Can a film’s designer be its effective auteur? He can, if his name is William Cameron Menzies. Menzies is best known for directing and designing two classics of the science fiction/fantasy genre, his 1936 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ Things to Come (above) and his 1953 masterpiece of Childrens’ Expressionism,* Invaders From Mars (below right). However, Menzies can also [...]
Tag: Alice in Wonderland
Happy 96th Birthday, Michael Gough!
Michael Gough (above) was born 96 years ago today in Kuala Lumpar, Malaysia, and remarkably, he is still alive. An incredibly sly and versatile English character actor – equally at home reading the dialogue of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Pinter, Berthold Brecht, or Jimmy Sangster (the principal scribe of Hammer horror) – Mr. Gough has worked with [...]
Women in Wonderland, Part 5 – Coraline (Henry Selick 2009)
Every one of Henry Selick’s four feature films to date has dealt with alternate realities. In the Tim Burton-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), the ghoulish Jack Skellington finds a hole in a tree that leads him, Alice-style, from his own reality, Halloween Town, to the very different alt-reality of Christmas Town. In James and [...]
Women in Wonderland, Part 4 – MirrorMask, Pan’s Labyrinth, and the “Strangeness” Factor
Dave McKean’s MirrorMask (above) and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth were released within a year of each other. Both are women-in-wonderland tales. Pan’s Labyrinth is about a little girl who flees from her evil Spanish-fascist stepfather into a woodsy fairyland. MirrorMask is about a ‘tween with a dying mom who enters a dream world in [...]
Women in Wonderland, Part 3 – Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock 1960)
The Alices in flight, those beautiful women alone in their cars on the run – Sylvia Kristel in Alice ou la Dernière Fugue, Candace Hilligoss in Carnival of Souls, and Inger Stevens in “The Hitch-Hiker” episode of The Twilight Zone – recall the most iconic of such women, Janet Leigh as Marion Crane on the [...]
Women in Wonderland, Part 2 – Alice, or the Last Flight (Claude Chabrol 1977)
Alice (Sylvia Kristel) has an argument with her husband. She drives off into the pouring rain. There is an accident. When she wakes up, the sun is shining, but something is not quite right. She comes upon a stone wall that seems to have no beginning and no end. She meets various characters who are [...]
Women in Wonderland, Part 1 – Lost Girls
There was Alice, who journeyed to Wonderland and through the looking glass, Dorothy Gale, who was carried on a cyclone to Oz, and Wendy Darling, who accompanied lost boy Peter Pan to Neverland. All three meet as adult women in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s X-rated graphic novel, Lost Girls (above). Moore, the genius author [...]
A Mad Tea Party – Alice in Wonderland (Jonathan Miller 1966)
When it comes to Lewis Carroll adaptations, Tim Burton’s upcoming 3-D Alice has a lot of competition. The IMDB lists 24 versions of Alice in Wonderland, including Burton’s, and that’s not counting at least 4 or 5 versions of Through the Looking Glass. I have two favorite live-action adaptations of Alice. One is Paramount’s 1933 [...]
Depp to Play Mad Hatter in 3-D Alice?
When I learned, via GreenCine Daily, that Johnny Depp might be playing the part of the Mad Hatter in a Tim Burton 3-D version of Alice in Wonderland (financed by the Disney Corp.) my first thought was – Why? Hadn’t Depp already played that part – or a visual simulacrum of it – in Burton’s [...]
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