Tag: movie

FROM Todd McCarthy Daily Variety Entertainment: A Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures release of a Walt Disney Pictures presentation of a Roth Films/Zanuck Co. production. Produced by Richard D. Zanuck, Suzanne Todd, Jennifer Todd, Joe Roth. Executive producers, Peter Tobyansen, Chris Lebenzon. Co-producers, Katterli Frauenfelder, Tom Pertzman. Directed by Tim Burton. Screenplay, Linda Woolverton, based on the books "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" by Lewis Carroll. Mad Hatter - Johnny Depp Alice - Mia Wasikowska Red Queen - Helena Bonham Carter White Queen - Anne Hathaway Stayne -- Knave of Hearts - Crispin Glover Tweedledee/Tweedledum - Matt Lucas Helen Kingsleigh - Lindsay Duncan Lady Ascot - Geraldine James Lord Ascot - Tim Pigott-Smith Charles Kingsleigh - Martin Csokas Hamish - Leo Bill Aunt Imogene - Frances de la Tour Margaret Kingsleigh - Jemma Powell Lowell - John Hopkins

Voices: Absolem, the Blue Caterpillar - Alan Rickman Cheshire Cat - Stephen Fry White Rabbit - Michael Sheen Bayard - Timothy Spall Dormouse - Barbara Windsor Jabberwocky - Christopher Lee Dodo Bird - Michael Gough Executioner - Jim Carter Tall Tower Faces - Imelda Staunton March Hare - Paul Whitehouse

"You've lost your muchness," Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter remarks to his newly shrunken teenage friend, and much the same could be said of Tim Burton in the wake of his encounter with a Victorian-era heroine of imaginative powers even wilder than his own. Quite like what one would expect from such a match of filmmaker and material and also something less, this "Alice in Wonderland" has its moments of delight, humor and bedazzlement. But it also becomes more ordinary as it goes along, building to a generic battle climax similar to any number of others in CGI-heavy movies of the past few years. A humongous Disney promo effort and inevitable curiosity about the first post-"Avatar" 3D extravaganza will pull wondrous early B.O. numbers, although long-term forecast could become clouded by the imminent arrival of further high-profile kid-friendly features.

It all seemed like such a natural fit -- Burton and Lewis Carroll, Depp as the key component in fiction's most eccentric tea party, and 3D put at the service of a story offering unlimited visual possibilities. Not that it's gone all wrong; not entirely. But for all its clever design, beguiling creatures and witty actors, the picture feels far more conventional than it should; it's a Disney film illustrated by Burton, rather than a Burton film that happens to be released by Disney. Although it draws heavily upon both Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (published in 1865) and "Through the Looking Glass" (1871), the script by Linda Woolverton (a Disney standard-bearer with a major hand in "Beauty and the Beast," "The Lion King" and "Mulan") crucially skews the material by advancing the leading lady's age from pre-pubescence to 19. The main upshot of the change is that this trip to Underland, as it's referred to here, becomes Alice's second, not first. The not-inconsiderable benefit is that enables Alice to be played by Mia Wasikowska, an actress of willowy, Gwyneth Paltrowesque beauty but, more important here, of a pale but powerful resolve that confers upon the picture any gravity it may possess. After an over-the-rooftops cinematic entry into London that could as easily have alighted at the residence of Sweeney Todd (or, for that matter, Ebenezer Scrooge), a delirious little Alice awakens from yet another nightmare to ask her father, "Do you think I've gone 'round the bend?" To which he offers the encouraging, tone-setting reply, "All the best people are." Thirteen years later, in an amusing framing story invented by Woolverton, a pale, sulky Alice is put up for an arranged marriage by her widowed mother (the enchantingly mordant Lindsay Duncan) with the twitty son of an aristocratic family. The lavish would-be engagement party quickly and appealingly establishes Alice as an impudent contrarian with a mind of her own; when, in front of hundreds of elegant guests, she is meant to accept the fatuous lad's proposal, she cries out, "I think I need a moment!" and promptly follows a white rabbit down a hole. Just as, at such a transformative interlude, "The Wizard of Oz" switched from black-and-white to color, this should have marked the point when "Please Put on 3D Glasses!" flashed onscreen and everything took on an all-consuming, eye-popping look (the 3D in the garden party sequence is actually banal, even poorly judged). In fact, Alice enters a verdant, overgrown world that undeniably resembles "Avatar's" Pandora and encounters at least one creature, a skeptical caterpillar, that actually is blue. As things get "curiouser and curiouser," she also meets the round, argumentative twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum; the vaporous and grinning Cheshire Cat; the manic March Hare; Depp's Mad Hatter, with saucer eyes, Bozo-like red hair and gap teeth that bring Madonna to mind; and, inevitably, the fearsome Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), who spares Alice from her favorite edict -- "Off with their heads!" -- because she, like all the others, needs to know if this is "the" Alice who visited so many years before.