Alice In Wonderland

Tim Burton and I broke up after Sweeney Todd. I tried to be nice about it, even saw it in the theaters four times trying to convince myself I liked it. After the fourth time, though, we had a huge fight and I said some very, very hurtful and insulting things (all of which I still think were justified).
Tim Burton, of course, did not respond because he was a figment of my imagination at the time (the real Tim Burton being unavailable due to the fact that we've never met and he was probably busy that day), but we agreed that I was simply too opinionated and he was simply too stagnant and repetitive (he has, like, three movies that he just makes over and over). I told him I was keeping the Sleepy Hollow and we went our seperate ways.
For years I'd clench my teeth at the mere mention of his name, but we're back on speaking terms of the polite but not necessarily friendly variety. I watched his Alice In Wonderland because I feel I don't have the right to complain about a movie I've never seen.
This is a movie whose previews I loudly, openly and shamelessly booed in theaters. You see, the main reason Tim Burton and I parted ways was that we realized we only got along when he was adapting things I didn't care about. For instance, The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow is a story I tried to read on more than one occasion but was never able to finish. Sleepy Hollow is, by far, Tim Burton's best movie. However, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street is one of my top five favorite musicals and Tim Burton (who claims it's the only musical he likes) only got one thing right: the gore. His movie has buckets and buckets of blood (yay!), less than adequate performances from everybody but Pirelli and Toby (as my friend Michelle put it: "It's really sad when the best actors in your movie are Borat and an eleven year old boy.") and twelve tons of missing the point. But I won't get into that. I'm not reviewing that movie.
So I went into Alice In Wonderland expecting to absolutely hate it. Instead I didn't hate it. I didn't like it, exactly. My reaction is complex and confused, and a good chunk of my problem could have been resolved by giving the movie a proper name: Return To Wonderland would have been more accurate.
The movie begins with Alice going to a garden party at which some snooty guy is going to propose to her (Alice is, like, eighteen in this version). The audience is supposed to know Alice is "different" (read "better") than the people around her because she thinks corsets are stupid and she's not interested in fitting into their society. Yawn. Like I've never heard that from every stupid movie ever; let's move on. (We also know Alice is a Tim Burton heroine because she looks as if she just spent the last two hours throwing up.)
Anyway, Alice runs away from her proposal to follow a white rabbit down a hole and she lands in Underland (it turns out "Wonderland" was her childish mispronunciation. You can't see it, but I'm rolling my eyes right now), where the Red Queen has used her Jabberwocky and her Crispin Glover to take over power from her sister the White Queen. It's been told that on the Frabjous Day, Alice with use the Vorpal Sword to kill the Jabberwocky.
Okay, fuck this! Explaining anything from Jabberwocky takes everything that's magical away from the poem. I don't want to see some dumbass filmmakers' interpretations of what a frumious bandersnatch is. I don't want vorpal blade to mean anything. And I'm motherfucking sick of jabberwockys just being dragons. Quit trying to ruin a brilliant poem by trying to make it mean something. Stop perverting it to suit your needs. Whoever wrote this screenplay can bite me.
Alice spends the whole movie insisting she's not the Alice they're looking for and then bossing them around because it's her dream so she's in charge. (I don't like Alice in this movie.)
And why can't the White Queen kill the Jabberwocky herself? Because "my vows make me unable to hurt any living creature." I'm pretty sure she's related to Glinda from The Wizard Of Oz. "I want this person out of the way without getting my hands dirty; time to get an unsuspecting little girl to do my dirty work for me." They're like mobsters. "Good Witch" my ass.
Anyway, so Alice teams up with the Mad Hatter and all the animals in Wonderland to find the sword and defeat the Red Queen.
And at some point midway through the movie my teeth unclenched, my blood stopped boiling and I managed to just enjoy myself. Something happened at maybe forty five minutes in that made me just stop caring about all the stupid things that were annoying me and just be entertained. I liked that quite a lot.
It didn't last, though. Around the time Alice rode the bandersnactch back to the White Queen's palace, I started getting mad again and stayed mad for the rest of the movie (except for the execution scene; that was pretty good). And I tried. I tried really hard to let go, to not be mad, to just enjoy the movie. "Remember how good you felt fifteen minutes ago when you thought it wasn't bad? Remember?" I pleaded, but it didn't work. Whatever the movie did to offend me was enough for me to declare war on Freedonia. (It called me an upstart?) (In this case "declare war on Freedonia" means "scowl for the rest of the movie.")
I really hated the White Queen, Alice bugged the snot out of me, the Red Queen was awful, the Mad Hatter was trying too hard to be weird (also, he was occasionally Scottish; either be Scottish or don't, dude), the Doormouse was a bitch, the March Hare made me tense (I really didn't like how he was animated) ... I liked most of the other characters, though. The Cheshire Cat was very cool.
So, I don't know. It needed more of whatever was going right in the middle to make me stop being angry about the unlikeable characters and the attempts at de-magic-izing a great poem.

End of line.
-Sally