Alice in Wonderland dvd movie.|
Alice in Wonderland buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
 |
List Price: $9.99 Our Price: $9.99 Features • Black & White • DVD-Video • Live • NTSC In Theaters : 1966 DVD Release : 18 November, 2003 |
| [ + Zoom ] [ Buy Now ] | DVD : Usually ships in 24 hours |
|
Alice in Wonderland description Fans of Lewis Carroll's classic novel for children will be fascinated by this startling 1966 interpretation by Jonathan Miller, a noted British theater director. Influenced by surrealism and Victorian architecture, Miller's black-and-white version of Wonderland is a dour and creepy place, not the frenetic and charming bustle usually depicted. A brunette Alice (Anne-Marie Mallik) wanders like a sleepwalker, rarely looking anyone in the eye, and has fractured conversations with the likes of the Mad Hatter (Peter Cook, Bedazzled), the Caterpillar (Sir Michael Redgrave, The Lady Vanishes), the Duchess (Leo McKern, Rumpole of the Bailey), and the Mock Turtle (Sir John Gielgud, Brideshead Revisited, Arthur). The result is probably an accurate picture of the adult world seen through a child's eyes--an unsettling and intriguing vision. Also featuring Peter Sellers as the King of Hearts and music by Ravi Shankar. --Bret Fetzer |
|
|
| ♥♥♥♥♥ | I Hate to Have to Say this, but... |
| ... I found this version of Alice almost unwatchable. Previous reviews well capture this version's character, including its truly fatal flaws. Please read them. But I think they are by-and-large far too charitable. I love Carroll's works, so do not take this negative review as a knock on the Alice books; it is purely about this dismal and moribund adaptation.
Note, I write "adaptation." This is not a faithful version of Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," nor was meant to be. Fair enough. But wherever there was any mirth or joy in Carroll's book (which is itself slightly dark), producer/director Miller has replaced it with a cringe-worthy combination of sleep-inducing sonambulism on Alice's part, and obscure and pretentious dated social commentary on the part of other characters. It simply doesn't work in America in 2007, and I doubt it worked even in England in 1966. There *are* bright spots, to be sure, as others have mentioned: Sir Michael Redgrave's Caterpillar, Peter Cook's Hatter, and--for me the best and only not-depressing part of the film--Sir John Gielgud's Mock Turtle. But these cannot make up for what is otherwise a perhaps noble effort, but simply no fun. As jammer wrote, "The director never seems to get enough of having interminable full-face close-ups of [Alice], whose visage is devoid of expression or reaction and during which, little if anything else happens to advance the rest of the story. (Meanwhile all this precious screen time goes down the tubes when it could have been used so profitably elsewhere! Aarrgggghhhh!) Lewis Carroll, whose whole focus revolved around Alice, must surely have turned over in his grave." Just so, and, as Alice says, "At any rate, I'll never go *there* again!" (Note: my nearly three year old daughter is entirely in love with KCRW's radio/CD version of Alice [available for purchase only at kcrw.org, I think], and listens to it over and over. She is surely not the target audience of this disturbing version, but I thought she'd at least want to watch it *once*. She couldn't even make it through a single viewing. It's simply "too dark--too dark altogether.") |
|
|