Blood, Sweat and Gears [Roadshow]

Edgeplay: A Film about the Runaways [Shock]:

2 out of 5

This doco is not be confused with the recently released biopic on The Runaways that promises to be a good one. And so it should, considering that the primary element is five sexy girls who kept the girl power flame alive by rockin’ out in an enticingly hard manner, but doing so alongside the usual sex and drugs stuff that is ever present in the glittery rock world and sometimes contributes to a good story. Into the mix comes a very weird dude by the name of Kim Fowley who put out a couple of notable psych-rock singles in the 1960s, but who also favoured himself as an ideas man and talent scout when putting together the original Runaways lineup in the mid 1970s. It turns out that Fowley was also a total creep who abused various members of this promising teenage band in the hope that great art and lots of money would be made. It’s a rather sad story, and this appalling documentary does little to tell it as it deserves to be told. Interviews with strong, beautiful women such as vocalist Cherie Currie and guitarist Lita Ford keep the story moving along, but the editing is of the kind more likely found on those teenybopper TV music shows where the camera disruptively leaps from one multi-angled frame to the next with unrelated ‘cool’ muzak playing in the background. And here we get to the problems. Little is offered in the way of the band’s musical achievements, replaced instead by ongoing discussions of bassist Jackie Fox’s supposed hypochondria. Also, where the hell is the music? The Runaways came up with one of the great proto-punk tunes in Cherry Bomb, but not one fragment of this song or any original music from the band appears in the doco, which is a major oversight.

Alice in Wonderland [Disney DVD]:

2 ½ out of 5

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, a pseudo-sequel to Lewis Carroll’s tale, follows Alice (Mia Wasikowska), now 19 years old, whose memories of Wonderland – or rather, Underland – appear as nothing but a dream. Alice, suffocated by strict Victorian morals and her impending engagement to a sniffling, silly aristocrat, finds herself falling once more down the rabbit hole. But once there she finds it is her destiny – with help from Johnny Depp’s schizophrenic, mercury-addled Mad Hatter and Anne Hathaway’s deliciously dreadful White Queen – to bring down the bloody reign of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter).

Alice follows a lacklustre and linear script, sans silliness – which is perhaps the strangest thing about the film. Unfortunately, the film itself should be strange: Carroll’s classic is a masterpiece of nonsense literature, and should not have been adapted into such a predictable plot. It is even more of a letdown than Burton’s unwillingness to subvert and make sinister a landscape that is ripe for it.

For a world that should inspire wanderlust, Underland is under-realised. The animation is not worthy of Alice’s story and all too often feels awfully artificial. It’s difficult to believe that the CGI creatures and actors are actually interacting, which makes the film feel both physically and emotionally unreal. The film does, however, look better on DVD than it did on the silver screen.

The DVD special features includes a short featurette about adapting Alice into a film, another about the development of Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter, and another about the special effects and animation in the film – probably the most interesting of the three.

Alice in Wonderland is disappointingly lacking in wonder.