Blog News

1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

2. There are now several extra pages - Poetry Index, Travel, Education, Childish Things - accessible at the top of the page. They index entires before October 2013.

3. I will, in the next few weeks, be adding new pages with other indexes.

Saturday 13 February 2010

Curiouser and curiouser

The adaptations of Alice keep on coming.
Today I bought the DVD of Malice In Wonderland, a film starring Danny Dyer and Maggie Grace.
It's quite a difficult one to describe but I'd have to say it's among the more off-the-wall adaptations. From the box I was expecting a gangster flick connected loosely, perhaps in the manner of a homage, to the Alice story. What I got was an out-and-out adaptation, a dark and surreal adaptation, to be sure,but it's far more Alice than crime thriller.
The story is filled with weird and rather sleazy characters, all variants on the familiar Wonderland cast. The outside world, non-wonderland, story makes little sense but not as little as the inside world Wonderland makes. It manages to be both dark and gloomy and colourful at the same time - like an abandoned fairground at night, with all the rides running but no customers: a scene which is in fact partially mirrored by one in the movie.
It's rather difficult to decide on who exactly the target audience for this film is, though. It's too weird and too incoherent for a mainstream audience, far too adult (with it's drug use and fetishism) for a general audience, far too far from it's source material for most fans of the book.
It's unlikely to have any kind of widespread appeal. I'm not even sure if I liked it or not.
I'm going to have to watch it again to even try to decide.

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