Alice
Director: Jan Svankmajer
Year Released: 1988
Rating: 2.5
While initially I thought that Alice in Wonderland would be a fantastic project for Svankmajer, whose films, which incorporate live-action and stop-motion in the most brilliant ways, have a Carroll-esque sense of black humor. But this simply does not work - I never really warmed up to the fun (though macabre) adventure. Svankmajer's reworking is heavy-handed, sluggish and relentlessly bleak: he's taken an acid-trip and turned it into a political fable. From a technical aspect, his work is always worthy of the highest praise - he is a meticulous craftsman with a wild imagination - but this is pretty tiresome.
