ask alice

i went to underland saturday afternoon.

and alice went along (alice the minicooper, that is).

apparently i wan't alone.

about 8 zillion other people have shelled out the money to put ridiculous looking sunglasses on their heads in a dark movie theater and sit there for two hours watching the forces of cheshire cat and caterpillar versus a deck of cards.

and the funny things was that it was worth it.

let me digress. i will watch almost anything with johnny depp in it. although i really couldn't do better than about half of the last two pirates movies even if they were in the caribbean (or disney world?).

don juan de marco, chocolat, edward scissorhands.

he's had some bizarre roles. remember gilbert grape?

but he knows how to entertain. and not just with a pretty face.

but the movie would have earned the value of a ticket even without mr. depp. (i just might not have been there).

visually stunning. incredible animation. and the mix of real actors and animated ones was pulled off flawlessly.

i am old enough to remember when just animation was considered amazing. carbon dating (is that like e-harmony?) will show that i missed snow white and the original alice by a few years. but fantasia was probably around my time. although i know all of them by either wonderful world of disney or video cassettes.

the current alice is darkly fun and has a nice plot of good versus evil and a pox on the aristocracy and boring lives.

not exactly original themes, but there is a certain pleasure in watching the transition of alice from milktoast to joan of arc.

and the 3-d does turn underland into wonderland, expecially at the end of the movie.

i'm not a big technology fan. and i do not expect to own a 3-D television set in my lifetime just to watch cheers reruns and an occassional sports event, let alone hardball and rachel maddow.

but i grudgingly have to admit that it made avatar and alice slightly better.

nothing succeeds like excess. so you will now have lots of bad movies with mediocre 3-D technology trying to jump on the bandwagon.

but back to the wonderland. and what i consider to be the most important underlying political statement.

the most memorable moment of the original movie (i won't give away anything in the new one) was the mad-hatter tea party. a bunch of crazy people doing crazy things, without sense or reason.

sound familiar?

we have our own tea party now. not based on the boston celtics fans celbrating by tossing the british tea into the ocean, but by those emulating the white rabbit and his friends in downtown wonderland. obama is not a citizen. homosexual behavior causes floods and war dead. send the minorities back where they came from.

it's late. it's late. for a very important date.

unfortunately that date is the dark ages.

that wonderfully nostalgic period of ignorance and superstition.

in a land where ignorance is valued, sarah palin can be the queen of hearts.

the time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things.

not all tea party members are crazies. but there are certainly a bunch of them who make the mad hatter look like the voice of reason.

so health care passes in a form no one is crazy about and the next election appears to be a bloodletting of epic proportion.

too bad i won't be there. i'm vacationing in wonderland.

just ask alice.