"Many of you are not going to like this film", safely predicts Terry Gilliam in a filmed Director's Statement at the outset, together with other stuff about his discovery of his inner child ("It turned out to be a little girl") and a viewer advisory not to forget to laugh. Unhelpfully, he makes no further appearances to advise the viewer on where and when. After the documentary evidence of Lost in La Mancha — about the aborted Don Quixote project of the director — and the whopping flop of his The Brothers Grimm, it is heartening, in the first place, just to see Gilliam working again and working "small." (Small cast, small scope, albeit big special effects.) We have ample opportunity, however, to repent our initial generosity over the course of a dark, dark, even slightly dirty fairy tale to do with a modern-day Alice in Wonderland (the Lewis Carroll classic is on open display to help us make the connection), more precisely an Alice in Tideland, who is soon relieved of her chain-smoking chocoholic mother and her drug-addicted Denmark-obsessed father (not, though, relieved of his rotting corpse), and who, stuck out in the middle of an Andrew Wyeth nowhere, must subsist on peanut butter and settle for companionship with a black-garbed, bee-allergic, one-eyed Wicked Witch or Cruel Queen figure, the latter's lobotomized brother, a talking squirrel, and a literal handful of finger-puppet dolls' heads. Altogether, a farrago of grotesquerie and bizarrerie, shot with a lot of wide-angle lenses, as if it were not hideous enough already. Jodelle Ferland, Janet McTeer, Brendan Fletcher, Jeff Bridges, Jennifer Tilly. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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