Disconnected thoughts on Alice in Wonderland:
1. Alice and Looking Glass are iconic books for me, deeply embedded in my imagination; Tim Burton is, of course, Tim Burton. The most immediately striking thing about this film is that it's just what one might expect a latter-day Burton Alice to be like.
2. Visually spectacular, of course, and I was totally fine with the reframing device. To me, though, the film suffered from its structuring around Alice's progression towards a climactic confrontation with the fearsome Jabberwocky - the books have an essentially a-narratival (that word is ugly no matter how I punctuate it) character which is integral to their effect, and something vital is lost in the film's focus on what is, let's face it, a fairly conventional story arc.
3. For some reason I found Anne Hathaway's White Queen very appealing. I suspect that this doesn't reflect well on me, though I can't quite say why.
4. That said, Alan Rickman pretty much steals the show as the voice of the Caterpillar. (Stephen Fry is also pretty great as the Cheshire Cat.)
5. Crispin Glover, by contrast, makes little impression. Goddamnit, he's almost normal in this movie! And Johnny Depp, while as watchable as always, seems in some measure to be reprising his role as Willy Wonka. Alice herself (Mia Wasikowska) holds her own, though.
6. A S Byatt's piece about the books in the Guardian is too long but quite charming in the way that it shows her totally geeking out about a pair of books that she obviously loves, and scattered with a fair number of genuine insights into what it is that makes Carroll's books so unique and great.
