BEFORE: I forgot to mention last night that I watched "Albert Nobbs" on an Academy screener left over from 2011's campaigns. As far as I can tell, the film has not aired on premium cable yet - what's the hold-up? I mean, it's available on Amazon Video for $3.99 and on iTunes for $5.99 so I saved a couple bucks. It must still be doing well there, if it hasn't made it to cable yet - but I pay so much for cable each month that I don't think I'm doing anything wrong by watching a screener for free. That is to say, I will record the film when it inevitably appears on a premium channel, but sometimes that takes too long and my chain needs to be as unbroken as possible. Like I watched "Into the Wild" last year on iTunes and paid $3.99 or whatever, because it fit perfectly into my chain. It just aired on TCM yesterday, I've been scanning the listings for it for years - so of course it airs for free a year after I needed to watch it. OK, whatever.
Today I'm back on Netflix for another film that hasn't made it to cable yet, but I'm just as curious about this one, and it fits into my chain, plus I don't want to wait any longer to watch it, since it could disappear from Netflix at any moment. Disney's working on their own streaming service, so that clock is ticking. Mia Wasikowska carries over from "Albert Nobbs".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Alice in Wonderland" (Movie #1,082)
THE PLOT: Alice returns to the whimsical world of Wonderland and travels back in time to help the Mad Hatter.
AFTER: As prep work for this 2016 sequel, I went back and read both the plot summary and my review of the 2010 film "Alice in Wonderland" - my main complaint seemed to be that the film bore no resemblance to the famous Lewis Carroll work, except that it used the same characters. Why bother adapting a novel if you're not going to stay true to the story one bit? Well, the same complaint stands tonight. While Carroll did write a novel called "Through the Looking Glass", about the only similar story element between that book and this film is the fact that Alice does reach Wonderland by walking through a mirror.
(Carroll stupidly left out the name "Alice" from the title of the second book, because it turns out he knew nothing about "branding". Possibly because that wasn't a thing back then. Never fear, Disney Corp is here to put the word "Alice" in the title, right after their own corporate logo. Thankfully, as much as they wanted this film to be titled "Disney's Alice Through the Looking Glass", cooler heads over at IMDB prevailed. That way it could be alphabetized "properly", next to "Disney's Tarzan" and "Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame", so that nobody will confuse them with Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan or Victor Hugo's novel of the same name.)
The original novel by Lewis Carroll is a complicated journey, based on a chess game that one could re-enact in real life on a chessboard. It also features the famous poems "Jabberwocky", and "The Walrus and the Carpenter", the latter of which is recited by Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, the White Queen and the Red Queen (who is NOT the same character as the Queen of Hearts from the first story). But since Disney's 2010 movie mixed most of these characters into that film's story, there's really nowhere for them to go here except to make up a completely new story using the same characters. And since today's kids apparently can't handle something like a chess-based story, there are no puzzles, riddles, chess games, or poems here - just someone going on a random quest through time to try to "fix" things in a nonsense realm.
The story opens in the real world, where Alice is the captain of a sailing vessel - this is more or less where the first film left her, only this is really revisionist history, since I'm fairly sure that there were no women even allowed on British sailing vessels in the 1800's. We see Alice commanding her father's ship, the Wonder, and escaping from Chinese pirates in a manner that seems even too unbelievable to appear in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise. When she returns to port, she learns that her ex-fiancé has conned her mother out of the family's house (so far this year, the villains seem to be bankers, more often than not) and is leveraging the house against her ship, while offering her a demotion from ship's captain to clerk, but it's the chance to be the first female clerk. (Hey, it's a job, with a pension, though probably not equal pay to a male clerk.).
As in the first film, Alice's journey to Wonderland (sorry, Underland?) coincides with personal problems in her life - so, is the journey to the fantasy realm real, or just her working out solutions to problems, or trying to avoid those problems? This is unclear. But when she reaches Wonderland she learns that the Mad Hatter is even more mad than usual, so she agrees to drop everything to work on his problem. He somehow believes that his family, believed to be dead, is still alive, so Alice steals a chronosphere from Time himself, to travel back and figure out what happened to them.
Through a few jumps to key moments in Wonderland history, she learns that nearly everything's connected to something that happened between the White Queen and the Red Queen when they were children. And there's almost a message here for the kids, about how important it is to tell the truth, and forgiving people when they are truly sorry, but unfortunately this gets spoiled when we see that there really is no punishment for lying, and there are also no repercussions for people who do bad things like go on tantrums and imprison people they don't like.
I also don't understand why someone felt the need to give all of the characters proper names. The White Rabbit is now named Nivens McTwisp - who the hell cares? We all know him as the White Rabbit, why can't that be his name? Similarly, who cares if the Red Queen is named Iracebeth, the Dormouse is named Mallymkun and the March Hare is Thackery Earwicket? Why this obsessive need to re-name all of Lewis Carroll's classic characters, these more complicated names just don't add anything to the story. They all sound like names rejected from the "Harry Potter" series this way.
I do want to get to some more time-travel films this year, that's been on my agenda for a while. But "Project: Almanac" is a very difficult film to link to, and so is "The Butterfly Effect 2". There are three more time-travel films on Netflix, maybe I need to just bite the bullet, suspend my linking for a few days and knock them all out. Perhaps in March, but I need to consider this a bit more.
Also starring Johnny Depp (last seen in "Black Mass"), Helena Bonham Carter (last seen in "Cinderella"), Anne Hathaway (last seen in "Don Jon"), Sacha Baron Cohen (last seen in "The Brothers Grimsby"), Rhys Ifans (last seen in "Snowden"), Matt Lucas (last seen in "Paddington"), Lindsay Duncan (last seen in "About Time"), Leo Bill (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Geraldine James (last seen in "Rogue One"), Richard Armitage (last seen in "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"), Hattie Morahan, Ed Speleers (last seen in "Eragon"), Andrew Scott (last seen in "Victor Frankenstein"), Joanna Bobin (also last seen in "The Brothers Grimsby"), Simone Kirby, Joe Hurst, Siobhan Redmond, Frederick Warder, Tom Godwin, Eve Hedderwick Turner, Amelia Crouch, Leilah de Meza, with the voices of Alan Rickman (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Stephen Fry (last heard in "A Liar's Autobiography"), Michael Sheen (last seen in "Passengers"), Timothy Spall (also last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Paul Whitehouse, Barbara Windsor, Matt Vogel, Wally Wingert (last seen in "Starring Adam West"), Meera Syal.
RATING: 5 out of 10 pocket watches
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