I've Often Seen a Cat Without a Grin, but a Grin Without a Cat?

So Tim Burton's latest adaptation of a children's novel, Alice in Wonderland, landed in theaters last weekend.  Mr. Burton can thank me for $14 of its $116,000,000 box office take on opening weekend(two dollars for three dimensions, what a deal! I tell you what, how about I take two dollars in quarters and ball it up in my fist while you put on the glasses and tell me what it looks like when I jam my fist in your mouth.  I'll still need the glasses if I want to reach that third dimension, though).  Apparently I wasn't the only one intrigued by the crew of Hollywood oddballs (Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover) and Burton's interpretation of the classic.  I'm not sure to what to attribute this booming success, but ultimately the reasons for it are not important to my thoughts on the movie itself.  Anyone familiar with Burton's body of work will know that his films offer tremendous exercise for the imagination, but with often significant sacrifices in some of the nuts-and-bolts storytelling components.  Let's start with the fun parts.

Burton movies are always visually a lot of fun to watch, and AIW is no exception.  He has a gift for producing great scenery and costumes.  I personally love the vibrant colors of the film and the way a particular character's costume is used to develop that character as much or more than that character's actions or narrative details.  I was mesmerized by the wicked Queen of Hearts and her outsize head.  Helena Bonham Carter played the part with a certain playful vulnerability that made it hard not to like her, despite her being the antagonist of the story and a genuinely awful person.  There was a good bit of odd dialogue that made me laugh out loud a few times.  Unfortunately, some of my favorite characters had barely any speaking lines at all (the twins, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Cheshire Cat, and the frogs guarding the evil queen's throne room.)  But all told, it was a very enjoyable visual treat.

But as with so many of his movies, Burton displays little skill or patience for developing the characters.  This leaves the audience with little emotional investment in the outcome of the story.  I wanted to like The Mad Hatter (who I heard aptly described as Willie Wonka, but less Michael Jackson-y), but by the end, I couldn't bring myself to really care what happened to him, or to Alice for that matter.  I'd say it's difficult to take on such classics because of all the childhood memories people have of these stories and the expectations that already exist as a result.  But I've never read Lewis Carroll at all, so I had no particular fondness for the characters going in.  Burton's shortcomings as a storyteller are consistent, though.  His lack of patience for plot development and the resulting unclear plot progression left me feeling like I was watching the Cliff's Notes version of a lengthy book, a consequence of trying to fit too much intrigue and too many ideas into one film without enough background context to help the audience understand why. The scene where Alice meets up with the Hatter while he is having tea with the Dormouse and the March Hare is a perfect illustration.  I imagine the dialogue could have been very enjoyable in its nonsensical way, but it was filmed in such a frenzied manner that I couldn't make heads or tales of what they were saying.  Johnny Depp's mush-mouthed delivery didn't aid clarity one bit.  More than that, though, I think this is a complex tale that would require a deft storyteller to successfully translate the script to screen.    
As with my favorite characters that I couldn't get enough of, there were a few that I could have completely done without had their characters not been so central to the story.  The Blue Caterpillar was one, with his stoned rambling about being who you really are.  He was supposed to be a pivotal player in Alice's development, but only seemed to show up when things were pretty well resolved already.  The other annoyance was Ann Hathaway as the White Queen (Ann Hathaway cast as a Disney princess/queen??  SHOCKING.  Wait, look at me.  Are you looking at me?  This is my shocked face.)  While her white hair and black eyebrows left no mystery to the drapes/carpet question, her hands were what drove me the most insane.  In EVERY scene she was in, she was lifting her hands up around her shoulders or face like she was holding two doves palm down.  I understand her intentionally overacting the part, as did most of the actors in this film.  It adds to the fantastical and fun nature of the film.  But Queen Ricky Bobby has no place in Wonderland. 
This brings me to my last thought.  There were scenes that were obviously meant for little kids who would have enjoyed the book.  But there were also a few scenes that may not be best for small children.  Nothing too scary, but I might think twice about taking my 5-year old.  Which leads to the question, who was the target audience for this?  Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2005, it seemed to fall into a sort of target audience void.  I'm not sure what that says about me that I enjoyed it as I did, plot and character development notwithstanding.  However, I'm too tired to pursue any deeper philosophical implications.  I will just leave it at this:  not a film that will evoke much of an emotional response, but plenty of fun to watch if you have some time to kill.  On the Humungus Scale of 1-5, I give it 3 cans of dog food.

Civilization is Hereby Canceled.

So in case you hadn't heard, DC got some snow earlier this month.  Being from Colorado, I was raised in the snow.  For most natives of the east coast, Colorado may as well be Calgary, which makes me half-Inuit.  That means I'm accustomed to scraping out a living on the frozen tundra, right?  It also means there is no end to my amusement watching the panic that arrives in the days leading up to a snow storm.  Grocery stores take on a vaguely Soviet feel, with barren shelves and people fighting for the last loaf of bread.  Your only competition on the road is a forlorn Snickers wrapper skittering across the asphalt.  The humans have all raced home and locked themselves inside with their provisions (and probably firearms) to wait for spring.  Shop windows are darkened with improvised hours of operation taped to the door:  Closed Until The Thaw.

