Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010)

"Do you think I’ve gone round-the-bend?"
“I’m afraid so. You’re mad, bonkers, off-your head. But I’ll tell you a secret, all the best people are.”

Some of the opening lines of Alice in Wonderland seem to sum up both the film and its creators perfectly. Released in 2010, Alice in Wonderland takes on a new plot thanks to screenwriter Linda Woolverton. But Tim Burton treats the tale as his own. Complete with his whimsical artistic aesthetic, Alice and Wonderland may not be a strong enough film to stand on its own but fits perfectly into Burton’s catalog of films.

The film is set in English Victorian times, with elaborate and fantastic costumes; the “real world” outside of wonderland appears to be a scene out of Brideshead Revisited. Thanks to Oscar-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood, the classic tan and pale blue Victorian corsets and petticoats are just as elaborate as the costumes seen in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. In fact, Alice in Wonderland draws on a similar theme – suppressed teenagers within a suppressive aristocratic world – as Marie Antoinette. Uncomfortable with and scornful of anything proper, Alice (played by Mia Waskikowska) wants out of everything relating to arranged marriages and extreme Victorian societal norms. She is an outsider, a Socratic rebel to say the least, always being reminded by others of her place in this world. “I was thinking what it would be like to fly,” Alice says during a posh English party. “Why would you waste your time thinking of impossible things?” exclaims her soon-to-be fiancé.

As we’ve seen in Heathers and Mean Girls, angsty teenage characters are often desperate to escape their own lives. When they finally do, they realize they are just as unhappy as they were before. Alice feels unfulfilled in Wonderland, where her role is set as the slayer of the Jabberwock in order to return peace to Wonderland. Like Veronica, JD, and Cady Heron, it is only at the end of this film that Alice discovers it isn’t where you are that determines whether you’re feeling content and happy despite outside influences and social norms.

Alice in Wonderland finds Burton continuing his exploration of a number of themes and cinematic styles that have become so closely associated with him. The film sheds light on why Burton maybe is one of the great film auteurs of our generation. What Alfred Hitchcock was to the Baby Boomer generation, Burton is to us, the dreamers and people of the XYZ generation. Auteurs like Hitchcock and François Truffaut stuck to what they knew best and rarely ventured outside a film genre. Hitchcock stuck to suspense, thrill, and aloof females. With Burton it’s a somewhat similar story, but instead of suspense there’s animation and this haunting obscure quality to the plot and characters. What Hitchcock achieved with films, such as Vertigo and Psycho, was this amazing feeling of suspense and thrill. With Burton, the audience is thrown into this dream-like world, escaping the somewhat violent and media-frenzy world we experience today. If anything Alice in Wonderland reaffirms Burton's consistent theme of parallel universes. Alice falls down a hole into Wonderland, just as Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas travels through a set of doors in the depth of the words into a universe of Christmas. Or as Victor Van Dort in Corpse Bride travels through this mystical and supernatural portal into the realm of the living dead. Or as Leo Davidson slips through time to a planet of the apes.

What Tim Burton conveys in his films, such as Alice in Wonderland, is an escape from reality into a universe of the wonderful and unthinkable, the impossible even. And sometimes, you need to think a few impossible things. Maybe even before breakfast.

Liz Rossman
British Literature II

Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001)

I was in 2^nd grade when I first saw Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I watched it once with a friend, and after that day, we watched it once a week for the rest of the year. I loved Nausicaa. I still love it. And I love Miyazaki’s other films – Howl’s Moving Castle, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, Castle in the Sky, and My Neighbor Totoro. I also love Spirited Away.

There’s something about Miyazaki’s animation that is amazing. He captures image, character, and message perfectly. First off, the animation is beautiful – the emotions on the characters’ faces (and the way they open their mouths really wide when they laugh), the colors, the style of drawing. Whatever the subject or tone, the artistry of Miyazaki’s work suggests an underlying joy. It’s more than just pretty images, although some Miyazaki scenes are stunning in their visual detail. His animation lends the cartoon scenes and characters a sense of reality. Watch Nausicaa some time. I love taking in every detail of the toxic jungle. Miyazaki includes every leaf and water drop, and doesn’t miss a thing. The pictures on the screen seem so alive. I think some of this comes from its being hand-drawn. It’s lot of fun to watch.

