The following review is of the Blu-ray of Alice in Wonderland. This will not be a review of the movie, but rather a look at the features of the disc containing Alice.

I would like to point out that the disc holds a whopping three DVDs. One is obviously the Blu-Ray disc itself. The other consist of the DVD and the digital copy. I myself have moved on from the DVDs in my house and only have a Blu-ray player but this would be a great option for those of you wanting a Blu-ray player soon but still have yet to make the jump.

Something that jumps out right away are the menus along with the soundtrack. The menus jump right out at you full of classic Tim Burton sketches along with concept art from the movie. The transfer is awe inspiring, clean and very much in the top 10 I have seen.

Below is a list of what to expect for extras, we will go into detail shortly.

1. Wonderland
   1. finding Alice
   2. The mad Ayer
   3. The futterwacken
   4. The red queen
   5. Time lapse: sculpting the red queen
   6. the white queen
2. Making Wonderland
   1. scoring Wonderland
   2. Effecting Wonderland
   3. stunts of Wonderland
   4. making the Proper Size
   5. cakes of Wonderland
   6. tea Party Props

There are a few sneak peaks into some upcoming movies. Sneak peaks for the upcoming Re-release of beauty and the beast on Blu-ray along with James and Giant Peach special edition on Blu-Ray.

With the above said make sure to read on about the details about the above special features.

Finding Alice: A behind the look at who Alice is and the world around Alice. Lots and lots of green screen behind the scenes along with clarity on who the character is. A great looking into a behind the scenes world of Burton’s head. Who is Alice? This is your guide to Burton’s thoughts and details behind who Alice really is.

The Mad Hatter: This feature is really a great look into how Depp dives into his character and also shows the work that can be put into a character in a movie. The look behind the mad hatter was actually draw almost identical by Burton and Depp when they were on separate coasts. Very crazy coincidence. They explore the hair, eyes, the dance, the it’s, the hats and more. Really an awesome look behind how he becomes mad.

The Futterwacken: The crazy dance that the mad hatter does at the end of the film. A crazy fluid, yet odd dance that plays a small part within the film, which comes alive in this special feature. Youtube dancers enter! A great way to be resourceful and really trick us all. This is a must watch!

The Red Queen: What a character to play. What a character to hate. What big head! The queen of hearts, err the red queen, is portrayed by Burton muse, Helena Bonham Carter. 3 to 4 hours of makeup, hair, lips and more include what we get to see. this feature shows us what it means to be the red queen, how she got there and how we see an enormous head.

Time Lapse of the Red Queen: It’s a very very fast time lapse showing us what it takes to make the red queen. A really awesome idea if you ask me. This was y daughters favorite part!

The White Queen: Besides being one of my favorite recent actresses, the white queen is a very fun character played splendidly by Anne Hathaway. A story of who she is and really yearns to be. The slightly off side of someone who is a such an iconic character. One of the better story’s of the characters of the film.

Scoring Wonderland: The sound of a film can make or break a film. Something that controls the fluidity of a film along with guiding its viewers along the way. Danny Elfman scored this beauty and explains how he gets there.

Effecting Wonderland: this is where it all happens. The majority of this film is CG and this feature goes into the backend ways that Wonderland comes to life is so many different ways.

Stunts of Wonderland: an inside look at the ideas behind the stunts, the way they go about making them, rehearsing them along with the steps of the actual stunt.

Making the Proper Size: size is a very large part of this film. from the red queen to the small Alice to the weird bodies of the red queen’s right hand man. This feature is something i have always wanted to understand.

Cakes of Wonderland: from the tea party to the eat me cake that Alice finds, there are cake props everywhere. What a way to make you hungry during the special features.

Tea Party Props: The tea party is not a very large part of the film but something that sticks out in a great way. This is how they went about making it the perfect tea party.

Overall the Alice in Wonderland Blu-ray release is one that should amaze you all. The colors, the sites and sounds all aim to please. The transfer is spot on and the audio track is amazing. Definitely run out and pick this one up.

Enjoy Alice in Wonderland!

On Thursday morning, Thierry Fremaux, head of the Cannes Film Festival, revealed the films that will be playing at this year’s Festival de Cannes.

American entries include Doug Liman’s (The Bourne Identity) Fair Game, a political thriller starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, which will be competing for the Palm d’Or as well as Inside Job, Kaboom, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Sundance winner Blue Valentine, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, which will open the festival, and Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.

