Something I DO like about Alice

At last, something I can be unequivocally positive about with regard to the new Alice in Wonderland. I today received my CD of Danny Elfman's score for the movie and it's a remarkably well rounded piece of work. It doesn't play like a film soundtrack, it plays like a suite of music written entirely independently and works very well as such. Here and there it may be a touch episodic but overall it flows almost symphonically. Danny Elfman, as testified by such previous scores as Beteljuice and Batman writes with tremendous dramatic flair and while, in parts, this may be reminiscent of those - and other - Elfman film scores, it remains nonetheless a splendid piece of work on its own terms. The recurring Alice main theme solidly underpins all of it with the choral passages threading through it as a constant counterpoint to the frequently menacing foreground.
As Alice says in Looking Glass when she reads the poem Jabberwocky, "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't exactly know what they are!"
Fortunately the ideas and images that it fills my head with are shaped by my own previous knowledge of the books, by my own imagination of how Wonderland should be and not by Tim Burton's movie.
If only everything about the film had been as good as the soundtrack it would have been a mighty piece of work indeed.