Lord of the Slithy Toves, er, The Chronicles of Wonderland, no, wait...

Given the presence of younger daughter in our home, there was no way we could avoid going to see Tim Burton's version of Alice in Wonderland. I had been noting the reviews in the newspapers and blogs; no one seemed to like it much. Still, I clung on to hope. More than one reviewer hadn't liked Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory either, and I had thought that was rather charming and far closer to the spirit of the original book than the 1971 version.

Oh dear. The film looks great, no mistake. The casting is nothing to complain about except for Alice herself; Mia Wasikowska comes across as a paler version of Gwyneth Paltrow --- with less personality. It is rather fun to see Tim Pigott-Smith and Geraldine James (Captain Merrick and Sarah Layton from Jewel in the Crown) as a married titled couple; in this movie, he's a goodie and she's a baddie.

Burton apparently decided to side-step the whole "series of odd happenings" of the books and make a movie about a nearly-grown-up Alice that might just have well been entitled: Alice: Return to Wonderland. It ends up being yet another "innocents against the forces of evil" epic which is what the Alice stories never were. The only references to Lewis Carroll's Alice are flashback scenes with a rather ill-looking six-year-old Alice who inexplicably goes to bed wearing pink lip gloss. Naturally, nineteen-year-old Alice dons armour and fights the Jabberwock herself in a stirring battle scene finale, before returning to the real world, turning down the offer of marriage from the stuck-up prig and embarking upon a life of adventure and commerce. Oh yes, and the Mad Hatter expresses his triumph and Alice her defiance with a techno-dance move....

As I cottoned on that we were in for another mélange of Lord of the Rings/Narnia/The Golden Compass, I soon drifted off. I was awoken by a mother who was one of hostesses of a birthday party of pre-teen girls in our row. She'd been on a popcorn run and needed to softly call to us twice to pass back in to her seat. The Resident Fan Boy and I thought it might not have been obvious that we were snoozing, due to the large 3D glasses, but decided later that our lolling heads and open mouths might have given us away.

Youngest daughter, however, was entranced, so I guess it was worth it.

I'll tell you what I did enjoy, though. There was a very funny column in yesterday's Ottawa Citizen about refusing to get a cell-phone. (Mobiles for you Brits.) I had a wonderful giggle; I don't think I even laughed once during Alice in Wonderland.

A Clockwork Grapefruit

These are the signs of the approach of spring in Hades:

1. Dust and the taste of salt in your mouth. With neither snow nor glaciers to hold them down, the gravel, sand, and salt rise unimpeded into the air. This heralds...

2. The unbelievably loud roar of street cleaners mowing up and down the streets between midnight and 3 am. Even our double-glazed, airtight casement windows fail to hold out the din.


3. Chunky rivers dotted with motorboats of ice wranglers. We have special machines that roll out on the ice to begin breaking it up, but I missed them this year.

4. Cars, trucks, and buses brushing by pedestrians in frighteningly close proximity. After six months of being shielded from the road by glacial trenches and palisades of snow, one feels positively naked and exposed to traffic. Rear-view mirrors appear to whistle past one's ears.

5. Cardinals.


6. In a related development, a bird feeder that now needs refilling again after hanging unnibbled for more than a month. I don't know if the birds that were here in January found somewhere warm to hang out for February or simply got frozen to the trees. Either they or some new birds are now busily ripping through my seed supply.

7. The schoolyard is a vast expanse of glossy steel-coloured ice. On warmer days, this is very slick, and on even warmer days, it's a hazardous swamp with a lubricious and perilous bottom. Watch the ankle-biters sink shrieking from view.

8. The glaciers and piles of filthy discarded snow, resembling frozen tsunamis and other bad choices for surfing, are retreating centimetre by centimetre revealing perfectly preserved dog droppings and other delights.

9. Native Ottawans are now insisting on wearing open-toed shoes and sandals, despite - 11 Celsius temperatures. Because it's spring, dammit.

10. Blood-curdling screams from the bathroom to summon The Resident Fan Boy who has been doing his morning puttering in the kitchen.
 No, wait. That's not a sign of impending spring; that was me yesterday morning.

 This is because I glanced in the mirror while wrestling with my contact lenses and saw something like this:Since brain injury has been a bit of a theme at this house for the past six months, my immediate thoughts were: Omigod-omigod-omigod, I've having a stroke; there's cranial bleeding; my brain is leaking away; I don't want to spend the whole bloody day in emergency.... However, it seemed too much of a coincidence that I had just been to the ophthalmologist the day before and had those pupil-dilating eye drops. A quick google revealed a host of horrible things that could be happening to me, but also mentioned that anisocoria (a pretty name for the condition that makes you look somewhat like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange) is also a fairly common reaction to eyedrops. Mind you, I've never had this reaction before after many many years of taking my nearsighted eyeballs for a checkup, but I decided to hold off the panicked phone call until I'd taken younger daughter to school. If I'd really had my wits about me, I'd have only made up one eye to creep out the Rockcliffe mums, but my sense of humour was somewhat diminished that morning. When I got home, my pupils were nearly the same size and after an hour they were back to normal and I decided not to bother the doctor.

So the evening found me relatively panic-free, surveying a television schedule with little to offer. Thank God for the Turner Classic Movie channel. In between movies, they showed a delightful documentary of Chuck Jones remembering his childhood, illustrated with animated version of his rough drawings.

This got me to thinking of some of my favourite animated shorts. In my pre-mum days, I used to attend animation festivals regularly. I only had a faint recollection of one of my very favourites, in which two married animators took a soundtrack of their daughters talking and playing and transformed it into a luminous cartoon. And I found it! Here's "Windy Day" by John and Faith Hubley:
Another one I loved is one that seems to have vanished, a cartoon fantasy set to a 1930's recording of Fred Astaire singing "Puttin' on the Ritz" which is turned into a flight of fantasy with quite a bit of eroticism. I think it's from the early '80s. Let me know if you recognize it.

Finally, a delightful cartoon from then largely unknown Tim Burton:And yes, that is the glorious and classy Vincent Price himself narrating.

Now that my pupils are the same size, I don't feel quite like I would fit in perfectly with that last item. Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time to go out and get grazed by passing cars again...