Alice in Wonderland

Saw Alice in Wonderland last night. Conclusion: meh. It wasn't bad. I fondly recall both the Disney cartoon version and the book from when I was a wee one, so trying to make my mental picture of it change is kind of questionable.

Visually, obviously, there's huge, huge potential. And it was nice and interesting to look at, but again: meh. I think The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus actually did more interesting things visually. The costuming was great, though, and I did like what they did with both the Red Queen and the Hatter.

I'm beginning to think that, unexpectedly, Johnny Depp playing a crazy person will never get old, because he's so good at it. Similarly, no one does evil crazy quite like Helena Bonham Carter. I'm a bit mixed about Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar - he has such a distinctive voice that I'm not sure he's well-suited to voice work at this point in his career.

The Chesire Cat was well done, I thought: Stephen Fry and the visual team did a good job of putting an original spin on him but also keeping his "I'm only doing this because it amuses me" attitude. I'm not sure where exactly the bloodhound came from but he was adorable and I wanted to rub his belly.

All together, I think it's most charitably seen as an homage to Carroll's works, not as a retelling of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (because it's not). I don't think it's a particularly bad movie - the pacing was okay, enough characters were interesting enough, it was pretty enough - but it's not particularly good, either.

The best thing about it, actually, was that it's showing both in 3D and 2D here. I can't see movies in 3D, so we went and saw it in 2D. When we walked in, there was a line crossing the entire lobby of people waiting to get into the 3D showing - it was close to sold out it not entirely - whereas the 2D theater was less than half-full and we walked right in. So that was nice; for once I was glad for my visual processing failures.