See the complete list of films below:

Michael Douglas and Shia LaBeouf in Wall Street 2

Opener
Robin Hood, U.S.-U.K., Ridley Scott

Competition
Another Year, U.K., Mike Leigh
Biutiful, Spain-Mexico, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Burnt by the Sun 2, Germany-France-Russia, Nikita Mikhalkov
Certified Copy, France-Italy-Iran, Abbas Kiarostami
Fair Game, U.S., Doug Liman
Hors-la-loi, France-Belgium-Algeria, Rachid Bouchareb
The Housemaid, South Korea, Im Sang-soo
La nostra vita, Italy-France, Daniele Luchetti
La Princesse de Montpensier, France, Bertrand Tavernier
Of Gods and Men, France, Xavier Beauvois
Outrage, Japan, Takeshi Kitano
Poetry, South Korea, Lee Chang-dong
A Screaming Man, France-Belgium-Chad, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
Tournee, France, Mathieu Amalric
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Spain-Thailand-Germany-U.K.-France, Apichatpong Weerasethakul
You, My Joy, Ukraine-Germany, Sergey Loznitsa

Un Certain Regard
Adrienn Pal, Hungary-Netherlands-France-Austria, Agnes Kocsis
Aurora, Romania, Cristi Puiu
Blue Valentine, U.S., Derek Cianfrance
Chatroom, U.K., Hideo Nakata
Chongqing Blues, China, Wang Xiaoshuai
The City Below, Germany-France, Christoph Hochhausler
Film Socialisme, Switzerland-France, Jean-Luc Godard
Ha Ha Ha, South Korea, Hong Sang-soo
Les Amours imaginaires, Canada, Xavier Dolan
Life Above All, France, Oliver Schmitz
Los labios, Argentina, Ivan Fund, Santiago Loza
Octubre, Peru, Daniel Vega
Qu’est-il arrive a Simon Werner?, France, Fabrice Gobert
Rebecca H., France, Lodge Kerrigan
R U There, Netherlands, David Verbeek
The Strange Case of Angelica, Portugal, Manoel de Oliveira
Tuesday, After Christmas, Romania, Radu Muntean
Udaan, India, Vikramaditya Motwane

Out of Competition
Tamara Drewe, U.K., Stephen Frears
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, U.S., Oliver Stone
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, U.K.-Spain, Woody Allen

Midnight Screenings
Kaboom, U.S.-France, Gregg Araki
L’autre monde, France-Belgium, Gilles Marchand

Special Screenings
Abel, Mexico, Diego Luna
Chantrapas, France, Otar Iosseliani
Draquila — L’Italia che trema, Italy, Sabina Guzzanti
Inside Job, U.S., Charles Ferguson
Nostalgia de la luz, France, Patricio Guzman 
Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, Netherlands, Sophie Fiennes

This year’s competition jury is presided over by director Tim Burton and also includes Benicio Del Toro and Kate Beckinsale. The prestigious festival’s 63rd competition will take place from May 12th until the 23rd.

Oh frabjous day! Here at last is a Tim Burton film that fulfills the magical promise and eccentric whimsy that the off-kilter director has been teasing us with all these long years. Not quite the vision that Lewis Carroll imagined when he wrote Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass, this Alice is all the best possible parts of that fantasia coupled with the better instincts of Burton’s own voracious imagination.

Earning the title ‘wonderland’, the phantasmal dreamscapes of Alice’s adventure unfold with a pastoral, surreal beauty that spring to odd and awkward life in 3D. This is not the immersive technique of Avatar, but instead a kind of pop-up book diorama where we feel we can run our hands over each lovely, absurd image and they both have depth, and not-depth. The fx have been used to build an animated world that stretches the boundaries of what we are willing to expect and the grand delight of Burton’s universe is not that he gives us things we have never seen before, but instead reintroduces us to dreams we had long forgotten we had.

By basing most of the character designs on John Tenniel’s classic engravings  Burton pulls out a collective understanding of what Alice should be and the images onscreen reinforce childhood memories of a land full of illogical and irrational beings and dark, strange adventure.  Towards the end of the film, when the Jabberwocky comes whiffling through that tulgey wood and burbling in the foreboding tones of Christopher Lee, I was transported directly back to youth and I couldn’t help but feel a bit perplexed.

