Whip It! and The Chronicles of Narnia: Alice in Wonderland

Two films that have been on the top of our queue for months that both underwhelmed.

Whip It! - There was a tremendous amount of buzz with this film. It's been a "Very Long Wait" for a very long time and has had fantastic reviews. But we were left feeling with a sense of what could have been, rather than amazed at what we were shown. The film is full of little teases that pull you along hoping it's going to be original and fantastic, from the casting....Alia Shawkat (Maebe from Arrested Development), Ellen Page, and my secret crush Kristen Wiig, to the setting of Austin and Roller Derby filled with the awesome quirks of that sport. But the casting just falls flat, Shawkat tries so hard to be funny, and we see little of Wiig, and when we do she's playing so subtle she's hardly on the screen. All that makes me think it's the directing. In fact, I blame it all on the directing, both as the reason for the film's mediocrtity and for the full showcase of what could have been.
This film really should have kicked ass, as a triumphant girl power film with the tagline "Be your own hero." But it so easily falls into the underdog, newbie sport film. It's directed by Drew Barrymore, with a cast of awesome comedic women (and Jimmy Fallen) (also and the guy who plays the coach, my fav character), set in a cool Austin atmosphere of indie...this film should be great. I hoped so much for it, all the way to the end, but over and over it kept dissapointing.
Final thoughts, though, it was pretty funny, it was great to see Maebe on the screen again, and the Derby girls' names were fun. See it, but hopefully you can forget every other underdog sport film ever made and believe this was original.

Alice in Wonderland - Tim Burton somehow found the lost manuscript collaboration between Lewis Carrol and CS Lewis. Apparently, CS wanted to adapt Carrol's characters into one of his books, where there's a girl transported back to a weird world with talking animals, and two monarchs fighting for power, and a big battle in the end where everyone fights, then the girl goes home to England and is better off.
Or maybe it wasn't the Lewises, maybe it was a Disney executive who thought that up, turning Alice in Wonderland into an epic fantasy world with a huge epic battle and all the strange creatures from the book join forces to battle an evil queen. Then somehow Tim Burton got involved and...
And ripped the original heart out, supplanting Alice 10 years later in a sort of sequel where she doesn't remember being there and is the only one who can save Wonderland, which is now called Underland. Why? Because some scroll with the history of Underland says so.
If I was a fan of the book I would be so pissed. I think it was a great and imaginative piece of work, albeit without a plot, but there was a magical theme to it all, hidden inside the chaos of the characters and situations Alice is in. It's as if this movie attempts to make total order of Wonderland, making the characters make sense, work together and give them all purpose. The whole point before was that it doesn't make sense, Alice is lost. She's dismayed that nothing is proper. Now, they've switched that up, where Alice is now out of order and Wonderland makes sense! Then the Mad Hatter does a techno jig and it's over, after an epicish battle between the Red and White Queens.
Final thought, this film can go straight to hell. (Imagine if I was actually a fan of the book.)