most utterly horrible thing of 2010

in film terms anyway.

Not just Depp, the whole thing.

I normally can't be bothered to write at any length about films or music I hate but I have to make an exception for this.

This film utterly depressed me.

Burton, a brilliant talent whose early career contains at least two near masterpieces, is seemingly intent on wiping out trace memory of those early, unique films. This is cinematic fraud, a cash-courting atrocity.

He's managed to take one of the weirdest and wildest of all children's tales and make the least interesting version of it ever. The maligned 1972 Alice, while stilted and often cinematically static, at least has some imagination and a lovely John Barry score. It also strives for a sense of wonder, something completely lacking here.

It’s a relentlessly ugly, shrill, atrocious piece of whimsy that annoyed me from start to finish and contains an end scene (with Depp, mugging gracelessly throughout) that made me want to set my own face alight with rage and despair. Even the kids in the cinema were clearly bored and restless by the end.

The fact that Burton bases his snow queen (Anne Hathaway with white hair - continuing Burton's odd obsession of taken beautiful raven-haired actresses and putting them in horrendous blonde wigs) on Nigella Lawson(?) tells you everything you need to know about where this ‘dark visionary’ currently is. He’s now a bogus outsider, a perpetual grumpy Goth kid who thinks he’s ‘weird’ but is in fact utterly, utterly conservative.

There are so many interesting, freaky and unique versions of this tale.

That said, if you judge good cinema by the dollar, this is up there with the best of them. It's already made about 800 million dollars worldwide - so what the fuck do I know?

Perhaps Burton might use some of the cash to go back and make a good - or at the very least interesting - film again?

other horrible films from 2010

The Lovely Bones
Whatever Works
Nowhere Boy
Tamara Drewe
The Tourist
The Kid
Micmacs
Green Zone
Kaboom!


disappointments
Scott Pilgrim
Never Let Me Go
Somewhere