I Said Cut, You Hack.


Anyone who knows me knows I would never read a comic book. And I would especially never read anything created by Kevin Smith.” — Tim Burton. “Which, to me, explains f**king Batman.” — Kevin Smith. Also by way of a friend, the 30 harshest filmmaker-on-filmmaker insults in history. Some of these are questionable (who cares what Vincent Gallo thinks?), but there are a few gems here and there. “I HATE that guy! Next question.” — David Cronenberg on M. Night Shyamalan. (Director Bowie via here.)

No Alice Aforethought.

The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. And why this film was stinking rot, and so darn bad it stings… Sigh. Well, if you were going to see Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, the box office numbers seem to indicate that you probably already have. Nonetheless, I’m sorry to report that — Mia Wasikowska, some of the art direction, and perhaps a scene or two notwithstanding — this Alice is a thoroughly woeful enterprise, and just an aggravatingly bad adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s world. If you hold any fondness for the book, trust me, you’ll leave Mad as Hell.

I say Lewis Carroll’s “world” because, as you probably already know, this is not a straight-up adaptation of (the often-combined) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass. Rather, this movie takes up Alice’s tale as a teenager on the threshold of womanhood (Wasikowska), who, while weighing the pros-and-cons of betrothal to a rich, haughty, and very Burtonesque suitor (Leo Bill), finds herself Down the Rabbit Hole and back once again in, uh, “Underland.” So, in other words, at best this iteration of Alice already feels like reading somebody’s random Lewis Carroll fan-fiction on the Internets.

Worse, the fan in question seems to have really dug The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, to the point of just grifting liberally from Narnia to write this sequel-story. Now, Alice is basically a Pevensie-ish “Daughter of Eve” prophesied to free Won…uh, Underland from the tyranny of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). Note the picture of Alice at the top of this post, brandishing the sword and armor on the battlefield(?), and standing next to Hathaway the White like she’s at Minas Tirith — Does that look anything like Alice in Wonderland to you?

So yeah, all the playful word games and off-kilter logic puzzles of Carroll’s book, and your usual Alice adaptations for that matter, have been thrown out the window here. Instead, we are left with…well, basically your average dumb summer movie. The Mad Hatter has become a major character, for seemingly no other reason than to accommodate the presence of Johnny Depp. We are told Alice is destined to slay the Jabberwocky early in the second reel, which means we spend the rest of the film just sitting around waiting for this prophesied shoe to drop. And — spoiler alert — when our heroine finally accomplishes the deed at the Big Battle and puts the dragon (and by extension the audience) out of its misery, she even gets to throw in a John McClane/Schwarzenegger one-liner. (“Off with your head!)

Put simply, this is just a blatantly stupid movie, and looking back on it, I can think of only one or two grace notes worth mentioning. As you might expect from most any Tim Burton production, the art direction is quite impressive at times (The 3-D, on the other hand, is muddy, and really doesn’t add anything to the experience.) So, for example, the design of the Red Queen’s soldiers is rather appealing, but these flourishes still aren’t really enough to keep things moving along. There’s one very brief scene involving frog and fish servants of the Red Queen that made it seem like the overall film would be much more fun and imaginative. And, while Wasikowska herself is actually quite solid throughout the movie, this Alice only manages to capture some of the real Wonderland magic in the Eat Me/Drink Me sequence early on.

Otherwise, tho’, hoo boy. While Tim Burton and the screenwriters clearly deserve the lion’s share of the blame for this fiasco, there’s more than enough Terrible to go around. (For his part, Depp is strange as usual, but is neither a plus nor a minus, really — Just don’t get me started on the breakdancing scene.) Somehow, someway, Crispin Glover, a.k.a. the one-eyed Knave of Hearts, seems like he’s overacting even when surrounded by talking dogs, rabbits, and pigs. But even he isn’t as lousy here as Anne Hathaway, who is high-school-production-bad. (I should know — I was in one.) As the White Queen, I couldn’t tell if Hathaway was trying to riff off of her Princess Diaries co-star Julie Andrews, or whether she was just totally lost amid the CGI, Natalie Portman-style. Either way, this isn’t a career highlight.

