Best part of the movie.

If I had to review Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland in one word, I would chose the word: boring. With a few more words in the review I could say that it was boring, with a side of boring for dipping. (I saw it in 2D, but I don’t think all of the 3D in the world would have made it any better.)

I consider myself a Tim Burton fan, and I think I was one of the few to actually enjoy Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There have been very few misses when it comes to my enjoyment of his films. Alice was a definite miss.

I wasn’t sure what to expect by way of the plot, but it was not really a reinterpretation of the classic story as I had hoped it would be. It was more like some sort of strange sequel or alternate reality.

I found myself unable to care about any of the characters. Every performance was lackluster. Depp definitely captured the “mad” in Mad Hatter, but there were times when I couldn’t understand a damn thing he was saying. There is a line between nonsense words and mumbling unintelligibly.

The White Queen (Hathaway) was supposed to be very light and ethereal, but she just came across as trying too hard. Carter’s performance as The Red Queen didn’t feel like anything new or fresh. Alice (Wasikowska) didn’t really strike me one way or another. The performance of Crispin Glover as Stayne was surprisingly better than most of the cast. At least he was effectively creepy.

The effects in the film were okay, but I found them more distracting than anything. The one stand out piece was the Cheshire Cat. He was beautifully rendered, and the character interpretation was overall marvelous. (Stephen Fry was the perfect voice actor for it.) I could have done with a lot more of him in the movie.

The ending of the film felt flat and uninspired. I think we were supposed to feel as if the character of Alice had grown because of her experiences, but the character development was so weak that there was never that sense of real life-changing accomplishment.

Even though the plot was not very true to the books, some of the elements and pacing felt very close. However, where the books draw you into the nonsense the movie pushes away.

I really don’t have much else to say. There was a point somewhere during the movie where I started spacing out from boredom in favour of visiting my own Wonderland. It was sadly more interesting than the one flickering across the screen.

Final Score: 2 out of 5.

This guy was the Phantom?

Sometimes it’s refreshing to visit our childhoods. Last night I feel like I got to travel back in time a little bit with the help of my old friend Condorman.

Condorman is a movie about an awkward comic book artist (Michael Crawford) who gets a chance to live out a comic book fantasy. It turns out his friend in the CIA needs a civilian to deliver some papers to the Russians, and wouldn’t you know who he picks to help out. Naturally things go awry and our unlikely artist-hero is sent on the adventure of a lifetime.

This movie had everything I could want as a kid. Espionage, comic-book action, explosions, a villain with one silver eye, crazy gadgets, “exotic” locations, and a guy dressed up like a condor. It doesn’t get much more awesome than that.

Watching the movie now, I don’t know if I would have had the same love for it if I hadn’t grown up with it. It would still be fun and entertaining, but in a different way. The plot is admittedly predictable, many of things in it don’t really make a lot of sense, and the scripting is very cheesy in places. Yet, upon re-watching it, I think that some of the cheesiness and predictability was intentional. Our hero is living out the Condorman story, so it only makes sense that it follow some of the same conventions of a comic book. Or maybe I’m trying to justify the silliness.

Regardless of any imperfections this movie may have, it left a big impact on me as a child. So much so that I was actively seeking a copy. I finally found a “decently” priced new copy from a seller on Amazon. I paid the lowest available price which was around $30, and sounded a lot better than the $50+ I was used to seeing. (Of course, knowing my luck, Disney will suddenly decide to re-release this and I’ll see it at Target for $15.)

As a final note, this was the movie that made it hard for me to believe that Michael Crawford could ever be the Phantom of the Opera. I’d listened to the soundtrack several times before anyone told me who was singing. When my mum finally broke the news to me I could only look at her slack-jawed and say “That’s Condorman singing?!”.