Morning: Rosie and I go to see Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland reboot at IMAX Melbourne. The car park is overcrowded with parents and cars, due to a baby expo next door. Rosie talks her way into a car space. Our consensus is that Burton watered down his vision for Disney: Alice has a couple of good sequences, but it's a 2D film marketed on Avatar's 3D hype, Depp's performance blurs into his other collaborations with Burton, and we would have preferred to learn more about the (reunited) family of bloodhound dogs.
Burton, his wife Helena Bonham-Carter and Depp: how long can a team maintain its high performance, across multiple projects, before it becomes derivative of earlier work?
Lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in Richmond's Victoria St precinct: amazing food, confusion amongst the waiters.
Evening: half-watching Paul McGuigan's Push (2009): the Hong Kong scenes remind Rosie of Kar Wai Wong's superior 2046 (2004). The film's opening sequence creates a narrative that combines several memes: Cold War paranoia, the early 1970s Nazi Occult cycle, the 1990s disclosure of government funding into remote viewing psychics in which the money went up in smoke, and David Cronenberg's early films. Push's one genuinely interesting idea was to have a taxonomy of different human capabilities that interact in a simple rules-based system.
Burton, his wife Helena Bonham-Carter and Depp: how long can a team maintain its high performance, across multiple projects, before it becomes derivative of earlier work?
Lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in Richmond's Victoria St precinct: amazing food, confusion amongst the waiters.
Evening: half-watching Paul McGuigan's Push (2009): the Hong Kong scenes remind Rosie of Kar Wai Wong's superior 2046 (2004). The film's opening sequence creates a narrative that combines several memes: Cold War paranoia, the early 1970s Nazi Occult cycle, the 1990s disclosure of government funding into remote viewing psychics in which the money went up in smoke, and David Cronenberg's early films. Push's one genuinely interesting idea was to have a taxonomy of different human capabilities that interact in a simple rules-based system.
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