Woody and the Hatter: Separated at Birth?

In honor of the wide release of Alice in Wonderland, we bring you this post from last month ... 

 Images of Tim Burton's take on Alice in Wonderland have been leaking out for quite a while now, and yes, there has been something disturbingly ... familiar about the art direction.  Sure, sure, obviously the Queen of Hearts is a grotesque rendering of early Queen Elizabeth I with a dash of  Bette Davis, the White Queen looks like a marceled silent film star, and the March Hare resembles a pop-eyed, brain-challenged Senator from Sath Ca'lina.  We just couldn't figure out who Johnny Depp's Hatter most resembled ... until Rotten Tomatoes made the mistake of putting these two pictures next to each other:

Need we say more?  And -- wait, is that Pixar's attorney calling?  Hellewww....?

 

Neil Gaiman vs. Stephen Colbert ... and Gaiman Wins!!

Incredible but true!!

It was, without a doubt, one of the oddest interviews this season, part of a show which consistently has the oddest interviews on TV.  Stephen Colbert, in full fulmination, grilled Neil (Sandman, Neverwhere, Coraline) Gaiman about his newest YA novel, The Graveyard Book.  Gaiman actually held his own, didn't try too hard to out-weird Stephen, and actually seemed to be enjoying himself.  And who'd have thought that Colbert would not only know who Tom Bombadil was, but could actually recite a whole Tolkien ditty about the man?  As previously reported: weird...

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Outlander: An Overlooked Gem

It was in the theaters for about an hour and a half, and slipped onto DVD shelves in May with barely a quiver, but amidst all the slam-bang-boom of the summer blockbusters, perhaps the best fantasy / action / adventure / sf / monster / kick-ass movie of the year remains: Outlander.

Simple but surprising plot: an alien soldier, indistinguishable from humans, crashes on Earth and inadvertently releases a horrible creature, the Morwen, on an unsuspecting Earth, where it immediately begins killing as fast as it can. The alien enlists the help of the locals to capture and kill the thing before it can kill even more and propagate. Major problem: the alien landed in Norway c. 905. So it's Vikings vs. Predator/Alien, but better.

Jim Caviezel is tremendous as Kainan, the alien solider/hero. Sophia (Moonlight) Myers is absolutely beautiful and believable as Freya, his warrior-woman love, and you'll barely recognize a near-cameo of Ron (Hellboy) Perlman as a rival king. But the real star of the movie is the Morwen, without a doubt the best CG monster of the year and then some. And you should see it underwater. And on fire! And this ain't even the climax! It's an excellent example of just how good CG can be if the design and animation is top-notch and the context and editing seals the deal.

Here’s a merely representative sequence from the middle of the movie – this ain’t even the climax! – to show just how good CG can be if the design and animation is top-notch and the context and editing seals the deal.



The good news:  Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain, who wrote this nice piece, (McCain directed, too) have just been hired to do a major rewrite on the Conan the Barbarian script (and no, they still haven't cast Conan yet)..  Maybe there’s hope for that project after all…

Netflix or buy Outlander here.