MOVIES LIKE ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS 1998 MOVIE
The scads of additional movie subplots deaden the Cheshire Cat, the Dormouse (or “Mallykum”), and the White Rabbit (or “McTwisp”). She rarely revels in the beauty and magic of sheer possibility, the one quality all readers can savor in Carroll’s nonsense epics, whether or not they understand the comic multitudes of allusions and puns. She keeps learning therapeutic bromides and fighting a junior-feminist good fight. Such didacticism dampens Carroll’s imagination and puts a lid on Alice’s personality. Playing with Time teaches her yet another lesson: you can’t alter the past, but you can learn from it. She attempts to prevent the catastrophe that both turns the Red Queen wicked and ultimately triggers the Hatter’s near terminal depression. She uses a gyroscope-like device that stabilizes Time’s Great Clock-the Chronosphere-as a time machine. Alice Through the Looking Glass even contains a chronology-fracturing narrative in which she plays tag with the personification of Time (Sacha Baron Cohen). Everyone, including Alice, learns the importance of love, forgiveness, and family.Īs that bare-bone précis indicates, the problem with these Alice movies is not a lack of plot, but a surfeit of it. As Alice plays psychological detective, she uncovers primal scenes between the Hatter and his father and between the Red and White Queen when they were little sisters. After a tireless search, he has given up trying to find them. The Hatter has discovered evidence that his parents and siblings, thought to have perished when the Jabberwocky incinerated a fairground, are alive. The butterfly is the new incarnation of Absolem, the previous film’s blue caterpillar, voiced by the late Alan Rickman, and he has summoned her back to find out why the Hatter has stopped throwing mad tea parties and lost his joie de vivre. When her mother naturally chooses the house, Alice tells her: “The last thing I want in life is to end up like you.” Then she follows a blue butterfly through a looking glass and into Underland once again. While Alice was on a lengthy voyage to open up new trade routes to China, he laid down an ultimatum to her debt-ridden mother (Lindsay Duncan): sign away either the Wonder or your house. But as Alice Through the Looking Glass continues, we learn that her dad’s business partner has died, too, and her spurned suitor (the partner’s son) has taken over the business. Back aboveground, she declares that she wants a place in her late father’s trading company, not a stately mansion. In Burton’s “Underland” (the new name is a particularly lame twist), she proves her mettle and moral agency by beheading the fearsome Jabberwocky, thus saving the loony, lovable creatures of the ethereal White Queen (Anne Hathaway), including the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), from the clutches of the comically rapacious Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). In the first film, she follows the White Rabbit down the hole after she spurns a marriage offer to an obnoxious young nobleman. These movies transform the heroine from a humorous, curious, changeable, often argumentative 7-year-old into a grownup action heroine. I’d missed Burton’s Alice movie, so when the lights went down for Bobin’s, and Mia Wasikowska’s Alice strutted on screen as the skipper of the Wonder, escaping a trio of Malayan pirate junks by steering her Tall Ship between shoals, I thought for sure it was a dream sequence. Now comes Alice Through the Looking Glass, produced by Burton, directed by James Bobin (the vaudevillian maestro of the last two Muppet movies, off his game), and once again written by Linda Woolverton, whose talents meshed better with the fairy-tale world of Charles Perrault in Beauty and the Beast a quarter-century ago than they do with Lewis Carroll’s genius silliness. Since most people saw it as a flesh-and-blood iteration of an old-school Disney cartoon, Disney executives thought they’d found a potent new box-office formula: rejiggering cartoon features or analog Hollywood classics into CGI extravaganzas with star-laden casts and pasted-on subplots filled with “empowerment” and “redemption.” Burton’s Alice in Wonderland paved the way for (among others) Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful and Robert Stromberg’s Maleficent. (Make that semi-live: there were a lot of semi-computerized bodies and faces.) The result was a travesty of Lewis Carroll-Burton said he’d never connected with the book-and an emotionally leaden super-production, but it also was a smash.
Burton commercially rehabilitated a venerable title by glutting it with special effects, inserting a new story to add rooting interest and “heart,” and doing it in live action rather than animation. Alice Through the Looking Glass is the misbegotten sequel to a blockbuster that became one of the most influential movies of the decade: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (10).
0 kommentar(er)
