted, sometimes the retelling is commenting on/satirizing the original, but I don't think Burton doing that here.)
So let's consider Wonderland as a story of its own. (Don't worry, this part is shorter.)
This Alice in Wonderland is a sort of 'sequel' to the original story. Alice is now 19 years old and her only memories of Wonderland are her recurring dreams of the place. (Though, remember how I said Alice was astonishingly stupid? She spends three quarters of the movie convinced that she's in a dream, but missing the fact that it corresponds with the dream she's had every night for the past thirteen years. Alice isn't the brightest bloom on the rosebush, it seems. And then, when she realizes it's the same as the dreams she's had before – suddenly that proves it's all real? Come again?)
So Alice is nineteen and doesn't really remember Wonderland but dreams about it every night. Meanwhile, in the real world, she's being pressured to marry an obnoxious young lordling – but during a hilariously staged proposal, she sees and runs off after the White Rabbit. She falls down the rabbit hole, adventures ensue. Unlike the original, this isn't Alice simply being inquisitive; the White Rabbit and his compatriots actually lured Alice back to Wonderland because she is their destined savior. Wonderland used to be great back when the (beautiful but creepily monochromatic) White Queen ruled the land, but she was violently overthrown by her sister the (ugly and therefore evil) Red Queen and things have gone downhill ever since. The muscle that the Red Queen uses to maintain her rule is the Jabberwocky, here imagined as a sort of dragon-y monster; however, there is a magical oracular picture calendar that has foreseen that Alice is fated to come back to Wonderland, kill the Jabberwocky with the Vorpal Blade on the Frabjous Day, and defeat the Red Queen, therefore saving the world.
If you think this sounds strikingly like an off-brand 'The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe' with some added 'Wizard of Oz' flavor – well, I cannot disagree with you. Or if you'd prefer, a slice-and-dice version of any five randomly chosen children's fantasy movies. The plot is so predictable and dull and we've-seen-this-all-before, in fact, that there's not much to say about it. The movie would be entirely forgettable without the patina of being a (retelling of a) classic children's story.
On a technical level, it's fine but not groundbreaking. The makeup and costuming are fun in that Tim Burton-esque way, the scenery and CGI are fine. The 3-D was meh-inducing, but then everyone is still coming off the Avatar pretty-high so anything less will seem boring at this point, I suppose.
But in the end, the movie seems to have this odd, almost Ouroboros-esque logical fallacy built into it. The book didn't have a plot but had tons of interesting characters and themes, so in theory the plot would be introduced as a way to make a movie out of these characters and/or themes – and really, it's impossible to imagine that Burton's primary point in making the movie was to focus on the bland girl-power-lite storyline. Yet the characters are then changed all around and the themes discarded or bent to fit this plot. So the characters are twisted to serve the plot that was contrived to serve them, and in the end none of it really works.
Okay, bedtime. Later, all!
2. Once you get into the swing of it (and actually decide on plot points, cough cough), script writing is actually not too difficult. I have just under 4 pages so far. Whee! As a movie, it will be terrible, but as a script-writing exercise, it's kind of fun.
3. So. Alice In Wonderland. Jason was teasing me that my 'review' of it was quickly becoming irrelevant since it's been out for weeks now. So I finally sat down and finished it.
I was really happy that was that I was able to watch Wonderland with my sister, although Erica and I have very different tastes in movies; I respect her taste immensely even when I disagree with her. I have a higher tolerance for campiness, self-conscious humor, and 'typical Hollywood' (romantic subplots, glitz, etc). Erica, on the other hand, has a much higher tolerance for gratuitous violence, sex, and drug use, low-budget films, and general grittiness. I like to think this means that, if we both like a movie, it's a good sign of that movie's quality. On the other hand, when we turn to each other after a movie and tell each other earnestly, “That was AWFUL”, it's a pretty good bet that movie is bad.
You can see where I'm going with this. People who really liked Burton's Wonderland...may want to stop reading now.
The short version: The latest Alice In Wonderland is Tim Burton with zero respect for his audience and precious little respect for his source material.
With any film adaptation of a book, there are two ways to evaluate the movie. One is as a retelling – how true it stayed to the plot/theme/characters/feeling of the book. The other is as a movie on its own merits – if you went into the movie without any knowledge of the original story, would you understand and enjoy it? Frankly, Burton's Wonderland fails by either of these measures.
