OwenAllaway Reviews

Alice in Wonderland (I) (2010)

Wonderful, but only a visual masterpiece.

[8/10 · 26 February 2010]

Disney presents Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

STARRING

Johnny Depp... as Willy Wonka, if Willy Wonka hadn't been Michael Jackson

Mia Wasikowska... as a winsome young lady Alice who discovers her inner fortitude

Crispin Glover... who doesn't dance, unfortunately

Helena Bonham-Carter... with a big head

Matt Lucas... as two Matt Lucases

Stephen Fry... who does actual voice acting and doesn't just read his lines

Paul Whitehouse... who against all my expectations, still does know how to be very funny

Alan Rickman... who nearly steals the movie, just by doing what he does best

Christopher Lee... who actually steals the movie with just two lines

AND

Babs Mitchell-Windsor... playing a character her actual, real size

I can see why the they've not really wanted to call the film a proper sequel. It is that, being the story of a nineteen year old Alice who returns to barely-remembered Wonderland, but it also lifts dialogue and scenes from the original books. The story is your standard journey, emotionally, but all set in a very Tim Burton Wonderland.

Which, of course, looks astounding. Wonderland is an amazing place, often colourful, but equally often ravaged and desolate. It's a treat for the eyes, with the imagination and design shining through the technology. (It's very, very good, but strange things happen if you look somewhere the 3D doesn't want you to look and there's the odd moment of strangely stiff animation, especially when human(-like) characters are completely CGI-ed up.)

Unexpectedly, it sometimes feels like one of the Narnia films (though makes those movies look like accountant-led spreadsheets that have been printed out on toilet paper and left out in the rain), but mainly it's exactly what you'd expect from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. It's a great big treat of a movie, to be sure. Given that it's Tim Burton working with Disney, it's often gruesome and scary, but not too much. It makes you laugh at times, it pins you to the back of your seat at others, it gets you leaning forward trying to drink in every detail of the place, but it's not ever actually surprising. You know what's up, you know where things are going and you're never shocked. (Maybe once, in a quiet, horrible scene that stands out, even amongst the rest.) Even if you've not seen a single still photo or second of footage, if you know Wonderland and you know Tim Burton, you can picture it yourself effortlessly.

So much of it is still in my head this morning, but it's all visual. There's no heartache or sense of triumph that lingers after a great story. Funny as it is, there's only one line I'm ever likely to quote (a single word). I just have these amazing images left in my brain. In that sense, then, it's appropriately dream-like.

I doubt I'll go back and watch it again at the cinema, but I'm most definitely getting the Blu- Ray when it comes out next week, or whenever Disney decided they should bring it out.

If it feels like I've damned it with faint praise, I don't intend to. It's all pretty wonderful for the two hours it takes to speed past you, but I just want to make it clear - nothing that goes into your ears or your heart ever quite matches what goes into your eyes.

Rendition (2007)

The Longest Film You'll Ever See

[2/10 · 18 October 2007]

There's a good movie here. It's probably about seventy-five minutes long. Unfortunately, this cut is two hours long and moves a pace that would have a snail beeping its horn and trying to overtake in frustration. Shots go on for centuries, scenes seem endless. It's well-shot and it's about an important subject, but it just goes on and on and on and...

There are good things - there's a nice little twist at the end and Alan Arkin's good value - but everything just takes so long to happen. I'm not sure what the reason is for the languid pace. Maybe the filmmakers involved just thought that slow equals atmospheric, which it really doesn't. Maybe it's meant to reflect the fact that this isn't a one-off urgent special event, but a matter of daily routine. Maybe the studio just demanded a two hour film. Whatever the reason for the pace, it just breaks the movie.

It's a real shame, because there's a decent movie about an important subject in there somewhere.

