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Alice

Alice

List Price: $29.95
Your Price: $26.96
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A decent Alice...sadly, a little known one.
Review: This is doubtlessly the most bizarre film I have ever seen. Since it is a version of ALICE, that's okay. It holds a sort of hallucinatory shadow over the story from which it was inspired: it is a frightening look into the very desolation that comes with age. Alice herself is lost in Wonderland, perhaps an embodiment of the corruption and decay that follows the subversion of childhood. The characters of the book have been reduced to dead, mindless things here: the White Rabbit is a taxidermist's expirament; the Mad Hatter is a marionette; the March Hare is a stuffed animal. These characters, void of life and thought, seem to represent the dull world of adulthood, where the repetitive events of every day are hammered out endlessly, and seen without the color or whimsy they hold when seen through the eyes of a child. The movie is doubtlessly symbolic of many things, however they are so cryptically presented that I cannot figure any of them out for myself. The movie itself is not fun to watch, it is rather tedious, in fact: but it holds a subconscious power over the viewer, he sees with astonished eyes Alice moving through the doorways and drawerways of the decaying realm. The viewer becomes part of a different sphere of consciousness: he lingers with Alice in a perpetual dream-state, or, a nightmare from which he cannot awake, until the last scant bit of dilogue is recited, and the final credits roll. Svankmajere (or however you spell it) has a fine taste for the macabre, and by moving as far from Carroll's story as possible, he does it ironic justice. By moulding the plot to form his own tightly-knit fantasy, he does not sabotage the feel of the book, but intensifies it. For this he deserves praise. With Alice we feel every bit of menace and curiosity, a trait rarely found in films. This one touches profoundly and unexplainably with the child inside us, and for the lapse of its running time we become part of another world, one which we are anxious to escape while we linger in it, but feel obsessively drawn back to after the return to our conscious states.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A different point of view
Review: This movie is a different point of view about Carroll's classic Alice in Wonderland.
It's closer to nightmare than dream and the young actress (the only human being in the movie)is a perfect Alice.
The plot follows Alice in Wonderland book (at last a version which doesn't mix Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the looking glass).
Don't miss it if you like Lewis Carroll and if you like very good movies.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Incredible, delusional adaptation!
Review: This movies is by far my favorite of all the Alice movies that I own! This adaptation is incredibly unique and completely fascinating to watch! Obvious that much time and care was put into the making of this film. I would not, however, recommend this film for children since when I watched it with a 22-year-old friend, she found it disturbing and asked me to turn it off. One of the films main characters is the product of taxadermy, and there is very little speaking and virtual silence for much of the movie except for the sound of scurrying and footsteps and such. Personally, I found it brilliant and completely engrossing!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Surreal Trip Without the Hit
Review: This Surreal vision of Alice in Wonderland will delight and amaze you. It's even a little disturbing. Just thinking of the sardine tin gives me the willies!

This is a must own for any fan of the obscure! If you get the chance to...please see this on the big screen...the sound effects are sublime!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Jan Svankmajer's Alice
Review: Truly eerie and surreal verison of the Lewis Carroll story, has(at the beginning) Alice sitting in her playroom. In there, she sees a white rabbit break out of his cage and leap into an adjoining desert-like area where a table with a drawer stands up ahead. She then climbs into it and falls into a disturbing world where household items become the characters of Wonderland, and a deck of cards becomes the Wonderland castle. Jan Svankmajer's stop-animation treatment makes this film a truly original experience, giving it a disturbing and eerie feel. The lighting and photography also add to the mysterious atmosphere of this 85-minute film. Fans of other film versions might not be happy about the fact that this film changes quite a bit of the story, but I found that to be little of the problem. I reduced the rating to this film because I thought that ALICE would be a little more for kids, but some parents may want to view this before letting their kids watch it. Highly original, but somewhat disturbing film version of Alice. Quite good.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Looking Glass shows Nightmares!
Review: We have all be introduced by either the written form or the theatrical form of the story of "Alice in Wonderland". Unfortunately, I feel that most of us have been introduced to this story through the film version instead of the written word. Sad as it may seem, we have all been sucked into either the Disney version, the Care Bear's version, or better yet even the recent made-for-TV version that was on ABC. So, with that being said, we all then know the story of Alice's journey through Wonderland. For all of you who have perhaps missed out on this fabled children's tale, let me recap for you quickly:

White Rabbit, Small and Big, Caterpillar, Tweetlede & Tweetledum, the Walrus, the pig baby, the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, "Off with their heads!!!", the Cheshire cat, and the Alice dream.