Since I'm a born purist and I reread both Alice novels right after watching the movie, let's start with the movie as a retelling. The problem is, neither Alice in Wonderland nor Through the Looking Glass have a plot, exactly. In the former, Alice wanders through Wonderland and takes various people's suggestions about places to see: that's about it. In the latter, Alice wants to get to the last square of the chessboard so she can become a queen and have a delicious feast – and, apart from some distractions, she makes it easily. Plotless wandering is a difficult sell for what was clearly meant to be a A Big (Financial) Success of a movie, so a plot was generated. It has extraordinarily little to do with either of the books, so I'll discuss it later as a part of the Movie as a Movie section.
How about the characters? Er. I actually am cautiously in favor of the woman who played Alice; in fact, the more I think about it, Alice was one of the better parts of the movie. Granted, she's got some of those traits that are obnoxious due to sheer ubiquity – she hates corsets! Just like every protagonist female in a period piece, ever! - but she does retain the flavor of the Alice of the books. When the mother of her fiance-to-be asks her rhetorically “Do you know what I'm afraid of?” and Alice responds, almost absently, “The decline of the aristocracy?”, you see the innocently tactless girl who once offended a mouse by starting a conversation about her cat catching mice, then changed the subject to her dog killing rats. (Unfortunately, the plot requires Alice to be astonishingly stupid at times, which frustrates. More on this later.)
The Wonderland denizens are a mixed bag. As
deliriumdriver insightfully pointed out, the movie feels a bit like fanfiction. Certain characters are completely reimagined (the Dormouse as a Reepicheep knockoff, hee!) and characters who didn't even know each other in the books are suddenly comrades in arms and all know each other's histories and are friends. My favorite of the bunch by far are the Cheshire Cat and the Caterpillar, simply because Stephen Fry and Alan Rickman rock my socks off. If they ever made a spin-off TV sitcom about these two characters (played by these actors) just being snarky, I would watch the hell out of it, no question. And yet, it's the delivery I like more than the lines. The caterpillar in the book has all of the arrogant obtuseness of the lotus-eater who believes his (ahem) altered consciousness truly gives him hidden insights. In the movie he becomes the Wonderland equivalent of a lifestyle coach, advising Alice to, well, just be herself. Similarly, the Cheshire Cat goes from “it doesn't matter which way you go...you're bound to get somewhere if you go long enough” to “here, I'll bring you to the Hatter, they're all waiting for you.” This goes back to the fanfiction comment, actually – the characters are no longer people with their own (skewed) logic and motivations, but plot contrivances to get the heroine where she needs to be.
Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. Oh dear. First of all, strike the mad part. Depp's Hatter is, at worst, mildly eccentric (think Helena's father/the Prime Minister in MirrorMask, and he plays a similar role in the story); it's made clear that his and the March Hare's madness is a deliberate front to protect them from the Queen's evil henchmen. Sadly, the 'mad' characteristic is not replaced with any other personality traits, so the character becomes yet another plot device, the Heroine's Expository Character and Designated Sidekick. (And also, possibly, love interest? If this was intentional and not just Johnny Depp having sexual chemistry with everyone, I am perhaps unfairly creeped out by it. Alice is of age now, but half of the total time that he's been acquainted with her, she was six. It's weird.) I must also add that the Scottish brogue was a misstep. And then there's the break-dancing. Actually, I don't know that I can discuss the break-dancing without sputtering, so: Johnny Depp sorta break-dances at one point in the movie. It is as stupid and four-wall/mood-breaking as you might imagine.
Possibly the most disappointing character is Helena Bonham Carter's Red Queen. She's supposed to be an amalgam of the Red Queen from Looking Glass and the Queen of Hearts. I say 'supposed to' because she has absolutely nothing to do with the Red Queen, who was strict and occasionally high-handed but not unkind. The Queen of Hearts in the book, meanwhile, was rendered disturbing yet funny because her constant 'off with their heads' edicts were so rarely enforced. HBC's Red Queen has no restraints and her orders are followed to the letter, so we can no longer laugh at her shrill off-hand executions. Yet she has become no darker for it, as you might expect she would – we don't see her, for example, having developed a taste for sadism or even particularly enjoying her power over others. This gives her character a certain flatness; we've lost the enjoyable points of the caricature without gaining a fully fleshed bad personality in return. The character felt real to me for exactly five seconds in a single scene near the end of the movie - this is not a good sign.