So, to sum up, Alice in Wonderland is pretty much just a travesty. (Or, to quote the lady of the hour: “Of all the silly nonsense, this is the stupidest tea party I’ve ever been to in all my life.“) One way or another, and just like Alice, Tim Burton has managed to accomplish an impossible thing here. He’s taken a beloved children’s classic that seemed very well-suited to his strengths, and somehow managed to suck all the magic out of it.

Prince of Thieves, Queen of Hearts.

In the trailer bin, Russell Crowe grunts, growls, and generally looks very Maximus-ish in the new trailer for Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, also with William Hurt, Mark Strong, Max von Sydow, Oscar Isaac, and Cate Blanchett (nee Sienna Miller) as Maid Marian. And two colorful new trailers for Disney’s Alice in Wonderland suggest Tim Burton might have gone pretty far afield from the original Lewis Carroll tome, and that Johnny Depp might get Willy Wonka-annoying here after awhile.

Update: But does he know the street value of that mountain? It’s The Hangover meets Back to the Future as John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, and Clark Duke travel back to 1986 in a Hot Tub Time Machine, also with Lizzy Caplan, Crispin Glover, and Chevy Chase. Um, yeah.

Mandela and the Madhouses.

As with the other day, I can’t seem to make Quicktime happy at my workstation here. Nonetheless, it appears Matt Damon has gone from exposing his conjoined twin’s involvement in the WMD fiasco to ending apartheid in the new trailer for Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, with Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela. Busy fella.

Also in today’s trailer bin, two second looks at worlds gone mad: Mia Wasikowska finds Through the Looking Glass is still crazy after all these years in trailer #2 for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, also with Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Crispin Glover, Timothy Spall, and Christopher Lee. To be honest, it looks a little too Burton-y to me, if such a thing is possible for a property like Alice.

And Leonardo di Caprio is still losing his cool on The Island in trailer #2 for Martin Scorsese’s recently kicked-to-2010 Shutter Island, also featuring Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, Elias Koteas, Jackie Earle Haley, and the eminent Max Von Sydow. Eh, this looks better than most January fare.

Next Stop Wonderland(s).

In the trailer bin of late:

  • She’s given up, stop: Mia Wasikowska, a.k.a. Alice, takes a tumble down the rabbit hole anew in our first look at Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, also with Johnny Depp (frontlined a bit much here), Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Christopher Lee, Alan Rickman, Matt Lucas, Crispin Glover, Noah Taylor, and Timothy Spall. (Looks like a good start, although clearly there is still much CGI-rendering to do.)

  • In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where naturally Gary Oldman is up to no good, a Mad Maxish Denzel Washington may be carrying the secret to something-or-other in the trailer for the Hughes Brothers’ The Book of Eli, also with Mila Kunis, Ray Stevenson, Jennifer Beals, Frances de la Tour, and Michael Gambon. (It’s good to see the Hughes, of From Hell and the underrated Menace II Society, back behind the camera. But I’m betting this’ll seem a bit been-there-done-that, coming so soon after John Hillcoat’s The Road.)

  • Kate Beckinsale uncovers something deadly, dark, and dangerous in the furthest reaches of Antarctica in the straight-to-video-ish trailer for Dominic Sena’s Whiteout, also with Gabriel Macht and Tom Skerritt. (It looks like The Thing, with shower scenes. Beckinsale is probably one of my bigger movie star crushes, but lordy, the woman needs a new agent.)

    And, as Comic-Con 2009 is just kicking off:

  • Pushing Neil Blomkamp’s District 9, Peter Jackson talks The Hobbit and Tintin. (Apparently, the script for The Hobbit is three weeks away, and four or five of the 13 dwarves have been front-lined. Spielberg has finished a first cut of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, and The Lovely Bones comes out Dec. 11, with a trailer Aug. 6.)

