Malice in silly glasses

[perlmonger]

ramtops and I skived off to the cinema on Friday to see Alice.

The 3D is worth seeing; it's (mostly) well done and non-obstrusive, but overall the film was disappointing: it tried too hard with the Alice backreferences and the latter stages, as Mac wrote, were a poorly conceived mess. Peter Jackson has a lot to answer for.

I do like that the lead character is a woman, that she has agency, and isn't rescued by a man (unless you count the Cheshire Cat being voiced by Stephen Fry :) but the toggling of Alice being trapped by expectations and historical inevitability, and rebelling against and confounding the same - this flipover happens at least five times through the movie - left me wondering if Burton's intention was really just to exhibit that tension. If so, it didn't really work. Bechdel fail, but that's really only because of the paucity of human characters, male or female (though I at least read all the anthropomorphised animal characters as male: is that me, Carroll, Burton, or a combination of all three?)

Oh, and the White Queen needed a good slapping; Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen may have been psycho, but if I had to choose between the two, I know which way I'd jump, genocide of small furry creatures notwithstanding.