I suppose I should mention Anne Hathaway, the beautiful White Queen to HBC's evil (and ugly) Red Queen. The White Queen, in the Looking Glass, is mostly sweet and fairly ditsy. Hathaway chooses to portray this by playing the character as if she's standing in chest-deep water throughout the movie (no joke, I don't think her hands went below the level of her sternum in any scene) and looking politely puzzled most of the time. This is a valid interpretation of the character, I guess, but the White Queen is so clearly a figurehead in every way that I find it difficult to care about the character in any case.
So much for the characters. How about thematically? Underneath the alarming yet charming nonsense of Alice's wandering, there is a lot going on with the books. You've got levels of social commentary, not to mention tons of playing with logic and logical fallacies (I took a logic class once and the teacher mentioned that Lewis Carroll was a logician – and rereading the books, you can really tell). The movie, on the other hand, has some fairly simplistic messages:
1.Corsets and other 'stuffy Victorian traditions' (thanks
deliriumdriver!) are bad.2.Ugly, evil monarchs are unpleasant. Beautiful, kind monarchs are preferable.
3.Be yourself! Even if people think you're crazy!
4.You may find friends in unexpected places, so keep your eyes open.
5.You may think that it's impossible to be as awesome as you'd like to be, but believe the impossible because you totally can
Yawn.
Why does this all matter? As I said, I'm a purist by nature. I personally believe that, if you like a book (or other franchise) enough to re-tell its story, you ought to, well, actually care about it. If you're using the setting or characters to do something completely unrelated or even antithetical to the original, you're basically using the original as a marketing gimmick to sell a new story. I think that's disrespectful to the source that you claim to like, and usually doesn't bode well for the movie that you apparently didn't think could stand on its own. (Granted, sometimes the retelling is commenting on/satirizing the original, but I don't think Burton doing that here.)
So let's consider Wonderland as a story of its own. (Don't worry, this part is shorter.)
This Alice in Wonderland is a sort of 'sequel' to the original story. Alice is now 19 years old and her only memories of Wonderland are her recurring dreams of the place. (Though, remember how I said Alice was astonishingly stupid? She spends three quarters of the movie convinced that she's in a dream, but missing the fact that it corresponds with the dream she's had every night for the past thirteen years. Alice isn't the brightest bloom on the rosebush, it seems. And then, when she realizes it's the same as the dreams she's had before – suddenly that proves it's all real? Come again?)
So Alice is nineteen and doesn't really remember Wonderland but dreams about it every night. Meanwhile, in the real world, she's being pressured to marry an obnoxious young lordling – but during a hilariously staged proposal, she sees and runs off after the White Rabbit. She falls down the rabbit hole, adventures ensue. Unlike the original, this isn't Alice simply being inquisitive; the White Rabbit and his compatriots actually lured Alice back to Wonderland because she is their destined savior. Wonderland used to be great back when the (beautiful but creepily monochromatic) White Queen ruled the land, but she was violently overthrown by her sister the (ugly and therefore evil) Red Queen and things have gone downhill ever since. The muscle that the Red Queen uses to maintain her rule is the Jabberwocky, here imagined as a sort of dragon-y monster; however, there is a magical oracular picture calendar that has foreseen that Alice is fated to come back to Wonderland, kill the Jabberwocky with the Vorpal Blade on the Frabjous Day, and defeat the Red Queen, therefore saving the world.
If you think this sounds strikingly like an off-brand 'The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe' with some added 'Wizard of Oz' flavor – well, I cannot disagree with you. Or if you'd prefer, a slice-and-dice version of any five randomly chosen children's fantasy movies. The plot is so predictable and dull and we've-seen-this-all-before, in fact, that there's not much to say about it. The movie would be entirely forgettable without the patina of being a (retelling of a) classic children's story.
On a technical level, it's fine but not groundbreaking. The makeup and costuming are fun in that Tim Burton-esque way, the scenery and CGI are fine. The 3-D was meh-inducing, but then everyone is still coming off the Avatar pretty-high so anything less will seem boring at this point, I suppose.
But in the end, the movie seems to have this odd, almost Ouroboros-esque logical fallacy built into it. The book didn't have a plot but had tons of interesting characters and themes, so in theory the plot would be introduced as a way to make a movie out of these characters and/or themes – and really, it's impossible to imagine that Burton's primary point in making the movie was to focus on the bland girl-power-lite storyline. Yet the characters are then changed all around and the themes discarded or bent to fit this plot. So the characters are twisted to serve the plot that was contrived to serve them, and in the end none of it really works.
Okay, bedtime. Later, all!
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Haha, it is old, and loooong. But like I said, I don't particularly expect anyone to actually read it all - I wrote this for my own satisfaction, so it doesn't really matter.