  • Jonah Hex gets a poster that is sadly devoid of Malkovich. (For what is here, the scar looks decent enough, Megan Fox in anything gives me pause (but I guess she’s a hot ticket after the Transformers sequel made so much bank), and the lettering looks a bit futuristic for the property…unless they’re going post-Crisis Hex.

  • TRON 2.0, a.k.a. TR2N, is now called the much-more-boring TRON LEGACY. But, hey, at least they’re not abusing the colon…yet. (More TRON news, of sorts, in the post below, and, since the weekend is young, undoubtedly more Comic-Con news to come.) Update: The TR2N footage that premiered last Comic-Con is now — finally — up in glorious Quicktime.

  • Down the Rabbit Hole.

    “There is the usual Burton-esque ghoulishness (Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen, whose favorite retort is ‘Off with their heads,’ has a moat filled with bobbing noggins), but Zanuck assures most kids can handle it. ‘The book itself is pretty dark,’ he notes. ‘This is for little people and people who read it when they were little 50 years ago.’

    USA Today obtains some stills from Tim Burton’s forthcoming adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, including some unsettling shots of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Anne Hathaway as the Mad Hatter, Red Queen, and White Queen respectively. Also in the cast: Mia Wasikowska as Alice, Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar, Christopher Lee as the Jabberwock, Michael Sheen as the White Rabbit, Noah Taylor as the March Hare, Matt Lucas as the Tweedle twins, Crispin Glover as the Knave of Hearts, and Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat.

    Nine Walkers…Again.

    Coraline: Salvation? Post-apocalyptic puppet Elijah Wood finds himself fronting another crucially important nonagonal fellowship in the new trailer for Shane Acker’s 9, produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov and also starring Jennifer Connelly, Martin Landau, Christopher Plummer, Crispin Glover, and John C. Reilly. Hmm…definitely maybe.

    Depp the Disgruntled Milliner?

    Wonka redux? Word is Johnny Depp will be suiting up as the Mad Hatter for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, in 3D. (Burton cast his Alice last week: Australian Mia Wasikowska, recently of In Treatment.) Alrighty then…but after Wonka, Dr. Thompson, and Captain Jack, hasn’t Depp already thoroughly crashed this tea party?

    Invisible Spinning Globes.

    If they hold an awards ceremony in the middle of the ‘Wood and there’s no around to hear it, does it make a sound? Why, yes, yes, it does. And the Golden Globe winners are

  • Best Drama: Atonement. Uh, no. My top drama would’ve been No Country for Old Men.
  • Best Com/Mus: Sweeney Todd. Didn’t see it. Not even a nod for I’m Not There?
  • Best Foreign: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Solid, and easy choice.
  • Best Actor [Drama]: Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood. Hmm, yeah, ok. Better than giving TWBB Best Drama.
  • Best Actor [Com/Mus]: Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd. Didn’t see it.
  • Best Actress [Drama]: Julie Christie, Away from Her. Didn’t see it either, but Christie is definitely this year’s “Helen Mirren”-style lock for an Oscar.
  • Best Actress [Com/Mus]: Marion Cotillard, La Vie En Rose. Didn’t see it. Since she’s a bit of an unknown, it’s too bad she missed out on giving a speech.
  • Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men. Great choice, and no real surprise.
  • Best Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There. That works, although Gone Baby Gone‘s Amy Ryan would’ve worked too. At least INT won something.
  • Best Animated Film: Ratatouile. Yeah, ok. Didn’t see Persepolis, and it wasn’t even nominated.
  • Best Screenplay: Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men. Usually given to the movie that was “clever” more than “good” — I’m surprised this didn’t go to Juno.
  • Best Score: Dario Marinelli, Atonement. Also a good, easy choice. It was the most memorable score of 2007.
  • Best TV Show: Mad Men. Nice! And it looks like Jon Hamm won Best Actor too.

    So there you have it. In case you missed it, my own best of 2007 list is now buried deep beneath the political coverage.

  • Grave and a Haircut, to go.

    The trailer for Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sasha Baron Cohen, Alan Rickman, and Timothy Spall, is now online. Burton wants me to see a bloody musical? I dunno.