General•Problems (and wonder) in Wonderland

• • sepslugseven
  • February 19
  • Permalink

  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1252091/Alices-weird-wonderland-Why-scenes-row-Tim-Burtons-fantastical-film-disappear-cinemas-fast-Cheshire-Cat.html
  
  
  
  
  
  The word is that watching Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland is the closest you can come to falling down the rabbit hole yourself and into Lewis Carroll's fantasy world.
  
  

• • sepslugseven
  • February 19
  • Permalink

  Those who have seen the film, or clips of it, say that it is utterly breathtaking, a hallucinatory alternate universe completely realised in every detail, from the sun streaming in through the gills of the mushrooms to the light falling on the individual fuzzy hairs on the caterpillar's back.
  
  It cost £158million to make and, with computer graphics mixed with live action and animation, it is more technically ambitious than anything Burton has done before. And it is in 3-D, putting it head-to-head with the sci-fi phenomenon that is Avatar.
  
  For screenwriter Linda Woolverton (The Lion King, Beauty And The Beast), the positive early reaction has been a vindication of her vision.
  
  'I wasn't trying to re-tell the old story; I was toying with the thought: what if Alice was older and she went back into Wonderland?
  
  But despite all this nurturing of Burton's vision, his movie is under threat of being smothered at birth. Quite extraordinarily, the UK's three largest cinema chains - Odeon, Vue and Cineworld - are threatening not to show it.
  
  They account for 65 per cent of the UK's cinemas, and 90 per cent of the 3-D screens, so the threat is a serious one.
  Given that the premiere is next Thursday and the movie opens on March 5, it's a disaster.
  
  

• • sepslugseven
  • February 19
  • Permalink

  The cause of the angst is that Disney wants to release the film on DVD and Blu-ray only three months after it opens at the cinema, rather than the standard 17 weeks.
  
  It wants to get the DVD into the shops before the midsummer doldrums, and to capitalise on the marketing of the movie while it is still fresh in people's minds.
  
  But the cinemas are afraid that people will just wait to buy the film on DVD rather than spend money on going to the pictures. They aren't alone: four big cinema chains in Holland are boycotting the film and the Italians are rebelling, too.