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Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

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I seem to recall it being decently entertaining, and I even saw it in a theater with a friend. I loved the Cheshire cat, and the dance scene is at least a bit amusing, referencing Jabberwocky.

I've also read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

I can only conclude I'm perhaps an anomaly.

Besides the Cheshire cat and the dance, the most memorable things from the movie for me are probably:

As an aside, doing the research for this post led me to discover that Anne Hathaway is returning as the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, scheduled for 2016. I didn't even realize they were planning to do that book too. I'll give it a watch at least!
 
Alphahawk said:
You probably should watch more movies then.
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Eh, I think I'll pass on deliberately choosing to watch more awful movies, unless they're the type that are so bad they're good. Those types of movies can often be the more hilarious movies I've seen. This movie didn't even manage to fall into that realm, and instead was bizarre and embarrassing to watch.
 
sn00zer said:
Gorgeous creature design...not so great anything else
cat.jpg
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I agree with you. Cheshire Cat's design is the only thing worthy to mention from this movie.
 
Seemed to introduce characters just to immediately injure them. Like, remember your childhood? POW! Way overdone.

Also would've been better with Lindsay Lohan in the lead role like she campaigned for. If nothing else but for the camp factor.
 
Data West said:
It suffers from the same problem that Burton's Wonka and various other Alice re-imaginings do. You do not need to 'weird up' Alice In Wonderland. The novel is already as weird as it needs to be, but everyone who gets a hold of the world feels that they just need to make it a little more weirder. That they need to overload the dreaminess so much that the only thing it's missing is the Saved By The Bell pink dream framing.

It comes off as trying too hard to be a spectacle, trying too hard to stand out when a more tame approach on an outlandish property will always translate better and make the abstract parts stand out far more. It's a problem Burton has suffered with for a very, very long time.
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Well said.

Also, obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFzLRP8e4vE
 
Visually, it's great. Mia was a decent Alice. But everything else was eh. Alice 2 is gonna be intresting considering Burton isn't directing.
 
The Disney animated version is at least 3.75 million times better. Burton's effort was fucking dreadful.
 
It's been a long time since I saw it, but I remember paying the tickets for me and my sister and not regretting it, so I guess that's something. At least it didn't put me to sleep, unlike Dark Shadows or Frankenweenie.
 
I can distinctly remember two instances of actually watching an inflight movie, this one and that Katy Perry movie. I can say with complete certainty that I enjoyed the Katy Perry movie more than this crap.
 
I forgot almost everything about it. Some designs were pretty good, I guess? It's certainly one of Burton's bad movies.
 
Corpse Bride, Sweeney Todd and Frankenweenie have all happened since Big Fish. They're not bad and some, if not all, are better than Big Fish.

Never saw Alice. Saw Charlie and figured it would be just as bad.
 
Chopper said:
Nowhere near as good as it should have been. Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The idea of Burton doing these films is much more exciting than the actual result.
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Exactly this.

It sounds like the kind of movie that would be wonderful when directed by Burton. Instead, he sucked away all of the whimsy, charm and mathematical depth, and replaced it with a shitty generic action-adventure story, a hollow shell of the original work.
 
Turning the kooky weirdness of Wonderland into an epic quest is just weird. I haven't read much of the original material, but I mean look at Disney's animated Alice film; her journey is really just a weird little circumstantial trip through a land she doesn't fully understand, she's not the chosen one or anything.

It's exactly the problem I have with Jackson's Hobbit films.
 
The worst part is how it tries to put a generic traditional Hollywood three act 'hero' arc into a story that is designed at its core to be nonsense and clever wordplay. It hacks together the most famous parts of the two Alice books, and strings them up trying to turn it into a cheesy fantasy Braveheart.

Same thing with Wonka and Planet of the Apes. Haven't seen any since Wonka because it was such a turd.

For all his hype about being 'weird' it's just tired garish late 90s window dressing. He's as generic as they come when it gets down to it.

And how the hell will they do the Looking Glass 'sequel' when all the Looking Glass material was shoved into the last movie?
 
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