Search found 1 match: Mia Wasikowska

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by AFlickering
Fri Dec 28, 2012 11:43 pm
Forum: Full Reviews
Topic: alice in wonderland (tim burton)
Replies: 0
Views: 721

alice in wonderland (tim burton)

how could the collective moviegoing public not roll its weary eyes at the news of johnny depp playing the fucking mad hatter in a tim burton remake of alice in wonderland--can any one of you think of something more irritatingly telegraphed and redundant than that? and of course, this is ultimately just another johnny depp vehicle even when he's not present on the screen, taking on the tone of his flamboyant, foppish eccentricity wherever it goes, willing to sacrifice emotion for the sake of spectacle and ceraaaaaazy shenanigans. meanwhile i'm left desiring a vehicle for arguably the most talented star of HBO's supremely-acted in treatment mia wasikowska, whose alice is an unfortunately blank canvas for these deppisms and deppites to smear across, save a kind of generalised feminist thrust surrounding alice's decision to escape an arranged marriage to a pompous ass and discover what she truly desires. alice insists that this wonderland is "all her dream", an individualist proclamation that would carry more weight if "underland" exhibited any concrete relation to the pressures and burdens that weigh upon her life in the real world.

i've never been especially convinced by burton's so-called outsider perspective, believing his insanity to be a conscious affectation of the crowdpleasing sort (too often he's the loud guy at a party charming everybody with his colorful array of idiosyncracies and gleefully nonsensical riddles, while the true weirdos keep themselves to themselves in a dark corner), but at least he tends to provide a distinctive stamp on his films. not always so with this failed remake-cum-sequel, which not only struggles to cement burton's presumably self-ordained position as a modern day lewis carroll, perfectly illustrating the chasm between burton insane and insane insane, but for long stretches fails even to achieve burton insane, settling particularly during action set-pieces into amorphous, dunderheaded narnia megabudget-fantasy territory.