Another very real part of Miyazaki’s films is the emotion. In a lot of films, especially cartoons, it’s hard to believe in the way the characters are feeling. But in movies like Spirited Away, the emotions are clear. Miyazaki captures them in facial expressions and in actions, but also through the careful use of music. The soundtrack adds a lot to the excitement or emotion-filled moments. One of the most vivid places where the music comes alive in Nausicaa is where Nausicaa comes racing out of the jungle chased by a toxic insect. The music soared and became more urgent, and my heart raced with excitement. In My Neighbor Totoro, the plip plip sounds of water dropping after the rainstorm at the bus stop adds an amazing awareness of the passage of time while Satsuki waits for the bus.

With a Miyazaki film, though, you get entertainment and more; you walk away from them with something other than just a good time. I particularly like the messages implicit in his movies, especially his attitude about the environment, a subject that is important to me. As you watch Spirited Away, think about what’s going on beyond plot and character. Think about what Miyazaki might be saying about growing up, about greed, about family. It seems like there is always a good message portrayed through all his movies.

Whenever Spirited Away is mentioned, whatever group of people I’m around, people say, “Oh, I watched that movie when I was eight and I got so scared!” They don’t realize that that’s the beauty of it. You can’t be scared of something you don’t think is real, like those obviously fake, rubber monsters in an old horror movie. But when Chihiro’s parents turn around to face her and they are pigs, it’s pretty terrifying. At least, to an eight-year-old. More terrifying is after that, when Chihiro runs through the city full of the unknown and she can’t find her parents because they aren’t there. The thought of being abandoned and alone without guidance is the scariest. And Chihiro’s terror is probably the most real moment in Spirited Away.

I hope that moment is still terrifying, even if you’re not eight years old. That would mean that Miyazaki has succeeded, both in entertaining you and in making you feel something important about growing up.

Kaia Findlay
Miyazaki Devotee

David Lynch's Eraserhead (1976)

David Lynch finds horror in unlikely places. We were going to write about his being a difficult-to-categorize director, but then it occurred to us – he directs horror films. But not the kind you’re used to, not slasher pics like Friday the 13th or monster movies like The Host or fantasy horror like The Howling or psycho scary films like The Grudge or The Cell. No, we’d put Lynch in more of the existential horror mode.

Take a movie like Blue Velvet for example. In the opening scene, the camera moves in slowly on an idyllic suburban setting: cute little house, white picket fence, green lawn. The camera keeps getting closer and closer, moving down to ground level, then into the grass, then into the dirt. Where we find creepy crawly things. And a severed ear.

Yeccchh. The scene works as a good metaphor for Lynch’s early work, that beneath the seemingly benign or pleasant exterior there is a seedy, seething corrupt creepiness, that we find this creepiness more horrifying because it exists not just next to but inextricable from the ordinary. We see it in the overdone, psychotic makeup that Diane Lane wears in Wild at Heart. We see it in Dennis Hopper sucking pure oxygen in order to amp himself up to do something evil in Blue Velvet. We see it in the endless revelations of unexpected corruption in the TV-show Twin Peaks. And we see it the whole vision that is Eraserhead.

Lynch has been asked, many times, what Eraserhead is about, or what inspired it, or just “what the heck?” His answers are frequently elliptical or philosophical or oblique, never straightforward or concrete. Eraserhead is like one of those pointillist paintings, where you have to step back from it a bit to get a clear picture of what it represents. In this movie you’ll see a young man and his wife. They have a baby. What could be more ordinary than that? The stress of their relationship drives the woman away, leaving the man to take care of their baby. Okay, that’s basic conflict and good substance for a film. But if you’ve never seen Eraserhead, then what you’re imagining right now as you try to picture the film is nothing like what you’re going to see. That’s why critics tend toward the word “surreal.”

But it’s more than that. It’s horror. Lynch’s movie makes visual the terror we suppress not just in difficult situations like the one in the film, but in every moment of our daily lives. He suggests that we live in a nightmarish world, and the normalcy is just the clown make-up we plaster over it to feel safe.