Despite the comedy of it all, the storms of the last two weeks have been every bit the crippling nightmares the weathermen warned they'd be (for once).  This is the closest to an actual apocalypse that I've been.  It was an educative (wet) dry run.  First, the Saturday storm dumped over two feet of snow.  My cupboards were all stocked up, so I could have stayed in the house for days.  But somehow the knowledge that I couldn't go anywhere even if I wanted to brought on a maddening cabin fever very early on.  Nothing was open.  All public transportation was shut down.  Nothing to do and nowhere to do it.  You might think that I would use this down time to do something productive like write or read or start converting my DVD collection to digital.  You'd be wrong.  Let me shed a little light on my own behavioral patterns for you.  IF those activities had been options for avoiding doing something more important when the weather was nice, I would have pursued those activities with gusto into the wee hours of the night.  But since they now became the most productive options on the table, immediately my mind went in search of something less pressing to distract me from What I Should Be Doing.

By two o'clock that first afternoon, when things looked about like this shot below, I got bundled up and headed out to dig my car out.

 

What's that you say?  Cute red jacket?  No, that's not me.  That's a neighbor.  How can you tell from that distance?  Well, the shovel is what gave it away.  See, I didn't/don't have a shovel.  Every store within 40 miles has been sold out of snow shovels for the last month.  So what did I dig my car out with?  Brawn and grit,  that's what.  Steeled by the raw determination that is stretched in the sinews of all true patriots.  Nah. Actually, it's more an illustration of just how badly I wanted to do anything but stay in the house.  For two and a half hours, I bailed the heavy, wet snow with my hands.  Whenever my energy began to wane, thinking about being cooped up in the apartment for the rest of the night was all I needed to keep the John Henry Express moving.  Here's the after picture:

I know it doesn't look like much, but I was proud of that job.  That trench goes all the way around.  You can imagine my pique upon waking in the morning to find that one pass of the snow plow had undone the whole thing.  This dig/bury cycle was to be the wash-rinse-repeat of the next week.  Every day through the following Thursday, I spent some amount of time shoveling my car.  By the time the plows stopped coming, there was just nowhere else to put the snow.

The week following the first storm was fairly astonishing as well.  With the struggle to clear all the weekend snow, and with the arrival of 15 fresh inches on Tuesday/Wednesday, nobody was risking anything.  As you can imagine, government employees make up a huge proportion of the workforce in DC.  And the government shut down for pretty much the whole week.  At times it seemed like the only people working were the foreigners running the 7-11, but I think they live in the back closet so it hardly counts.  One of the biggest annoyances of the lockdown, though, was the television programming that Washingtonians were subjected to.  Roadblock coverage on all the networks all day long of weather and reporters on the street nattering on about the dangers of walking on uncleared sidewalks and snowball fights.  Are we three years old? 

We did eventually get mobile again last Thursday, and my roommate and I ventured into the city to see what we could see.  We were excited about what snow-packed mayhem lay across the frozen Potomac.  But what we discovered was much more frightening/thrilling than we could have ever expected:  VIKING INVASION!!

I don't think we have to worry about them, though, considering they showed up on a friggin' boat.  Who storms Washington on a boat anymore?  How 19th century.  But no matter how weird our day may have been, I imagine this little fella was wondering who slipped the acid in his mashed nanners:

 

There are worse ways to ride out the storm than dancing on the sidewalk with Smurfette and Sully, I suppose.  Like shoveling snow with your hands maybe.  I guess that's all I have to say about that.  Except that I am officially done with winter this year.  All I want is warm weather, a beautiful beach with palm trees, and drinks with little umbrellas in them.  Is that too much to ask?   

And Now For the Most Boring Two Weeks in Sports

The winter olympics are finally upon us.  The time has arrived when we find out if the Canadians' rigging of practice schedules can save them from complete embarrassment in front of the whole world (probably not.)  Some people will be riveted by the round-the-clock coverage planned by NBC.  I am not one of those people.  The olympics bore me.  I don't care about ice dancing or ski jumping.  During the Salt Lake City olympics when I was driving the Russian team's VP, he made me go to the cross country skiing events nearly every day.  On those days, I often dreamt of wandering onto the biathlon rifle range so one of the athletes would put me out of my misery.  The only winter olympic sport I am interested in is hockey. 

Don't get me wrong, the summer olympics are a snoozefest as well.  But there is one reason that the winter games are superior to the summer games:  personalities.  I'm not talking about the ice queens of the figure skating world, men's or women's. I'm talking about the wonderfully stoned-out quotes from the snowboarding teams.  So far this year, my favorite comes from Graham Watanabe.  When asked what it feels like to be on the olympic team, he gave the money quote of the year:

"Try to imagine Pegasus mating with a unicorn and the creature that they birth. I somehow tame it and ride it into the sky in the clouds and sunshine and rainbows. That’s what it feels like."
  
Wow.  I mean.  Wow.  Because that's exactly how I imagined it would feel.  I am pulling for Graham to win some kind of medal so we can get more reactions like this.  But I get the feeling that all The Dude wants is his rug back.  That rug really tied the room together. 

Quick, Pegacorn!  To the half pipe!