With Comic-Con beginning tomorrow, there’s so much movie stuff being talked about today that I almost didn’t know what the biggest topic was/is. And really, the most discussed film-related news of the day wasthe Sam Raimi/World of Warcraft movie announcement. But WOW fans have apparently gone back to playing the game and aren’t hanging out on the web so much anymore, so it appears the teaser trailer for Alice in Wonderlandhas taken over as the most exciting thing for movie geeks to drool over right now. Even more than the hot photos of Freddy Krueger, Jeff Bridges on the set of Tron 2.0and the Megan Fox Fangoria cover.
All I can say is that if you told me 15 years ago that I’d ever be this disinterested in something involving either Tim Burton orLewis Carroll, let alone both, I would have called you a liar and then beat you with my Edward ScissorhandsDVD (see, the joke is that I was such a big fan back then that I had the DVD before it ever existed). It doesn’t look as bad as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I guess, but it looks a whole lot duller than I expected. Maybe this is just too perfect and obvious a pairing that there’s no need for it, in the same way we don’t really need a Terry Gilliam-directed Good Omens or a Chris Columbus-directed Percy Jackson (doh!). I guess that’s the main reason I have no desire to see this movie, but the fact that it somehow looks both murky and meretricious has me turned off completely.
Let’s see what the rest of the film blogosphere thinks of the teaser, after the jump:
Earlier this week we got our first look at Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, including character portraits of the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and Tweedledee and Tweedledum (both played by Matt Lucas). And like most people who saw the images, we believe that this version of the Lewis Carroll classic may end up being too creepy for moviegoers in general, let alone for children.
In response to the promotional pics, a number of people (and blogs) began discussions of disturbing and scarring kids’ movies. So, to join in the fun we’ve compiled a list of our own picks for creepiest flicks made for children. It took a lot for us to be freaked out by a film when we were young (most horror movies didn’t phase us), but each of these titles gives us nightmares still. …Read more
A lot of people are talking today about how creepy this movie looks. We agree that it will likely give some children nightmares, but that’s merely to be expected of any movie featuring Bonham Carter, who scares the crap out of me even in non-fantasy films like A Room with a Viewand Mighty Aphrodite. In this, looking like an older version of those big-head Steve Madden ads, she’s especially frightening, but I’m actually more worried that this bright-palette 3-D fantasy is more like Burton’s crappy Charlie and the Chocolate Factoryadaptation than the brilliant take on Lewis Carroll’s classic we’ve been hoping for. After all, Depp is almost wearing the same top hat as he had in that movie. His hairdo is just more Carrot Top than Emo Philips now.
Check out what the other blogs are saying about these new images after the jump:
At the Kansas City Star, Robert W. Butler brings up an issue that I’ve been thinking about a lot: with music minimized in the massive TV campaign behind Sweeney Todd (see a totally music-free spot above), aren’t they worried that that millions of Jack Sparrow fans will swarm the theaters, only march out angrily when the star breaks into song? According to Butler, we’d be naive to expect anything else:
Today’s kids are crazy about Johnny Depp and horror, and the Warner marketing folk have played to those strengths, emphasizing that in the R-rated Sweeney Todd Depp plays a bleakly amusing killer, a nut job with a straight razor. At the same time the ads de-emphasize the film’s musical origins…Lest I come off as terribly cynical about this, let me state right now that I approve of the Warner ad campaign. That’s because I think Sweeney Todd is a brilliant accomplishment that deserves to be seen by as many people as possible. And if you’ve got to con the kiddies into buying a ticket, that’s fine with me.
“Con the kiddies,” huh? Without even broaching the topic of a studio blatantly trying to sell an R-rated film to the under 17s (not to mention Butler’s presumption of knowledge about “today’s kids”), the real dishonesty here goes beyond the fact that the distributors are not being totally forthcoming about the fact that 90 percent of this story is told in song. The real lie: Sweeney Todd is not just a musical. It’s very literally your parents’ musical. …Read more
Much has been made of the gore in Tim Burton’s film version of Sweeney Todd, which seems to me to be a bit hysteric. If you’ve seen one contemporary cinematic blood bath, you’ve seen them all, and if you produced mathematical proof that there’s more blood here per minute of running time than in, say, Hostel II (from which Burton, actually rather worryingly, borrows the device of spurting corpse-as-shower), I’d be surprised. In fact, blood doesn’t make an appearance until fairly far into the film, and at least initially, the focus is not on the wounds of the victim, but on the assailant’s rage.
Like Atonement, this season’s other high-profile adaptation of a highbrow contemporary text once thought to be unadaptable, Burton’s crack at Sweeney Todd works best when it serves to support the inherent perversity of its source. The director’s mashup of Steven Sondheim’s musical with his own, patented, teenage Goth sketchbook aesthetic may play like German Expressionists-do-Torture Porn, but the brutality is mostly farce. As in Sondheim, Burton’s Sweeney Todd is most disturbing when it’s talking about love.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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With Comic-Con beginning tomorrow, there’s so much movie stuff being talked about today that I almost didn’t know what the biggest topic was/is. And really, the most discussed film-related news of the day was 