This indeed, is just as I had imagined it as a child and yet, I never would have placed Lee’s voice in its mouth. That touch is perfect though, and it aligns the Carroll creations, the pop awareness, and Burton’s own sensibility in one shimmering moment of fantastic delight. Almost the entirety of this new Alice is that way, a mythological and mad miasma of the concerns and insecurities of adulthood laid perilously over the matter-of-fact logic that often accompanies childhood.

Carroll purists, and I don’t honestly know how many of those are out there, may take offense at the way Burton has streamlined and arranged their story. For one thing, this isn’t a remake exactly or an adaptation of Through the Looking Glass. Instead, it’s a sequel of sorts, using Alice’s forgetting of the original events to make her return to Underland (as a child she mistakenly cited it as wonderland) new and uncertain while still including most of the signposts and moments that we know and love. The story follows a different tact that belongs more to the land of Oz or Narnia than to Wonderland. Alice is a prophesied warrior, The Red Queen an insecure tyrant, and The Mad Hatter a pitiable member of the royal court, faithful but fallen on hard times. All of this has been done no doubt so that audience members can have a more relatable, familiar fantasy to hold on to.

I personally didn’t mind, as the new adventure satisfies on a narrative and thematic level and it allows Alice to come to the forefront of the story in a way she never has before. Mia Wasikowska is a vision of lovely innocence and curiosity as Alice and wisely screenwriter Linda Woolverton has aged  the character so she’s hovering in the uncertain ‘underland’ that exists beyond adolescence but just before the boundaries of adulthood.

On her first trip to Wonderland Alice was merely observer and testifier to the insane ramblings and riddles of its inhabitants. Now, with Wasikowska channeling reserves of youthful courage and confidence, she makes choices and interacts with the roiling universe she finds before her. Watching Alice confront and comfort the frumious Bandersnatch–think Jim Henson Creature Shop meets a bloated wolverine– is one of those sublime instances where Burton expertly has two things going on at once; Alice is growing up, and she’s reclaiming her youthful destiny.

The rest of the characters are realized in a multitude of ways. Most of them are completely CGi, and this goes for all of the monsters like the aforementioned Jabberwocky, Bandersnatch and the deadly Jub-Jub bird as well as the more benign residents of Wonderland like Bayard the hound, the door-mouse, the White Rabbit, and the oafish Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Some of the characters are played by actors but have been deformed and manipulated in the editing room so they are monstrous caricatures of real people.

The least effective is Crispin Glover’s Stain, the toadie and sometimes lover (ick!) of the Red Queen. Glover is quirky and fine from an acting perspective, but the strange decision to digitally elongate his body so he’s a thin imposing wisp of a man is off. It never looks plausible and so most of the time we are looking at something that reminds us of Gumby with an eye patch. Better is Depp’s Mad Hatter who is more or less the same character he always plays in a Burton film; the oddball whose extreme external flaws (he’s got eyes that don’t dilate, a lisp that never leaves, and a Scottish accent that disappears on and off, as well as a mind that goes everywhere and nowhere) mask the fact he is made internally of strong and steadfast stuff.

The character who steals the show however is Helena Bonham Carter as The Red Queen. The special effects work completely for her, and I think it’s because she’s mostly a giant head on a tiny body. We aren’t even thinking about the rest of her because that enormous orb on her shoulders has the expressiveness of Carter’s own face and those piercing, half-mad eyes stare so intently we dare look elsewhere for fear of losing a head. Carter makes the Queen more than a tyrant and less than a fully realized person.

This is exactly what the film needs though. She was an abstract absurdity in the book and all of her human traits are seemingly based on what Burton knows about outsiders; the way they can draw strength inwardly to combat difference or insecurely lash out and surround themselves with what they believe to be ‘normalcy.’ In Burton’s version, the Queen’s greatest crime isn’t her subversion of Underland, but that she is living an elaborate lie that requires all to be subjugated to her deluded self image. She’s the mirror monster of what Alice will become if she falls victim to outside expectations.

As escapist entertainment, I found the movie to be frightfully good. It has some compelling layers but mostly it just works as a joyful puzzle of rich imagery and random bizarre flights of fancy. The details are terrific and scanning Underland gives us a peek at hundred of diverse and odd species that one many only fully see when this arrives on DVD. As a fantasy fable for youngsters and their parents I believe it also works. It is transporting and exhilarating and only intermittently dark. For Burton, abandoning that constant itching melancholy proves to be as effective and freeing as taking off an albatross around the neck. Wonderland is better, brighter and more confident than almost anything he’s ever d0ne.

A master of the misfit, Tim Burton has faced the mirror images of his own career expectations and emerged with a new and beautiful masterwork. Calloo Calay!