As Lynch got older (he made Eraserhead, his first feature-length film, when he was 31), he moved away from the rawness and near avant-garde feel of this film. Now his movies feel more packaged, more polished. In some ways that has only enhanced his message, although movies like Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire are far more than just existential horror films. He’s pushed his work into other genres, like the thriller, and turned up the psychological volume a bit, bringing his films closer to a world we recognize and acknowledging his audience’s lust for conventional entertainment forms.

As you watch Eraserhead, enjoy its weirdness, its vision of psychic turmoil, and rest easy in the knowledge that some day, when you’re at a party, and someone asks “what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen?”, you’ll have a ready answer. And on that other day, when life is beginning to grind you down, and your perfect life is bending under the strain of finals, or your job, or bills, or those goons who’ve threatened to break your knee caps, you’ll have an apt visual image for the pressure you feel – it’s like someone’s putting your head into a pencil sharpener.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Guillermo Del Toro was born on October 9, 1964 and raised a devout Roman Catholic. Del Toro started making movies when he was eight years old. When he was 21, he created and produced his first short film by the name of Doña Lupe. Afterward, he dedicated his life to learning about and designing special effects and costuming for eight years. When he was done with this, Del Toro helped to co-found the Mexican Film Festival and he started his own production company, the Tequila Gang.

His movies draw on a wide variety of genres and topics, ranging from being something like the fantasy movies that he is well known for, such as El Labertino del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), to the movies that are based on comic books, such as Hellboy and Blade II.

Guillermo Del Toro is best known in recent years in the United States for his work on Pan’s Labyrinth, which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in the 2006 Academy Awards (losing to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others). Pan’s Labyrinth received this kind of attention due to the amazing cinematography, costume designs, and imaginative story telling that Del Toro made as the movie’s director and producer. It’s hard to imagine viewers not thinking of the image of the faun, or of “the Pale Man” who holds his eyes in the palms of his hands, when they remember Pan’s Labyrinth. But every image in the film is a stunning visual treat, like a Tim Burton movie but with gravitas.

Del Toro’s love of costume design and special effects is also apparent in some of the earlier movies in his career, such as Hellboy (2004). While much of the imagery comes from Mike Mignola’s original comic book, Del Toro gave Hellboy a darker edge to its surrealistic fantasy, a trait shared by Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s clear that Del Toro is fascinated by fantasy, comfortable with disturbing but beautiful visions. What’s interesting is that he can find these common elements in both action-oriented super-hero stories and thought-provoking historical fantasies.

Perhaps because of his distinctive vision, since the creation and release of Pan’s Labyrinth Guillermo Del Toro has received many offers to work costuming or directing a variety of films but has turned many of them down. The ones that he turned down ranged from the serious, such as One Missed Call, to family movies like The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and even some in between, like Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and I am Legend. The reason that he turned all of these offers down was so that he could focus on writing and directing his newest release, Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), a film that has been almost as financially successful as the original Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth combined. (He has agreed to direct the upcoming film version of Tolkein’s The Hobbit.) As disturbing as Del Toro’s visions may be, they definitely are finding their audience.

Jackson Smith
Film Club Co-President

Jeunet and Caro's City of Lost Children (1995)

THE PLOT: A twist on the typical fairy tale, The City of Lost Children is the story of an evil genius named Krank (Daniel Emilfork) and his henchmen of mechanically-enhanced Cyclops, six identical Clones (all played by Dominique Pinon), the tiny and bossy Miss Bismuth (Mireille Mosse), and a disembodied brain (voiced by Jean-Louis Trintignant) which provides the philosophical foundation for the group. The band of genetically-engineered characters live on a man-made island off shores of a coastal city, and it is from this city that Krank's thugs kidnap children. Why? Because Krank is unable to dream, he attempts to steal them from the children's minds.

When the adopted brother (Joseph Lucien) of a circus strongman named One (Ron Perlman) is stolen, One goes on a crusade to save him. On his way, he hooks up with a nine-year-old ingenue/street punk named Miette (Judith Vittet), and they develop a symbiotic bond in their quest to destroy Krank's plot.

