Ip 2 and and Alice

I finished up watching two more movies:  Ip Man 2 and Alice in Wonderland.  Ip Man 2 was uneventful.  Don’t get me wrong, it was awesome.  It was like the first one.  Still amazing fights, and seeing Samo Hung was very amusing.  If you liked the first one, you’ll like this.
Alice in Wonderland, on the other hand, was a lot more notable.  But, there are really two ways of looking at this movie:  Looking at it as its own work of art, or as part of the greater Alice In Wonderland world.  As a stand alone film, it’s a little bleh.  Not terrible, but not particularly interesting.  It is a story of very simplistic hero’s journey.  The characters are kind of weird, the art is colorful, but it is completely by the book.  It’s just completely forgettable.
As a fan of Alice in Wonderland, it’s somewhat painful film.  From my point of view, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass were beautiful pieces of nonsense.  There were no heroes, no villains, just a bunch of colorful characters interacting with each other.  In the new Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter is a hero… They took this wonderful insane character, and made him dull and rather sane.  All of his actions make sense, and are always to make the world a better place.  But they didn’t just make the character dull, they tried to make the entire world dull.
My favorite poem is the Jabberwocky, with my favorite line ‘O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”‘  To me, this line speaks to the whole spirit of Alice: Most of the words aren’t words, but they flow so well together they make perfect sense to me.  Maybe they make different sense to you, but it doesn’t matter.  In the new movie, they decided to define frabjous… really?
What did they do wrong?  They tried to simplify Alice in Wonderland into a linear, simple plot.  I think it should have been a kid’s version of Naked Lunch, or Fear and Loathing Las Vegas… Make Alice wander around in an insane world where things don’t make sense.  How awesome would it be if Depp played Mad Hatter like a G-rated Hunter S. Thompson?  It would have been epic.  You listening Mr. Gilliam?
  1. Ip Man
  2. Raging Phoenix
  3. Ip Man 2
  4. Let the Right One In
  5. Gamer
  6. Severance
  7. Alice in Wonderland
  8. Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
  9. Croupier
  10. Gene Generation
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