Rating: ★★★★½ 

Gaze at the wonder that is Tim Burton’s Um from Umbridge Alice in Wonderland-

I’m trying not to gush but GEEZ this movie looks good! I haven’t been terribly impressed by the trailers but this clip really does it for me. I think the difference is the computer graphics just don’t translate well in the trailers (in my opinion) but here in this clip they look wonderful, even Helena Bonham Carter’s grotesque large head looks good. Also missing from the trailers has been any real dialogue beyond catchphrases; again, it’s Carter that makes me smile and laugh with lines like “anyone with a head that large is welcome in my court.

So this isn’t the Alice in Wonderland of your youth (nor mine) but we are in the capable hands of one the best filmmakes alive who’s sure to show us a thing or two about Wonderland we may have missed first time around. Catch Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland in Disney Digital 3D on March 5, 2010 until then I think I’ll throw in my DVD of the Disney’s original 1951 Alice in Wonderland .

Check out this new clip from Alice in Wonderland :

Headlining the top of my must-see films this season is Tim Burton’s version of Alice in Wonderland.  Recently announced to debut in 3-D and releasing at the start of next month, it seems to be on the tip of  a lot of movie buff tongues. I’m big fan of Lewis Caroll’s nonsensical novels and with each new publicity still and trailer I feel like I’ve got equal cause for concern and elation.

To be sure, this might be the closest we will ever get cinematically to the original tone of Caroll’s novels. Visually, I’m psyched and have been ever since I caught glimpse of the Jabberwocky winging it’s way through Wonderland. On a visual level this one is probably gonna melt your eyes into sticky goo, which is of course a good thing.

But what about those other elements? We know what Wonderland will look like? But what will it feel like? Will the script have proper emotion, the actors tapping into the right strain of madness?

Just as importantly, what will it sound like?

Thanks to Universal Music, you can discover the answer to that question yourself. The ‘Almost Alice’ widget below allows you to listen to every song on the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ soundtrack (this isn’t the score, mind you).

The mix of artists on the soundtrack is indeed eclectic, including Avril Lavigne, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, All American Rejects, and in a mad bit that would no doubt delight the Hatter, Franz Ferdinand. There’s even a cover of  “Very Good Advice” by Robert Smith, which is the only song that also featured in the original Disney animated film back in 1951.

Check out the streaming versions of the songs below, and the preorder for Amazon is up here: http://bit.ly/AlmAlcOST

The first movie advertisement to run during Super Bowl 44 in Miami on CBS was Disney’s ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

ALICE was the only film to advertise during the first half of the game starring Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts versus Drew Brees and the New Orleans Saints. The second film to run an ad in the Super Bowl was PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

The ALICE ad has to be a first Super Bowl appearance for Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. ALICE IN WONDERLAND will be in theaters March 5th, 2010 and PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME will follow in the summer of 2010.

With 37 years now since the final installment of the original series, and the lackluster performance and lukewarm response of Tim Burton’s 2001 “re-imagining,” you might think that Twentieth Century Fox would have given up on attempting to reignite the Planet Of The Apes franchise.

You’d be wrong.

It had been reported that Oscar-nominated screenwriter Scott Frank (Minority Report, Out Of Sight) had long been working on re-tooling an existing script for a proposed series reboot, with plans to also direct. With recent reports that Frank had officially left the project citing creative differences, the new Apes looked to be on the fast-track to development death.

However, insiders are now claiming that Fox very quickly filled Frank’s void by enlisting writer Jamie Moss (Street Kings) to put the finishing touches on the script, and have even called in the screenplay’s original writers, Amanda Silver (The Hand That Rocks The Cradle) and Rick Jaffa (1997′s long-forgotten The Relic) to help.

Frank’s proposed plotline (referred to secretly as Caesar) served less as a remake of the original film, in which Charlton Heston’s astronaut crash lands on a violent planet inhabited by intelligent simians, and more as a reworking of the series’ fourth act, Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes, in which the world’s first advanced ape, named Caesar, spreads his knowledge throughout the world’s primate population, and leads an eventual uprising.

Whereas the Caesar of the 1972 original was the son of a time-travelling ape couple from the franchise’s earlier films, the reboot presents Caesar as the product of intense psychological testing, resulting in his highly-evolved intellect.

No word yet on a possible director for the new Apes, but keep your eyes glued to Atomic Popcorn, as this project seems to be moving very quickly.