Alice in Wonderland (2010)
Tim Burton
Impression published on Friday, 2010-04-16 | Film | 1 stars
Crispin Glover has always been great, but, as it turns out, Helena Bonham Carter is an incredible character actor as well. She steals hell of scenes in this movie.
Neither of Glover nor Carter could save this production, however, from the formidable suckage caused by a.) Johnny Depp's inclusion in the cast, b.) Tim Burton helming the thing into the rocks at every turn and c.) a script that stupidly mashes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass into a frequently cringe-inducing Harry Potter clone.
Johnny Depp, in the most charitable estimation, has been persona non grata since Chocolat (at least). Depp, who has devolved into the worst kind of one trick celebrity pony, has spent the last 10 years ruining movies by basically showing up, rolling his head around on his shoulders (bemused head cocking counts) and squinting his eyes for a second before jerkily shouting his lines in an ecstatic, sententious voce piena like a deaf Vaudevillian and then suddenly falling to a whisper for a few significant syllables before starting up again. He does the same thing in Burton's Alice.
It is as annoying as it ever was.
And, speaking of Burton and unwelcome recapitulations of stuff that no one liked the first time around, I am personally shocked and confused that no one seems to be petitioning him to stop directing movies. Tim Burton is a production designer. A really, really good production designer. He ought to be designing more productions, however, because he is not a director. When Tim Burton directs movies, they end up being treacly, poorly-paced groaners just like this one. Or Corpse Bride. Or Big Fish. Or Planet of the Apes.
But, in his defense, the groaning isn't all Burton's fault. If you remember Lewis Carroll at all from (pre-)adolescence and you've logged enough hours in the stacks to find the contemporary popularity of JK Rowling's brand of embarrassingly un-researched and poorly-arranged plagiarism intellectually insulting, I promise you that you that this piece of trash will twist your guts with the same feelings of rage and exasperation. From the eye-roll-inducing, one dimensional childishness of the 19th century garden party that opens the film to Alice's final sword duel with the Jabberwock (WTF?) and the Mad Hatter breakdance that accompanies it, the sword-in-the-stone narrative into which Linda Woolverton (screenplay author) et al. have shoehorned assorted details from Carroll never stops being patronizing and never starts sounding like anything other than a Mad Libs hastily filled-in by someone who does most of her reading on the recumbent elliptical.
This movie was definitely in 3D, however. And I hadn't seen one those before.
So that ended up being kind of awesome.
