"It's not like the book," is how the 10-year-old described the 3-d preview of the upcoming Alice film. It 
Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter in the upcoming Alice filmseemed dark -- like peering into a rabbit hole the entire time. Everyone is rushing around, especially Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter (slighty crossed with a White Rabbit) -- the constant activity made me think this is an Alice for our frenetic times, an ADD Alice with a Wonderland like a hive of busy bees. Of course, that was true with Lewis Carroll's original, particularly the White Rabbit who's constantly late. Maybe that's one of the reasons the book still resonates in modern times -- we're all running around to get somewhere that the getting becomes more important than the being.
It's also so hard not to think of Willy Wonka when you see Depp. Then again, it's always been befuddling to me why Roald Dahl is one of the most popular children's authors in England, eclipsed only recently by the popularity of J.K. Rowling. He doesn't have that huge popularity in the U.S.
We saw the preview for Alice when we saw Avatar in 3-D. While wearing the new black 3-D glasses, we thought the Alice preview often used the new technology almost better than some of Avatar. That film is beautiful and stunning, but because of the stilted dialogue and the lack of a really extraordinary new idea for the film, it will not probably linger in the same way that Star Wars, another film with bad dialogue, does. Star Wars has details and back stories that you want to learn about. Avatar's characters just weren't as involving to me. What did interest me was the stunning world and particularly the bird/dinosaur like creatures flying through the floating mountains. Part of me thought the trees where all the people lived was a riff on Swiss Family Robinson.