Christopher Null
FilmCritic.com

ANALYSIS: In The City of Lost Children, Jeunet and Caro have presented another gloomy world where "normal" life is no more. The film is saturated with atmosphere and features some of the most imaginative set construction of the year. The picture works in part because the film makers have taken the time and effort to frame a strange land where all their quirky characters can live and operate. Jeunet and Caro's movie is thematically and stylistically inspired by such diverse sources as Frankenstein, Dracula, Brazil, Time Bandits, and The Wizard of Oz. Like Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children is characterized by dark, twisted humor, yet this movie is more of a fantasy than a macabre comedy.

James Berardinelli
ReelViews Movie Reviews

INTERVIEW with Jeunet and Caro: Freudian Dreams

You were thinking of a world depopulated of dreams, dark and gloomy.

Jeunet: It was the idea that we had. That someone who didn't dream but, just the same, lived very well, yet would want to see, in dreams, a greater dimension of the imagination. For us, someone who is deprived of that is condemned to die. That's part of what we wanted to say...If one cannot dream and imagine things, and if one is sentenced to the everyday, to reality, it's awful.

Can we find, in "The City of Lost Children," a parable on the desperation of modern man, who is progressively losing the ability to dream?

Caro: We never have "messages" of that sort, merely the desire to tell a simple story.

Jeunet: I think of men incapable of dreaming...There have always been men to put on fantasy festivals, or to make films, to make others dream; and there are others who have never dreamed.

Caro: Dreaming is also having the ability to preserve the spirit of childhood. It's true that it's a little metaphorical in the framework of the film, but there's no message.

What is your own definition of the world of dreams?

Caro: In every way, in this film, our vision of dreams is not at all realistic. We've read all the books about dreams, their significance, etc.; but, while it was thoroughly interesting, it wasn't necessary to take it into consideration for the story that we wanted to tell. One takes a greater risk in the realm of fairy tales than in dreams, in the proper sense. So we went in that direction, letting our imagination manifest itself.

Jeunet: The Freudian side of dreams is very interesting, but it's not at all our subject. That would have made for a tedious film, more of a mediocre parable...

Alain Schlockoff and Cathy Karani
Sony Pictures

INTERVIEW with Jeunet: Like a Fairy Tale

In all of your films (besides "Alien Ressurection"), there's this idea of people's secret lives and the crazy schemes they come up with to get what they want, like the elaborate ways Aurore tries to kill herself in "Delicatessen" and the kids in "The City of Lost Children" using a cat and a mouse to break into a safe. What's the fascination there?

Jeunet: I don't know. I think this film is a little bit different. It's also talking about destiny, but not this kind of chain of events. I tried to avoid that. I remember one scene I cut a lot because I did not want to repeat myself, the scene where they make love and the objects are moving. I am not very proud about that, because it's too Delicatessen. But I do the same thing in my own life. When I give a gift, for example, I put arrows on the floor: You have to open the refrigerator. Inside you have an artichoke. Inside you have a paper [saying] you have to turn on the TV. I am on TV. I explain that you have to open a book, etc. I love this.

I was thinking about "Delicatessen" and "The City of Lost Children." While they are dark, they also have happy endings for the characters who deserve them. So, in that sense, maybe you've been sentimental and optimistic all along?

Jeunet: For us, The City of Lost Children wasn't dark. It was like a fairytale, and in a fairytale everything is dark: the little children, the dark forest, they are lost. But it is so good to be afraid when you are a kid. And when I saw it again last year, I thought, "Oh yes, it is dark." For the first time I felt it was dark.

Andrea Meyer
indieWIRE

INTERVIEW with Jeunet and Caro: A Certain Cruelty

For some people, the film seems to be meant for children as well as adults...

Caro: Absolutely, but, as always, at the outset, the film was made first of all for ourselves. It's true that we've stayed very childlike...

The paradox is that the film, at moments, seems a little too dark for children...

Caro: But if you look at Pinocchio, Dumbo, Snow White, Bambi, there are some awful enough scenes that make an impression...I think that an audience member, whether big or little, wants to feel afraid, to have fun, to be moved, to cry -- in short, to be surprised. There has to be a little of all those emotions...

Jeunet: The idea is to rediscover, a little, childhood fears -- those in tales that were told to us. This is far from being gory. Yet, in the tales, when you read Grimm or Perrault, there's a certain cruelty.

Alain Schlockoff and Cathy Karani
Sony Pictures