The Best Movie I Saw This Week: Alice in Wonderland

This week, most of the films I saw were part of our Cannes Proje(c)t. And the quality was very, very high. But eventually, I chose a movie outside the project, Alice in Wonderland (Clyde Geromini et al, 1951), as the best movie of the week. I had watched the Disney Classic before and I don't think I could ever get tired of it.

It is most likely the funniest film in the Disney Canon, with an absurdist and exaggerated sense of humour that I have to say, is perfectly encaptured in the Spanish dubbing of the film. I am a Nazi when it comes to seeing films in the Original Version but some of the Spanish Disney voices are so ingrained in my brain that it does not make sense watching them in any other way.

Another remarkable thing about the film is its rythm. Once Alice falls down the rabbit hole, it's non-stop crazy. It's impossible to play favorites; if I had to choose the parts I like best I'd go with the door, the dodo, and I would just list every moment in the film in chronological order. I mean, what's not to love? The story about the oysters is so delicious (like the oysters were!) and the scene with the flowers is so funny and original. The caterpillar is one of the most literal scenes from the wonderful novel. The one at the White Rabbit's house is so great with poor Bill. And the Cheshire Cat and the cards and the Queen and the trial and of course, the most iconic scene in the movie, the unbirthday party.

Alice in Wonderland is probably the only Disney film without a lesson to learn at the end, something very basic if you know the novel, that the Tim Burton version got wrong (among so many other things). And that is so cool because our heroine does not need to learn a lesson other than the one her sister is droning on about. I just love Alice as a character so much. She is funny, polite when she needs to be but generally she doesn't give a fuck what the crazy people in Wonderland think of her. I think that in this age of overpraising mediocre films such as Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2013) for not being medieval in their representation of women, it's a good idea to turn to the classics to see how things were done.

Other films I watched this week:

Topsy-Turvy (Mike Leigh, 2000)

Heremakono (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2003)

Uzak (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002)

The Return (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2003)

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (Marc Webb, 2014)

Capote (Bennett Miller, 2005)

Tiempo de Valientes (Damián Szifrón, 2005)
Tiresia (Bertrand Bonello, 2003)
The Three Burials of Melquíades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005)

Cannes Proje(c)t 2014

If the Oscars are the Super Bowl, Cannes announcements are Christmas Morning, if Santa Claus was a sadist and would only let you hear about the presents that you will receive throughout the year. And also, some of those presents are going to suck. But in general, the Cannes film festival is the best thing ever. It celebrates the best in film and most of my favorite directors choose the Croisette to showcase their latest films.

Any film festival is more entertaining the more you know about the directors showing their work. You can get excited for a specific film, you can laugh if the reviews are bad for some other. So, every year (this is the third) my boyfriend and I do the Cannes Proje(c)t. The (c) is between parentheses to help with the pronunciation, by the way. The Cannes Proje(c)t consists in the following: Once the official competition lineup is announced, we choose a previous film by each one of the directors selected. We watch them before the festival begins to get an idea of the different directors in competition, to remember films we wanted to revisit and many times, in my case, to fill out shame holes in my watchlist. After watching them we rank them in a Letterboxd list because of course. So, without further ado here are the films we have chosen to see before the festival.

Olivier Assayas: Irma Vep (1996)

Bertrand Bonello: Tiresia (2003)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan: Distant (2002)

David Cronenberg: Naked Lunch (1992)

Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne: Rosetta (1999)

Xavier Dolan: Laurence Anyways (2012) [This is the only film I had watched before this project]

Atom Egoyan: Exotica (1994)

Jean-Luc Godard: Le Mépris (1963)

Michel Hazanavicius: OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d'espions (2006)

Tommy Lee Jones: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

Naomi Kawase: The Mourning Forest (2007)

Mike Leigh: Topsy-Turvy (2000)

Ken Loach: Kes (1970)

Bennett Miller: Capote (2005)

Alice Rohrwacher: Corpo Celeste (2011)

Abderrahmane Sissako: Heremakono (2003)

Damián Szifrón: Tiempo de Valientes (2005)

Andrey Zvyagintsev: The Return (2003)

We are about half-way through the project and so far, this year is having a tremendous quality. Let's see if it holds up...