I went to see Up in 3D tonight, one day earlier than expected due to a rare burst of spontaneity, and it was wicked awesome, but I will write more about that (and the other animated films I have seen/will see this week) another time.

What I really wanted to say was – the Barbican cinema, which is where we saw it, is 2 storeys underground and has no reception.

I can’t be the only one who thinks this is a genius way of terminating phone-pest behaviour during movies? Because it really bothers me. Texting and that buzzy vibrating noise are massive annoyances (let’s not even get started on actual phone ringing, and worse still, people picking it up and going “I’m in a movie!!” in what they think is a hushed tone but actually isn’t). I just think that unless you are a massively important VIP, in which case you can afford a private viewing of said film, there is no reason why anyone needs to use their phone during a movie.

So why is it not more common to just build cinemas with no reception? Singapore, take note!

there are some songs that just start your morning off with a euphoric bang. bon jovi’s “you give love a bad name” is one of them. so is, as i discovered this morning, matchbox twenty’s “real world”, which plastered a silly grin on my face as i walked to the tube station and which i am sure made me an object of ridicule to passersby, embarrassment fortunately offset by the said induced euphoria.

i ache everywhere (no, there is no explanation, i just ache despite a marked lack of physical exertion of late), i am really tired, i have an unprecedented amount of work to do, there are unforeseen snags with stuff, i have not left the office on time once in the past few weeks, monday promises to be a crazy busy day and i still can’t find anyone to take my extra proms ticket for monday night… not to mention i am perversely continuing to sleep deprive myself by wasting time online when i could be sleeping. why, why do i do this?

but! on the bright side there have been several pieces of good news from friends lately (yays all around), some good-ish news for myself, and teasingly tentative summer weather beckons this weekend. oh BBC, you and your vague, non-committal “sunny intervals”. you’ll probably change your mind in the morning too, as well as throughout the day, fickle and heartless as you are.

anyway, to all, i am very well, i know i owe multiple people emails/messages/chat time (i think the victorians had the right idea about setting aside a letter-writing time everyday for personal correspondence; it really piles up), but i haven’t forgotten and hope to catch up soon… “hope” being the operative word! the work and jobhunt and other annoying offline obligations never seem to end.

oh and the trailer for tim burton’s alice is really weird. i have decided to drop the idea altogether that it is an “alice film” and instead think of it as an entirely new fantasy world and characters which bear some vague, very distant resemblance to carroll’s – i am sure it will be a fabulous film but let it be said it has very little similarity to alice! it’s almost as egregious a departure as ella enchanted was, the latter being worse only because it made the pretense of being like the book while alice has the saving grace of being a sequel.

Given that I left the cinema practically slack-jawed in awe, and almost the whole of the film in some kind of rapture, this may not be tremendously objective… but I’ll try my best.

On the whole, I really, really liked HBP. I thought it was the best of the movies so far, and in order to assess this opinion I went home and re-watched PoA, my previous favourite, to see how they stacked up against each other. I definitely need to see HBP again before giving a definitive conclusion, but at this point I have to say that, given PoA had such a strong book as its base and HBP doesn’t, it is remarkable how good the latter movie is. And I think it is as good as, if not better, than the PoA movie.

I should preface this with a caveat that I’ve only read HBP once, when it first came out. I can’t remember a lot of things about the book, so missing things and niggly details didn’t bug me so much. And I did not go in expecting it to be anything like the book. If you do, you WILL be disappointed! If you’re prepared for something that departs significantly but still manages to capture the essence of the book and stands in its own right as a cracking good movie, you’ll enjoy it a lot more. Detailed review of things I liked and didn’t like below!

WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS.

DO NOT READ!

…if you haven’t seen the film and don’t want to be spoiled. It’s safely cut for everyone reading this here directly, but if you’re reading this in Google Reader, beware.

New Images From Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland | Comingsoon.net

Tim Burton’s remake of Alice – probably the movie I’ve been most anticipating, and dreading, since I first heard about it last September – has finally released its first preview images! The link I’ve posted above includes two that I haven’t seen before, including close ups of Mia Wasikowska as Alice and Matt Lucas’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Much as anything related to Disney and entitled “Alice in Wonderland” makes me twitch, because it smacks of the common hodgepodge amalgamation of both books that so well encapsulates a plethora of generic assumptions and simplifications of all things Alice, the fact that it was Tim Burton directing gave me a dull glimmer of optimism. And it was with enormous relief that I found out a while ago it’d be a sequel where an older Alice returns to Wonderland, rather than a movie based on the books. It actually sounds an awful lot like American McGee’s Alice, which makes me wonder if there was some unconscious, unacknowledged influence in Burton’s conception of the plot… though it’s much less dark than the game.

The good thing about it being a sequel is that my one of my biggest fears has been totally dealt with – that the books would become horribly mangled in an attempt to give the film’s stars their fair share of screen time. The Hatter, played by Johnny Depp, only gets one chapter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and a few scant pages in Through the Looking-Glass. And really you don’t see all that much of many of the other characters; they come and go very quickly as Alice muddles through the story.

And overall, the first impression I get from the released images is very, very positive: the landscapes are absolutely stunning, Alice has just the right amount of steely primness and vulnerability, Helena Bonham Carter’s Queen of Hearts looks appropriately insane and imperious, and Anne Hathaway’s White Queen is absolutely my favourite. The ever helpful Wiki article on the film informs me that her character doesn’t walk, but float, and I think that is totally perfect for the character! I can really see the vagueness, randomness and kind but scatterbrained nature of the White Queen coming out of that picture – less enthusiastic about the fact that Hathaway plans to play her as “cute but psycho”, as I really don’t think the White Queen is that psycho, but I quite like Anne Hathaway as an actress. So we’ll see.

