Alice: A Look into Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (2009) Review

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(More customer reviews)You know a documentary is not off to a promising start when the narrator repeatedly mispronounces the name of the subject of the documentary. (Lewis Carroll's real name, Dodgson, was pronounced with a silent "g": that is, "Dod-son".)
The narrator also mispronounces the name of Carroll's most famous illustrator, saying "Te-NEEL" instead of "TENN-i-el" (that is, rhyming with "perennial").
At another point, he actually refers to Carroll as "Liddell". He mispronounces "ideologies" as "ideal-ologies."
At another point, he talks about a rainstorm in which Carroll and his child friends were caught as inspiring the "valley of tears" section of ALICE. The VALLEY of tears?! I assume he means the "pool of tears".
In another place he refers to Carroll's habit of figuratively "marking with a white stone" the happy days in his diary as a "Biblical" symbol. It was actually a pre-Christian Roman custom.
He also refers to Carroll's famous boat trip with the Liddell sisters as taking place on "Independence Day" -- July 4th. The fourth of July isn't actually a holiday in England. Independence Day is an American holiday.
All this typifies for me the whole sloppy, lazy approach taken in this rather shallow exploration of the lives and relationship of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell. When the narrator mispronounced a word -- or accidentally called the subject of the documentary by the WRONG NAME -- couldn't they be bothered to record a second take? Was the director not paying enough attention to even notice that it happened?
In addition, "facts" are repeatedly introduced, but not supported. One typical example: "Father William is thought to be based on Jowett ..." Thought by WHO?
Several longish tangents are devoted to the lives of Watts, Wordsworth, and Blake -- as it is asserted they were an influence on Carroll -- but those sections really add little to our understanding of Carroll. It would have been sufficient to say in one sentence that, say, "Carroll was parodying the many familiar moralizing poems of Isaac Watts."
About a third of the documentary consists of the narrator recounting in unnecessarily tedious detail the whole familiar story of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" -- throwing in occasional interpretive "facts" supposedly related to the writing of the story (though some of these are questionable and mostly unsupported as well).
The few plusses about the DVD are that it shows many nice and interesting photographs of Victorian Oxford -- though it is rarely explained what they are, and they tend to be shown repeatedly. (At one point a photo of John Ruskin is shown in a section that has nothing to do with Ruskin, and it is not said who he is. It is as if the filmmakers thought, "Well, here's an interesting Victorian-looking man" -- and that was good enough for them.)
Also, the special features include quite nice prints of the 1903 and 1915 silent film versions of Alice. Those are the reason I am keeping this DVD.
Otherwise, you would do better to find and read several of the good, illustrated biographies of Carroll available.


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The books, written by a mild stuttering bachelor lecturer of mathematics, that told the adventures of a little girl who fell down a rabbit hole into a wonderland, and later, went through a mirror into a looking-glass world, have sold more copies than any other book except The Bible. Alice was the name of that little girl, who not only became the heroine of these tales, but was also the name of the child who inspired the writer, Lewis Carroll, to exercise his genius.This program examines the coming together of the writer and his muse, the society they inhabited, and their relationship that is still the subject of much controversy, as well as the effect it had on their subsequent lives.SPECIAL DVD EXTRASAlice in Wonderland (1915 Version)Alice in Wonderland (1903 Version)

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Alice (2009 Miniseries) (2009) Review

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(More customer reviews)There's a girl in a blue dress, a Queen of Hearts, and a a magical looking glass that whisks the heroine into a surreal Wonderland.
But beyond that, don't expect this SyFy miniseries to have much in common with Lewis Carroll's classic novel, "Alice in Wonderland." Instead, "Alice" is a whole different animal -- a deliciously gritty sci-fi adventure filled with action, romance, monsters psychedelic horrors, and a revolution against a drug-peddling queen. It's a little silly, but still immensely entertaining.
Alice's (Caterina Scorsone) dinner date with her boyfriend Jack (Philip Winchester) falls apart when he offers her an heirloom ring. When she chases after him, she sees him being dragged off by some suit-wearing thugs -- and promptly trips THROUGH a looking glass. Of course she ends up in Wonderland, a world of grimy urban ruins and art deco casinos. And it's ruled by the Queen of Hearts (Kathy Bates), a ruthless tyrant who keeps her populace drugged with emotions from kidnapped "oysters" (ordinary humans).
Alice ends up following the eccentric Hatter (Andrew-Lee Potts), who offers to take her to the Resistance -- but when they get there, they discover that Jack's ring is actually the Stone of Wonderland (which powers the transdimensional Looking Glass). Since everybody in Wonderland wants the Stone, Hatter and Alice end up on the run from both the Resistance and the Queen's assassin Mad March. Alice is still determined to rescue Jack and return home, but she soon finds that her boyfriend isn't quite what she thought -- and that one of her loved ones is the Queen's brainwashed slave.
The whole idea behind "Alice" is that Carroll's story was real, and that Wonderland has become a very different place in the last 150 years -- crumbling smoky cities, insectile airships, bunny-headed cyborg assassins, and a pair of sadistic interrogators called Dr. Dum and Dr. Dee. It's a far darker, more complex affair than Carroll's books, and that's what makes it so brilliant.
There's plenty of sci-fi action and chaotic battle scenes, including aerial chases, bombing runs and the occasional attack from the grotesque Jabberwock; and the writers keep the complex plot flowing along nicely. But they also keep the story grounded with a love triangle between Alice, Jack and Hatter, as well as Alice's quest to free the oysters and a long-lost family member. And there's just enough humor to keep it from being excessively grim ("We don't have to use a user manual, do we? I HATE user manuals").
Problems? A few of the homages (the grinning cat, the "drink me" bottle) are pretty superfluous, and the siege of skeletal soldiers is kind of silly (especially the "Hit them with everything we've got").
Scorsone makes an excellent modern Alice -- intelligent, capable and capable of butt-kicking her way out, but still vulnerable and young ("You don't remember me!"). Potts makes a deliciously quirky, sexily disheveled Hatter, and Frewer rounds out the main trio as a mildly insane White Knight. Winchester and Colm Meaney are also excellent, Tim Curry is brilliant but underused, and Kathy Bates absolutely rules as the casually cruel, petulant Queen. And yes, she does say "off with his head!"
I don't know what beloved children's story will get reworked next, but "Alice" does a great job with Lewis Carroll's classic novel -- lots of action, a touch of romance, and just enough surreality.

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Abandoned by her father as a child, the independent twenty-one-year-old Alice is accustomed to men being unpredictable, but Jack Chase is something else. Just moments after surprising her with a rare family ring, he\'s suddenly kidnapped by two thugs and driven into darkness. It is then that Alice is confronted by a sharply dressed stranger who calls himself White Rabbit, and who promises to know more about Jack than she. Where Alice follows him is through the liquid glass of an ornate mirror. Where she lands is Wonderland, an outlandish underground city of twisted towers and parapets, staircases conceived in a Dali dream, and an otherworldly purple horizon. Soon, the word\'s out that Wonderland has its most prized captive. It seems Alice has the ring that controls the looking glass—the key to the power of the Queen of Hearts. It was mad folly for her son Jack to give it to a girl he barely knew. But Jack had his reasons. Discovering them is up to Alice.

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