Alice in Wonderland

Poor Alice. Such is the generally off-center quality of the attempts to pin Alice in Wonderland to the celluloid wall that most of us don't even think of a movie (except for the 1951 animated Disney version) when asked about modern takes on Lewis Carroll's hallucinatory Victorian children's classic, but rather a song: Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit." The latest effort, a made for TV special from the creators of the vastly superior Gulliver's Travels and other more middling entries, manages to be one of the more faithful and unquestionably the most visually spectacular adaptations to date, if also one of the more turgid, bogged down by a series of disastrous star turns (to name names: Ben Kingsley as Major Caterpillar, Christopher Lloyd as the White Knight, Robbie Coltrane and George Wendt as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Miranda Richardson as the Queen of Hearts and, taking top honors in this category, Gene Wilder as the Mock Turtle). Tina Majorino is fine as Alice, the young girl who chases a large white rabbit (kudos to Jim Henson's Creature Shop for creating a puppet cast that is--with a few notable exceptions--more interesting than the human cast), falls into a very deep hole, and ends up in Wonderland, a topsy-turvy magical world full of quirky characters and strange situations. Clocking in at 129 minutes, Alice in Wonderland wears out its welcome long before the end credits roll, but there are a few highlights: 1) the opening half-hour, 2) the Mad Hatter's Tea party (featuring a brilliant, perfectly Carollian performance by Martin Short), 3) Peter Ustinov's moving recitation of "The Walrus and the Carpenter," and 4) I'll give a half-nod to Whoopi Goldberg's too briefly seen (no pun intended) Cheshire Cat. For $19.98, it's hard to pass this one up, but I'd definitely recommend judicious use of the "fast forward" button here. (R. Pitman)