I watched this movie just to see Jim Henson’s muppets, I was dissapointed since there are only around four muppet characters and they are only on screen for minutes.
The movie has basically nothing to do with Alice in Wonderland, it instead seems to be the story of a elderly woman facing mortality and realizing she blew her one chance at love with a pedophile at age ten.
:eek:
That is what her speech and the fantasy sequence at the end imply right?
I remember this movie only vaguely from childhood…I was just as disappointed as you. The back of the rental box showed g.d. muppets! That’s what I wanted to see.
I saw it when it came out, and found it to be enjoyable. I didn’t expect a Muppet extravaganza so it was good. I don’t remember it well enough to comment, so I’ll just spin a tale of seeing it.
My brother became a dad for the first time just before Christmas of 1985. A good group of my family went to the hospital on Christmas Eve to see mom, dad, and new baby. Then my sister and me went to see the movie. After the movie, we tried to get a drink. We were surprised that so many bars were closed for Christmas Eve, but finally found one open. For the occasion, they had free hors d’oeuvres and free Champagne (only two glasses though). So we had a couple of glasses of Champagne and ate lots of finger food. As we left, they gave us a coffee mug. And we paid nothing, but left a big tip.
That may have been the year with a big blizzard that night, but that’s another story.
It’s been awhile but I seem to recall that some of the more strange things that Lewis Carroll did were addressed in the movie. Her comment at the end is pretty much what anybody would think about him Basically it was loosely based on actual historical incidents and any drama in the movie was purely the invention of the screenwriters.
Personally I remember thinking that they neatly sidestepped the whole “Lewis Carroll was a pervert” thing.
The actor playing Carroll whose name I cannot recall did a masterful job of playing a sympathetic pedophile, it really is hard to hate him since he is so obviously inept.
The great Ian Holm, a truly gifted character actor.
Actually I don’t think the film in any way made it clear that Holm was an actual pedophile. Rather it strongly implied Alice’s mother was suspicious, which made the adult Alice suspicious in recollection. But he may have just been a very socially inept geek who was only really comfortable around children and was infatuated with the outgoing and precocious Alice ( very well played by Amelia Shankley ). Still not exactly normal or socially acceptable, but essentially harmless if kept at a safe remove. This is sort of the idea I got from the final sequence of scenes and the adult Alice’s final comments.
Especially since I really doubt it was the filmmaker’s intent to say if only Alice had just shacked up with this doddy old pedophile, what a loving relationship they would have had :p. I didn’t get the idea that the director was quite that transgressive.
Regardless, I’ve always rather liked that film. Probably the first time I had seen a truly threatening/disturbing muppet.
I hope you mean Carroll, not Holm.
My own theory is that Dodgson/Carroll was just the opposite of a pervert: someone who found sex so unimaginably creepy and disgusting that he sought the love he desired from people he regarded as non-sexual.
I think he meant that they didn’t make it clear that the character that Holm played was a pedophile.