Although that may seem like a jumbled line of words and phrases, that actually accurately sums up the entire plot of the children's story. What surprises me is that over time the film versions of this story have not changed. They have continued to show this innocent child being swept up in this imaginary and beautiful "Neverland" where she finds herself being the center of attention. I am not sure if studios are afraid to topple the Disney version, or if there is no creativity running through the minds of writers to make a fresh new story of this old tale, but something needed to be done. It was a tired story, that needed a modern day face-lift. With this said, let me introduce you to the Czech version of this fairy tale. While I applaud it for taking a much darker twist to this story, I do denounce it's use of stop motion animation to create the impossible.

Lewis Carroll, the author of the story, really intended "Alice in Wonderland" to be a very scary and dark story for children, and until Disney put their hands on it...it was. What Czech director Jan Svankmajer has done brought back the darkness to Alice. Almost taken from a page out the directing book by David Lynch, it abruptly begins with Alice announcing that she is going to watch a movie...this movie to be exact. She then proceed to play in her room. The movie does follow the actual story of Alice, but it takes a nightmarish version of the favorite characters. For example, the White Rabbit constantly looses his stuffing, only to pull his watch out of his stomach to proclaim that "He is very late for a date". He refills himself by eating wood chips that immediately fall back out of him. At the Mad Hatter party, a wind-up March Hare sits during the entire scene and butters watches to make sure that the gears get oiled. The lady who was watching the baby who is actually a pig is portrayed in this film as a frog footman who battles flies with a very lifelike tongue. Even the smallest of characters are evil. There is a scene with a door mouse that crawls up Alice's head when she is sitting in a pool of her own tears, and proceeds to set up camp in her hair.

For children...I think not...original...I think YES! While it even ends the same as the other versions of "Alice", the feeling that it leaves in your mind and stomach afterwards will be remembered further more than the cutesy animated version.

I tried hard to like this movie. It was art, it was foreign, it was from my native country...but I just couldn`t connect with the stop-motion animation. I don't want to stray you the wrong way, if you enjoy this style of animation, then I really recommend this film to you. I guarantee that you will never think of "Alice in Wonderland" in the same way. The symbolism was very strong and very poignant. I enjoyed how the feeling of Wonderland actually being a part of the house. I loved how the director used household items to create this normally "pretty or cuddly" characters. I also enjoyed the darkness to this film. When I think about it, I don't think of "Alice in Wonderland" as a children's story. A young girl follows a rabbit through an uncharted area (not worried that she is not home) and creates havoc all throughout this peaceful town. When she is finally caught, her punishment handed down by the elected Queen is not fulfilled...instead she awakens only to discover that it was a nightmare. I was always curious why there were so many cute characters in a nightmare. I think Svankmajer saw the darkness in the story and brought it out in this version.

Overall, I enjoy seeing another side of a story that our society loves so much. I love seeing artists take a vision that we have all seen before and turn it into their own design. I think this was done with this film. I applaud my Czech friend for all of the work on this film, and I suggest tackling yet another children's classic soon!!

Grade: *** out of *****

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: very drugged
Review: While I have never been on acid, I believe that watching this movie is a lot like taking some sort of hallucinogen. It's tweak.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Surrealistic and dark. That's all..
Review: Yes. i admit that this one is a surrealistic, experimental, dark film far from the other Alice-related movies. But all those things does not prove that it deserves to be praised. What i could find in this movie is that a vague plot, bizarre characters and a weird sound. That's all. Even puppet-animation failed to catch my mind (I am a big fan of that method). Instead of it, i'd like to recommend BBC's TV version directed by Jonathan Miller and/or 'Dreamchild' to people who are interested in more creative, dark version than normal Alice movies.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Background movie
Review: You blow it on a screen at a party and take a lot of [stuff] and get all [happy] and turn up the music really [loud]. And then you [dance] and you'll get all [happy]. This ain't the other version cuz it's this version but this is the one you play over and over don't worry about the [poor] dubbing or any of that [lordotic juxtaposition of hypercondensed narrative]. It's wizard and'll give you [big dreams].


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