A Brilliant Conflict

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

If one looks at this version of Alice in Wonderland - a star studded 3 hour mini series or a cut down 2 hour standalone movie - in isolation from Lewis Carroll's book(s), then one must come to the conclusion that it is an excellent piece of work - imaginative, beautifully designed, showcasing some stunning effects work, and populated with very good performances.But it is almost impossible to look at an adaptation of Carroll's work without comparing it to the source material and, notwithstanding the strengths of the adaptation, one's attention is always drawn to the differences. And those differences (which, the makers will surely argue, are there because a literary work cannot be adapted literally for the screen) always - for Alice, always - are for the worse. The additions to the story - poor. The non-Carroll dialogue - poor. The inconsistent visualisation of characters - disconcerting and varying between good and poor.Tina Majorino's Alice is a long way from my personal envisaged Alice, but is nonetheless very good. Her English accent is excellent.

This may be one of the great unknown or under-appreciated films. I am a big fan of Lewis Carrol's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There", and for near perfect translation of the former, this is the only live-action film to compete with Disney's "Alice in Wonderland" and to do so more faithfully to the book without glaring omissions and amalgamations between the two works. The cast is marvelous featuring Tina Majorino as the titular character (you may know her most famously from Napoleon Dynamite) with perhaps the film's best performance from a perfect Mad Hatter played by Martin Short. The special effects are impressive for a 1999 TV movie and the imaginative sets and costumes are clearly inspired by the original Sir John Tenniel sketches, going as far as including the heads-to-large-for-their-bodies proportions. I would be remiss to neglect mentioning the astounding work of Jim Henson's Puppet Studio to masterfully bring Carrol's creatures to life, from the White Rabbit to the Gryphon. I give a ten without a hint of hyperbole, for as far as a live action film adaption of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland goes, I eagerly await Tim Burton's attempt to see if this can be topped.

When I was 17, even though I was already reading Harrold Robbins, William Burroughs, Iceberg Slim, I also had developed a fascination for the Alice books. Couldn't quite put my finger on it. Course, when I turned 24, I discovered a take on Lewis Carroll that I would have never guessed in a million years, something that justified my re-reading the books with this new knowledge. It was mostly the revelations of his metaphores. The garden Alice was trying to get into, the unexplained growing up and growing down, the idea of the oppressors being "nothing but a pack of cards"...I won't mention what they represent as I am under a restrictive mandate to maintain the secret but it definitely changes the whole picture.This movie followed the book to a certain extent...I'm not crazy about the blending of both stories into one, to tell you the truth. It loses it's thematic thread. That is, one story is essentially about a card game, the other is about a chess game. Who plays chess and poker at the same time? Many of the scenes were surprisingly hilarious. Robbie Coltrane and George Wendt's part as Tweedledee and Tweedledum was a standout. Martin Short literally SHONE in his big courtroom scene. And the scene where Alice comes across the Duchess and her cook for the first time was excellent.However, what was particularly odd was that on the DVD, there were short bios for the main actors...and they said NOTHING about Tina being in Napolean Dynamite, they didn't breathe a WORD about Robbie Coltrane's recurring role in the Harry Potter movies...was this some kind of weird English idiosyncrasy? Then I noticed that this movie was made in 1999, way before those movies I mentioned were ever done. Still, the DVD was made AFTER them, right? You'd think they'd give a backstory.

I love the two Alice books and quite often I find myself looking through the pages, reading some of my favorite parts.I think for a TV_version, this film works quite well, it is a treat to watch all those celebrities becoming some of the most famous characters in literature. Strangely though, my favorite sequence is the one with Peter Ustinov and Pete Postlethwaite as the Walrus and the Carpenter, probably the only scene in the movie that does not contain CGI.So, why only six stars? As in most versions, the makers of the movie have mixed all kinds of elements from "Alice in Wonderland" with "Through the looking glass" (Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, The Walrus and the Carpenter, The White Knight). It may work, if you really look at the books just as a collection of episodes, but whenever this is done, the makers miss the point of the books. Alice in "Through the looking glass" is quite different from Alice in "Alice in wonderland" and also, there is a completely different composition to the latter book which is explained in the preface and which finds no acknowledgment whatsoever here. I think the makers of this movie again don't understand the books at all and though I enjoy watching these scenes independently from each other, the whole leaves me unsatisfied.I have gotten used to mixing the Alice stories, Walt Disney has done the same thing and others as well. But what bothers me most about this film it that it turns the whole thing into a story of initiation. Come on.... Alice does not dare to perform a song in front of her parent's guest but after walking through Wonderland she finally does? This is just plain wrong and completely in contrast to the meaning of the books. Why would you want do make sense out of nonsense? The books are meant to portray Victorian stereotypes, make fun of language etc, but not to enrich a child to become more independent and self-assured. Moreover, it does not make sense at all, why Alice should finally be able to sing in front of the others.All in all, this movie has fine performances and puppets and decent (considering the time it was made and it being made for TV) CGI, is nice to look at but in the end only mediocre TV-entertainment.