Description

Mike loved Alice in Wonderland mainly because it reminded him of Labyrinth, which you could watch instead.

Transcript

I am Mike from substream.com and this is an episode of watch this instead, for the weekend in March 5th. Tim Burton whose adaptation extension of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland book comes out today is a really divisive film maker despite not ever really making films and all that provocative. It’s his sameness that some people love and some people hate. I’m the one that hates it. He doesn’t really make bad movies. Even the Planet of the Apes which is probably his worst movie isn’t that bad. But some people get kind of annoyed by a guy that makes the same movie over and over again for almost 30 years. He made some incredibly good movies, almost master pieces. Pee-wee’s big adventure is one, Beetle juice is another, Big fish was pretty good. But especially lately he seems to just the sticking to the same formula layer esthetic of black curly queues and in spirals and stripes and goofy eye balls, and make up jobs, and letters and titles that are kind of crooked bent and don’t even aligned just properly and all those movies seems to start the same actors his partner Helen Bonham Carter and his I guess non romantic partner Johnny Depp. To some people it’s a great vibrant, unique, esthetic and to other people it’s a really carefully crafted manage brand of gothic weirdness that gets really tiring. Even doing the same thing for a long time with the same actors. So you can kind of understand why people might not be that excited about his remake of the Alice in the Wonderland books because it seem like the perfect very much obvious and on the nose examples of something for him to work his cookie new romantic creeperland more of the same. Fortunately the film is good and for one reason Mia Wasikowska. Tim Burton cast is film with the bunch like he always does with a bunch of very talented but perfectly obvious and on the nose actors. With their great talents like Johnny Depp and Helen Bonham Carter and Chris Ben Glover who again plays as spooky bad guy, and Anne Hathaway who again plays the regal pure of heart kind of white queen character but he did one thing right and that’s the cast of virtually unknown Wasikowska in the role of Alice, she’s perfect. Everything else about this film is blindingly obvious, accepting maybe Stephen Fry the Cheshire cat but casting Wasikowska of Alice is a smart enough decision to make the film almost well fresh, which for a Tim Burton movie is almost unheard that. Let’s to go back in 1978 basically when director Richard Donner and producer Ilya Salkind and cast is a very, very unknown Christopher Reeve as Superman in the big budget Hollywood adaptation of that beloved character to understand how brave and how perfect a casting of unknown Wasikowska is in the role with Alice. She’s so good in fact that you don’t want to see her in a bunch of other roles. This doesn’t feel like the birth of the star. She is just very, very, very good at the role that she was casting. And she’s spectacularly subtle in a film that’s anything. Burton is also to be commended for one other choice which is making sure that the monsters in this film with the Jabberwocky and the bander snatch are actually kind of scary. This movie is about is dark as you think a Hollywood kids film would be but the monster in it are legitimately terrifying which in 2010 is kind of surprising as everything generally specially Disney stuff, things that have the claws and teeth blended. What’s missing though is the deep alienating sense of weirdness that truly good examples of genre can create and I’m talking about the—of the film like Dark Crystal or more specifically Labyrinth. Depp and Carter are too familiar to us. They’re giant stars and they work with Burton all the time doing stuff that’s very similar to what they doing in this film the effects in the film are too plasticy and unfortunately too fake, to create the real sense of weirdness that the vision all be kind of funny and goofy but also somehow legitimately terrifying of a guy like David Bowie in a giant wig and retards with the giant bulging cross, the thin white dude scaring’ the shit out of you waving around to clear ball to create. Its close, Wasikowska gets at much, much, much closer than a bunch of other more obvious starlet choices would have gotten it. But her performance is let down by the sheer obviousness on the rest of the film. Alice though maybe not as a movie but as a character created by writer and then director and an actress is brilliant. And her emergence late in the third act is the champion that wonderland has been searching for is as powerful and as moving a heroic emergence as I’ve seen really since Ripley turned around in a giant nexus to fight the alien queen. Is that good, it’s that moving late into the film and it’s all of down to the performance of Mia Wasikowska. It’s a magical moment and its one special enough that it manages to lift Tim Burtons, otherwise, very, very, very much on the nose re-dreaming of the Alice in Wonderland stories from something been very obvious and miss something that’s kind of special.