Let’s start with the action.  Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is an action movie, and its antagonists are fearsomely toothed and clawed or armed with spears and swords.  There’s a lot of running, dashing, leaping across chasms, swashbuckling, and general tomfoolery.  At the climax we have a thousands-meet-in-battle scene that probably used the same software developed for Lord of the Rings.  In between, though, and there’s a lot of in-between time, Alice feels like a much more personal movie, whimsical and grotesque in that charming Tim Burton way.

Perhaps the thing missing most from Alice is the spirit of the book on which it’s based.  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland dabbles in an off-putting sense of whimsy; characters range from bizarre to grotesque, and usually engage in equally strange activities.  The book operates on dream-logic and until the end, Alice herself maintains that half-detached half-involved state dreamers have, as if they’re never sure if they’re living the story or narrating it.  Though the Alice of the movie pays lip-service to this, we never get a sense of Wonderland as a place where anything can happen.  In the book, take a step, and you could be miles away or not have moved at all; the movie has a clear, consistent geography.  It’s as if by mapping Wonderland, they’ve taken the wonder out of it.  (Aside: it’s mentioned in the movie that the place is really called Underland, and was just misheard by a very young Alice.)

Fundamentally, the book is about the experience of living on the cusp of awareness.  To read it is to be seven years old and know that a baby can’t really turn into a pig but not be able to put your finger quite on why that shouldn’t be so.  The literary Alice reacts to the events in the books not by disbelief or commitment, but with acceptance and discomfort.  Clearly, she says, the rhyme doesn’t quite go “how doth the little crocodile…”, but how does it go?  Her ability to reason is not yet developed, so she greets this world not with a sense of wonder but a sense of caution.

Alice as an adult has the luxury of truly understanding what reality is and committing to it with a young person’s passion.  She pays lip service to the idea of  not knowing whether or not she’s in a dream, but aside from the strangeness on all sides, it never feels like a dream — the logic of Wonderland is remarkably consistent.  In the book, nobody really wanted anything from Alice.  She was after the white rabbit, of course, but the characters she met each had their own agenda and their own madness.  In the movie, they are unified in looking to her as their literal knight in literal shining armor.

So do go see Alice in Wonderland.  It’s a great whimsical action movie, with winning performances by both queens, Anne Hathaway as the flamboyantly elegant White Queen and Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen by turns funny and sad despite being a living bobblehead doll, and Johnny Depp plays another of his increasingly overly-mannered oddballs.   I really enjoy him; lately he seems to be trying to single-handedly force acting into a post-realist era, an ultra-modern take on how people acted in the old silents.  The set design is everything you’d expect of Tim Burton doing an update on Disney, and there are hundreds of little callbacks (and not-so-little ones) to the book and movies that have adapted it in the past.

So confession: back when I was in college, I stole a beat from Four Tet.  The underlying drums to She Moves She became the best part of the best song I had written that wasn’t a direct rip-off of Interpol, which is by way of saying that Four Tet is really good.  His CD “Rounds” became a study-music staple and I’ve tried and failed to imitate his sense of music off-balance, melodies shattered and reconstructed.

This was the first chance I’ve had to see him, and what surprised me most was the straightforwardness of his music.  For a good solid hour and a half, a four on the floor beat alternately swallowed and propped up the cacophony of strange and otherworldly sounds.  His new stuff is already more dance-y than his older work, and tonight he mostly gave the capacity crowd what it craved, music to move to.

My favorite moment was a beautiful rendition of My Angel Rocks Back and Forth that ended the evening; it was haunting, strange, and bits of it are still ringing in my ears.