Like Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., Christopher Nolan’s Inception, or Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch invites the viewer to deconstruct a narrative puzzle – nested realities, stories embedded within stories – that in Snyder’s case allows him to present a series of meticulously rendered alternate worlds. As anybody who has seen or read ... read more »
Feb 232009
Every one of Henry Selick’s four feature films to date has dealt with alternate realities. In the Tim Burton-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), the ghoulish Jack Skellington finds a hole in a tree that leads him, Alice-style, from his own reality, Halloween Town, to the very different alt-reality of Christmas Town. In James and ... read more »
Feb 152009
Dave McKean’s MirrorMask (above) and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth were released within a year of each other. Both are women-in-wonderland tales. Pan’s Labyrinth is about a little girl who flees from her evil Spanish-fascist stepfather into a woodsy fairyland. MirrorMask is about a ‘tween with a dying mom who enters a dream world in ... read more »
Feb 102009
The Alices in flight, those beautiful women alone in their cars on the run – Sylvia Kristel in Alice ou la Dernière Fugue, Candace Hilligoss in Carnival of Souls, and Inger Stevens in “The Hitch-Hiker” episode of The Twilight Zone – recall the most iconic of such women, Janet Leigh as Marion Crane on the ... read more »
Feb 082009
Alice (Sylvia Kristel) has an argument with her husband. She drives off into the pouring rain. There is an accident. When she wakes up, the sun is shining, but something is not quite right. She comes upon a stone wall that seems to have no beginning and no end. She meets various characters who are ... read more »
Feb 062009
There was Alice, who journeyed to Wonderland and through the looking glass, Dorothy Gale, who was carried on a cyclone to Oz, and Wendy Darling, who accompanied lost boy Peter Pan to Neverland. All three meet as adult women in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s X-rated graphic novel, Lost Girls (above). Moore, the genius author ... read more »