Halloween (2007)

New Horror's Masterpiece

[9/10 · 4 October 2007]

I'm really baffled by the reception to Rob Zombie's Halloween and I feel the need to redress the balance somewhat. It's been sneaked out in the UK with no notice (a week and a half before it was eventually released it still didn't have a confirmed release date that I could find), minimal publicity and no reviews. It's got an exceptionally poor rating of 25% on rottentomatoes.com and as I type the IMDb score is a reasonably-okay-but-not-great 6.1.

The reason I'm baffled is that it's clearly a nine out of ten movie. (And it's not that I can see any reason to mark it down from a ten, a nine just feels better.) The only way I can see people not liking the movie is if they were never going to like the movie.

Okay, if you don't like boobies and/or blood, then you won't like the movie. But then your criticisms are of horror movies, not of this movie.

If you don't think movies should ever be remade then, well, maybe this will change your mind. The remake of The Wicker Man wasn't a bad movie because it was a remake of a classic movie, it was because it was a quite incredibly awful remake of a classic movie.

I'm sure I'll be pulled over by the movie thought police for saying this, but the original Halloween, though incredibly influential and important, isn't without its problems. The main one being that, despite it's reputation as a lean, taut masterpiece, it drags. Zombie's version never does. He's made the story from the original movie the second half of his version and filled the first half with more back story for lil' Michael and family. It's a decision that works well. Michael Myers was never a character whose mystique came from his history. We knew a lot about him in the original movie and now we know more. As well as being interesting in its own right, this allows the second half of the movie to move along at a cracking pace. It's not all super-fast quick cuts, though. Rob Zombie is a talented director, who's as adept at using stillness and easy listening as fast motion and loud rock.

It's interesting, it's tense, it's scary and it walks the fine line between horror and comedy that Zombie seems to have chosen as his own particular path. A lot of people seem to have missed that in quite spectacular fashion. You may be able to get through without laughing out loud if you're particularly stone-faced, but I don't see how you'd get through without cracking a smile. It does, I'll admit, settle down on the horror side of the divide for the majority of the second half, but until then it's one funny film and isn't without amusing moments even near the end.

In a sense, I feel that Zombie's movies are for healthy people. They may sound odd to some, filled as they are with guts, screaming and death, but my theory is that you need to have a well-balanced mind to be able to appreciate all the dark shades he uses. The comedy in his movies is often very, very black, but it should be easily discernible if you're open to it. Halloween is on another level to his earlier movies, though, I think. He seems to have toned down the scatter-shot approach of House of a Thousand Corpses and The Devil's Rejects. Enjoyable as they both were, they didn't hang together nearly as well as this movie.

And to top everything off Halloween's sprinkled with appearances by Zombie regulars, Brad Dourif and the mighty Malcolm McDowell in a big, crunchy role.

As I said earlier, if you don't like modern horror then, no, you probably won't like this, but Halloween is on another level other recent remakes, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, and there's more story and life to it than the likes of Saw and other gorno features.

It's the masterpiece of the current wave of post-post-modern, seventies-influenced horror movies, it's actually better than Carpenter's original and it sure as hell deserves far better than it's got.

The Wicker Man (2006)

Not just a bad remake.

[2/10 · 9 February 2007]

The remake of The Wicker Man is as bad as the original is good. The original is one of my favourite films, maybe my very favourite. So, no, I didn't go into the remake with a very open mind. But I simply didn't expect it to be as bad as it was. As a remake it was all wrong, with the themes and style of the original film completely destroyed.

However, more than that, just taken by itself as a modern horror/thriller movie it's awful. It doesn't make sense. Characters come and go with no reason or explanation. Nicolas Cage spends the entire movie looking as if he's trying to work out whether or not he's just soiled himself. Events just... happen, seemingly at random. Scenes just... occur. It's a complete mess. Something went horribly, horribly wrong here.

It's genuinely one of the worst movies I've ever seen. It's up there with Romance, Boxing Helena and Batman & Robin.

And it's probably put people off seeing the original, which is just completely criminal.