Mar 5, 2010 0
‘Alice’ in Blunderland? Say it ain’t so, Burton!
I've been excited and nervous ever since I heard Tim Burton was filming Alice in Wonderland. Excited, because I generally love Burton's work. Nervous, because Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is my favorite book. Of the numerous versions on film, only the 1933 and 1966 adaptations appeal to me. I've already heard not-so-great opinions of Burton's take on Lewis Carroll's masterpiece. James Rocchi is especially brutal:
Burton's always been more of an image-maker than a storyteller. His films all tend to recycle the tale of the beautiful, misunderstood outsider; but at least "Edward Scissorhands" and "Ed Wood" had the lightness of inspiration and the physicality of the real world to support them, and in those films Depp was asked to do more than show up and be Johnny Depp. Like the sour, saccharine "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," "Alice in Wonderland" combines the heavy-handed clamminess of unneeded brand remarketing (Disney would love to sell new "Alice" stuff, and may have put more effort into the tie-in merchandise than the actual film) with the hateful hollowness of overdone and empty computer-generated imagery. The original 1951 Disney animated "Alice in Wonderland" is far from perfect, but at least it makes you feel like you're watching a fairy tale. With Burton's uninspired, underdone and underwritten version, you only feel like you're watching money.
Ouch! I'm still going to see it (probably not in 3-D though).
