“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense.” — Alice

JOHNNY DEPP

I have my reservations about the upcoming Tim Burton film based on Lewis Carroll’s novels, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.” Of course, I’m a stick-in-the-mud where this subject is concerned; I think filmmakers should be original and stop appropriating the classics. As I have written here with respect to Charles Dickens’ story “A Christmas Carol,” I have some patience with producers and directors who try to faithfully transfer a classic tale from print to the screen or stage, but they seldom do that without succumbing to the temptation to change what the author wrote.

Already Burton has changed the beginning of the story. He has replaced Carroll’s image of Alice lapsing into a dream while her sister reads to her on a summer day to Alice running away to avoid an anticipated marriage proposal. The young, wide-eyed Alice of Carroll’s story — and the real Alice Liddell who inspired the character — is now a sophisticated 17-year-old girl played by a 19-year-old actress, Linda Woolverton.

LINDA WOOLVERTON

What makes a person like Tim Burton think he can tell Lewis Carroll’s story better than Carroll told it?

I am interested in the casting of Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. Burton seems bent on capturing the dark undertones — including insanity — that Carroll employed in his stories, and Depp is well equipped to bring to life one of  the most insane characters of all. This aspect of the books has  been explored before — for example in the 1985 film “Dreamchild,” a fanciful recollection of Alice Liddell Hargreaves’ visit to Columbia University in 1932 for an observance of Carroll’s centenary.

ALICE LIDDELL

As did other tinkerers before him, Burton also combines Carroll’s two novels into the one production, as though each did not have its own integrity in Lewis’s mind and in fact.

It disappoints me that a generation of children — along with much of the generation that gave them birth — will see Burton’s film and accept it as a fair representation of Carroll’s work — missing out on all the satire and word games, tortured philsophy and twisted logic that made the Alice books the standard by which all such books would be measured.

But I suppose that’s less an indictment against Tim Burton than it is another sign of how time has passed me by.

THE MAD HATTER

There are no small roles.

JOHN DILLINGER

Amid all the tsurris about Michael Jackson’s death bubbles the question of how long his fame will endure. He will have done well, it seems, if the public fixation with him lasts as long as its interest in John Dillinger, an anti-social holdup man and murderer who was shot to death 75 years ago. Once Independence Day is out of the way, we can focus our attention on John Dillinger Day, an observance that commemorates his death, which occurred on July 22, 1934.

There are those, of course, who say that it wasn’t Dillinger who was gunned down outside a movie theater in Chicago, and I suppose we’ll have to live with those who will claim that Jackson didn’t die in Los Angeles last week but is living in Buenos Aires with Adolph Hitler, Emilia Earhart, and Elvis Presley. At last, a fourth for bridge.

The reviews in the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post are unenthusiastic about the movie “Public Enemies,” in which Johnny Depp portrays Dillinger. Dan Zak writes in the Post:

JOHNNY DEPP

There’s no excitement in the bank-robbing, no thrill of the chase, no emotion over justice served or thwarted. Depp’s Dillinger is neither charming nor despicable, nor does he occupy that delicious gray area between the two. His spree unspools dispassionately, cold as a Colt .380.

Peter Rainer in the Monitor writes:

Mann’s hero-worshipy treatment of Dillinger is undercut by the film’s dreamtime existentialist aura. In reality, the working poor cheered Dillinger’s bank raids but in “Public Enemies” the Depression is just a prop, and so Dillinger’s populist hero status, what little we see of it, makes scant sense. (This is probably why we see so little of it.) Missing, as a result, is the knockabout tumult of a time when gangsters could ascend to the same stardom as the movie actors who played gangsters. Dillinger was, for a while, every bit as big as Jimmy Cagney. Mann pirouettes around the twin realities of the Depression and the star culture it engendered and offers instead a moody blues doominess. It’s a vacuum filling a vacuum.

So Depp becomes neither Clyde Barrow nor Robin Hood. Maybe, in his old age, he can play Bernie Madoff.

Doo be doo be do.

 

FRANK SINATRA

It’s a sure sign that the semester is over that I’m spending my time reading Hollywood bloggers. And that’s why I came across Nikki Finke’s report that Universal Studios prefers Johnny Depp to play Frank Sinatra in a Martin Scorsese biopic about the kid from Hoboken. Finke says Scorsese has his eye on Leonardo DiCaprio for the role. Pay attention – this is important stuff! 

I don’t know that I’ll be patronizing this movie, because while I like a lot of his films and records, I’ve never been able to summon much interest in Sinatra as a person. If I do see this movie, it will be because I’m curious about the challenge it’s taking on. Sinatra is such a strong and pervasive personality that I wonder if it will be possible to accept DiCaprio or Depp or any other actor. As it is, Finke says the actor – whoever he is – won’t have to sing, because the songs will come from Sinatra’s recordings. No one would buy another voice as Sinatra’s. The question is, will anyone buy another mug as Sinatra’s?