Things I’m less enthusiastic about include the fact that they’ve combined the Queen of Hearts and Red Queen in Bonham Carter’s character (why? why? why? as if most people aren’t already confused enough about the two – if they wanted a character just to shout “Off with his head!” they could just have kept the Queen of Hearts and axed the Red Queen), and Johnny Depp’s weirdly clownlike Hatter. The typically Disney addition of mad is one I can live with, since although he was never called the Mad Hatter in the books, the word “mad” and plenty of madness does occur during the tea-party scene in particular. But… I am unconvinced that the excess of white makeup and Ronald-McDonald-esque wig are necessary. Johnny Depp is a genius actor and I adore him to bits so I am sure he will be brilliant anyway. I’m just not all that keen on the artistic direction of his character… and what is with the “10/6″ in the hat!! That is a lazy ripoff of the Disney Hatter which ALSO read “10/6″ – book Hatter’s hat thingy reads “In this style 10/6″.

AHHHHH!

Right. Okay… so, well, if I get off my Alice high horse (which I know I SHOULD, at least before I see the movie) and stop nitpicking, I have to say it looks absolutely brilliant. It has quashed most of my doubts and I’m really, really excited about it. I can’t believe we have to wait till 2010 to see it when they’ve already finished filming! In the meantime, I shall keep obsessively waiting for more photos and information.

(Where did the week go?!)

Having had an absolutely manic week at work, a great deal of which was spent fielding a million phone calls, emails, stacks of paperwork, and other such exciting administrative tasks in the absence of my supervisor who is on tour, I wish I had the energy to write a longer post but I am exhausted. It was with some degree of horror that I realised this feeling was probably going to be permanent once I start proper full-time non-intern work – which I need, and soon, as my bank balance is very alarmingly low. It is kind of deflating; I wish I could genuinely say I do what I do for the love of it, but I am passing on job ads now that I would love to do but just can’t because they don’t pay (or don’t pay much – £5400 for 12 months, seriously, guys).

On the way back home today, I was on a Northern line train that didn’t budge from Old Street for the longest time. I hadn’t actually noticed because I was (predictably) drifting in and out of sleep as best as I could sandwiched between two armrest-hoggers, but then suddenly a voice came crackling over the intercom to say “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your driver speaking. There is a passenger in the first carriage playing very loud music. They may not be aware I’m speaking to them. If you will please turn it down, this train will be on its way.”

Sometimes – only sometimes, really – I love London. It’s especially charming at night, when there aren’t quite as many harried people around. It’s easy to think, walking down Regent Street from Oxford Circus to Piccadilly at 10pm, that the lights are rather beautiful after all.

Other (very geeky) exciting event of the weekend: today, in a fit of bleeding-edge madness, I nuked my entire Linux Mint system in order to try Fedora 10… for no reason really other than to have a clean, shiny new OS to play with and the enticing promise of speed, sleekness, flexibility and maturity. It’s like that oft-quoted quip “Why do people climb Mount Everest? Because it’s there” – Fedora was there and I was simply itching to try it. The jury is still out but a perverse part of me enjoys re-learning how to tweak, configure and use a new system. Fun times!

I also re-watched Pleasantville yesterday. It’s one of those movies which I really, really love but for some reason haven’t watched that many times. Since its Singapore release in 1999 (yes it has been that long!) I’ve only seen it twice, once in the cinema 10 – ten! – years ago, oh my gosh, and once in 2004 when I watched it for GP film screening along with the classes I was teaching back then. I’d forgotten how good a movie it is. Watch it if you haven’t.

So this is the first released picture from the new film version of The Picture of Dorian Gray (called, pithily, Dorian Gray; why the filmmakers think it necessary to excise “The Picture of” I have no idea), due in fall 2009 and starring Ben Barnes as Dorian, Colin Firth as Lord Henry, and Rachel Hurd-Wood (Wendy in the 2003 Peter Pan) as Sybil Vane.

I don’t really know what to think of it. On the one hand, I do think Barnes is absolutely mouth-droppingly droolworthily gorgeous (easily out-prettying everyone else in Prince Caspian), and I don’t really have a problem with his acting. On the other hand… I simply can’t see him as Dorian. Dorian is blond-haired, blue-eyed, ivory-skinned, charming and beautiful; I will always, always remember him as having “rose-red youth and rose-white boyhood”, which is so suggestive of a delicacy and sensuality that I’m just not feeling from this picture or from Barnes in general.

It just baffles me how the perfect Dorian still hasn’t surfaced after multiple TV and film adaptations. I mean, Stuart Townsend? Really? And is it all that hard to find a blond actor to play him? I readily confess to being a bit of an overzealous stickler for book details when it comes to adaptations, where said details may not be not all that relevant (e.g. Dan Radcliffe having blue eyes rather than green), but I really think Dorian’s colouring is very important to the way his character comes across. I just can’t see brunettes doing the corrupted beautiful innocent thing so well.

Having expended 2 paragraphs ranting about Dorian, I should end by saying, in fairness to the filmmakers, that I think Colin Firth will do well as Lord Henry. Though I see him more as Basil, somehow – and this guy who’s playing Basil, Ben Chaplin? He could be Lord Henry, in my book. Go figure.