Alice in Wonderland
(Starring Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway)
Alice in Wonderland was originally an absurdist political satire disguised as a children’s tale. Disney converted it to kid-friendly animation in 1954. Now, director Tim Burton has mixed the original with elements of Narnia, Hook, and Wizard of Oz. Yet this odd mishmash makes for a pretty fun film.
In this version, 19-year old Alice (Wasikowska) has forgotten all about her once-beloved Wonderland. Just as she’s about to
be forced into an arranged marriage, she again falls down the rabbit hole. Soon she recruited to save the land by battling the Red Queen’s vicious Jabberwocky. Some of the original story is here in redux, but much has been updated in slightly more violent ways.
Depp obviously has a blast with the loony Mad Hatter; he’s now a central character. He serves like Scarecrow did in Oz, and Alice grows fond of him. Bonham Carter is fantastic as the bulbous-headed Red Queen (rendered with brilliant computer graphics.) All the other characters—save poor Hathaway’s wussy White Queen—are loads of entertainment.
Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands, Sweeney Todd) has a great gift with visual effects, and this film shows that in spades. More importantly, in the past, he has often bludgeoned audiences over the heads with artfulness while ignoring a cohesive storyline (see Sleepy Hollow.) Ironically, in Alice—even though the director reinvents the mythology and blatantly borrows from other popular epics—he still succeeds in creating a fairly unified yarn.
Brooklyn’s Finest
(Starring Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke, Wesley Snipes)
The title Brooklyn’s Finest is meant to be ironic. Here are three mentally flawed police officers, operating in a system rife with poverty, politics and malfeasance. It’s a ponderous and bloody two hours that adds up to a whole lot of aimless, ghetto-induced nihilism.
Gere is a suicidal but sweet peacekeeper shuffling through his last week of work so he can spend his retirement with a coke-addicted prostitute. Hawke is a Catholic cop spitting out babies left and right; he kills druggies and takes their money in hopes of buying his brood a new home.
Cheadle is an undercover detective who makes meaningful friendships with the thugs. Oh boy, does that make it harder to snitch on them, set them up, or kill them later…
None of these actors embarrass themselves, though Hawke comes darn close with his scene-chewing Catholic guilt. The script also tries some subtle plot overlaps. Unfortunately, it’s so careful that it forgets to be clever. The middle drags on with repetitious scenes of cops in emotional crisis.
It’s hard to imagine an audience getting fired up about this when there are so many better examples (like Training Day, produced by this same team.) Brooklyn’s Finest is all ethically compromised cops using whatever power they can grasp, suffering under corrupt politics. The filmmakers use brute force to make this world purposeless, diseased, and unfixable. It just ends up feeling biased against law enforcement.
The Ghost Writer
(Starring Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams)
If he is extradited back to America for a 1977 statutory rape conviction, this may be the last film directed by 76-year-old Roman Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, The Pianist). So, it may not come as a surprise that Polanski finds a surreptitious way to take potshots at the U.S. Despite the man’s ugly personal life, he still is a deft filmmaker.
McGregor is an author known for ghost writing famous people’s biographies. He’s assigned to help British ex-prime minister Brosnan (whose character is obviously modeled on Tony Blair). McGregor doesn’t know much about politics, but he soon learns. He finds that his predecessor died under questionable circumstances. He also uncovers international intrigue, putting the prime minister squarely under the control of Americans using torture in their current war.
The Ghost Writer possesses a couple points where characters make weird, dangerous choices. The film sometimes grows ponderous in pace, and a few of the British accents (Cattrall) are uneven. If you can forgive these small missteps, it’s still a tense, Hitchcock-style political thriller, rendered in close-up, filled with taut dialogue.
In actuality, much of this flick’s creepiness could actually be because Polanski is exiled from the U.S., the country where most of The Ghost Writer is set. This version of America is a little off—spooky, stark and masked in perpetual fog. The skewed perspective does fit the movie’s mood, and—based on his history—it also fits Polanski.
