Alice in a 3D Spectacle

Yesterday I saw Tim Burton's new Alice in Wonderland. I saw it in 3D, which is definitely the way to see it, as the key to enjoying the film is to let yourself get caught up in Burton's spectacular visual imagery.

The story is a pretty standard Hollywood female-empowerment adventure about adult Alice's return to Wonderland (more properly called "Underland," in one of the little plot points that are potentially confusing without adding any meaning), but just like Avatar, the plot is just there string together the moments of visual wizardry that are the real meat of the film. The use of computer animation to make Alice shrink and grow is the best of the visual effects, and Helena Bonham Carter's performance as the Red Queen is well-complimented by the visual of her giant, heart-shaped head perching on her tiny body.

The movie only uses Lewis Carroll's work as a jumping-off point, so an essential part of enjoying it is being willing to accept the ransacking of classic literature. Of course, that's pretty much essential for watching anything with literary origins that comes out of Hollywood, so if you enjoy Tim Burton's style of film-making then you'll find something to like (though probably not love) in Alice. It's the sort of movie in which amazing visuals are held back by flawed writing, leaving the final product pretty good but not great.

At long last: an official "Where the Wild Things Are" trailer!

Of all the movies that have come out in the last few years or are currently in the works, this is the one I am most excited about. This is so lovely that it manages to simultaneously give me chills and make me feel warm inside.

May we all bless one another

This evening I rewatched one of my favorite films of the last few years. Joyeux Noël is a fictionalized account of the WWI Christmas Truce on the western front in 1914, and it is a very touching film. Sometimes we all need to be reminded that whatever differences we may have, even the ones that lead to anger, are very small in comparison to all that we have in common as human beings.

Learning from movies

This afternoon I went to see WALL-E, and I was quite pleased that it managed to live up to the elevated expectations that I had as result of all the good reviews and positive word of mouth. To make a movie about a trash robot, and to do it without any dialogue for 90% of the movie is an unimaginably bold move for a Hollywood film of any sort, but Pixar has proven their brilliance once again by crafting a touching and thoughtful film that is a stellar example craftsmanship in cinema.

It's not giving anything away to say that it has a surprisingly subversive message about how our wasteful consumer culture is destroying both the planet and the human race. The movie makes its point seamlessly, without any blunt didacticism, and it's hard to imagine a more compelling way to communicate concepts of conservation and good stewardship of the Earth. Unfortunately, the power of the film's impact on me made it that much more depressing to see that it did not penetrate the minds of my fellow movie patrons, who engaged in the typical movie theater behavior of leaving all of their scattered trash behind for someone else to clean up. If a film like WALL-E couldn't get people to change their behavior, it leaves me with little hope that we'll be able to achieve a happy ending of our own.

Hi, I'm an ad campaign... And I'm a parody.

I find the Mac/PC ads (and television ads in general) pretty annoying, which means that I'm generally not too receptive to the massive number of parodies of them, but as someone who enjoys comics and has followed the buzz for the two big comic-book films that are coming out this summer, this one actually tickled my fancy:

Subverting conventions

A few weeks ago I went to see the film Run Fat Boy Run, and although it wasn't bad, I left the theater feeling disappointed. Simon Pegg had won me over with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and I went into this one expecting to see it do for the inspirational sports movie what the other two had done for zombie gore-fests and buddy cop action flicks. Unfortunately, what I discovered is that as stale as the cliches of the sports movie genre have grown, it has yet to reach the point where a film could get away with reversing them. Just think what would happen if you tried to make a sports movie in which the hero triumphs by quiting in the face of adversity. Perhaps someday it will happen, but this film didn't even try.

Online Videos

I don't watch TV, so I haven't been particularly bother by the foolishness of the writers' strike, but one of the great disappointments for me has been the fact that the vast majority of the online videos supporting the strike have turned out to be quite boring. I watch probably more online videos than is healthy, which meant I was all over Tom Cruise's "Yes, I really am crazy" Scientology video. To my great pleasure, they have been combined with hilarious results:

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I also recently came across the most entertaining video game reviewer ever. Probably not the first choice in terms of deciding which game to buy, but the hilarity more than makes up for his idiosyncratic system of evaluation.

The Soul of Wit

I just got back from watching Juno, which a fine example of a well-written comedy. Lots of comedies are entertaining by virtue of the comedic talents of the performers, and the writing serves merely as a platform for them to express those talents (a good example would be Anchorman). There's nothing wrong with that sort of comedy, but it's not the writing that makes it good.

Juno had both witty one-liners and longer bits of clever humor, but it also had a coherent emotionally-potent story that did not rely on typical Hollywood manipulation to power its more touching moments. It reminded me in some ways of the stage version of Pride and Prejudice that I saw recently, but the big flaw in that show was that they tried so hard to work in so much of the novel's clever language. It was a very up and down show because the story's core is the love story, but it gave the witty lines so much weight that the romance lacked heft. Juno succeeded by building around the comedy, which allowed the romance to flourish in a secondary position.