Alice vs. Alice

When comparing Svankmajer's 1988 Alice to the 1951 Disney film Alice in Wonderland it is hard to draw any comparisons. For one, Alice is live action/stop motion while the Disney version is complete animation. Secondly, Alice is based only on Lewis Caroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the Disney version combines elements of Caroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Thirdly, in Disney's version the protagonist actually imagines or travels to another world, while in Alice she merely wanders around her home. And although they both revolve around the same story these two couldn't be anymore different.

Svankmajer's cult classic is dark, twisted and horror like. For one, the mood is darkened by the color scheme he shoots with. There are no vibrant colors and if there is movement, it is robotic stop-motion. The protagonist herself is so unemotional and so zombie like it is unnerving. When I think of a child's imagination I think, while given a little off beat, happy, colorful, and hyper. She is nothing of the sort, which inherently is not a bad thing, it is just a strange thing. In her world the animals sentenced by the red queen to get their heads lopped off, do in fact get their heads cut off...with scissors. At the end she even considers cutting off the white rabbits head herself. While being faithful to the book, the film  brings to life the darker side of the novel and the darker side of childhood. I suppose not every child has thoughts of flowers, bunnies and cute, cuddly creatures.

While Disney's film would have you think otherwise. Children's heads are filled with flowers, bunnies, and vibrant colors. Alice, a hopelessly lost child, wearing an innocent blue dress, white stockings and a bow in her hair is a victim of her own imagination, not the evil mastermind behind it. She is an unwilling protagonist that just wants to return home. Some of the characters she meets are mean, but always in a friendly sort of way and they are all lost just as much as she. Plastering the screen with vibrant colors, quick movement and even faster editing, Wonderland comes to life as a labyrinth of amusement. Taking from both books, Alice must go deeper into her imagination to bring herself home. Taking more a stance on womens' rights, the Disney film seeks to give young girls imagination, but not to get them too lost in any ideas, after all they must return home like good girls in time for tea.

Alas, both films, although different, are in perfect complement of each other. One stands for the darker side of the imagination, the other stands for the bright, less horrifying side of imagination. Both drawing from the same source material and each giving it their own twist, none is wrong, they just brighten or darken depending on the mood they're trying to convey. 

Jackie Brown

Adapted from the novel Rum Punch written by Elmore Leonard, Jackie Brown is as much a character driven piece as the novel. Although a few things were changed (the location, the title and the race of the main character) Tarantino sought to construct his film “…as if you were having your friends over, it’s a hangout movie”. If your friends happen to be criminals and a bail bondsman. 

I should probably start off introducing the characters for those who have not seen the film. The protagonist is Jackie Brown, she's a down and out flight attendant who traffics money for a gun dealer Ordell. Max Cherry is a middle aged bail bondsman who ends up helping Jackie get her hands on enough of Ordell's money to escape her life of crime.

The novel was originally set in Florida, as many of Elmore Leonard's novels are. Tarantino changed the location to Los Angeles, California for no other reason than he knew the area and wanted to make an LA movie. The change was a welcomed one as far as I'm concerned, as I'm a native LA girl. The only thing this change affected was that a minor character was cut from the script, as he was very regionally specific. 

The title change was also a very welcomed change for me because this story is about Jackie, not Max as the novel is. It was interesting to watch the film again after reading the novel and notice the change in narrative. The book is about Max Cherry, but the film is very much Jackie's story. Which leads me to my next point, Jackie's race. 

In the novel Jackie is white, Tarantino changes her to an African American woman. It was a great change because Pam Grier just nails that role. Although, in my opinion, race changes how a character can experience the world, it doesn't change much from novel to film because they both focus on Jackie as a middle aged woman. They both comment on how tough the world can be when a woman is past her "prime". 

As far as what was omitted from the novel, there were only a few minor events. As I said before a minor character was left out because he was too regionally specific, but probably for irrelevancy as well. This character happens to be a leader of a white supremacist gang in which happens to be in the middle of a protest at the beginning of the novel. Tarantino most likely takes these out because it just doesn't have anything to do with the story he is trying to tell. His film is largely apolitical, perhaps because he is more interested in his characters and telling their story. Elmore Leonard seems like he enjoys setting the political tide of the region, which could be another reason why white supremacists are not found in the film, because that stuff isn't readily very overt in modern Los Angeles. 

Telling the story of two middle aged individuals can be tough. Our society sees past twenty five as past your prime, but the film and novel do an excellent job telling Jackie and Max's story in an exciting, engaging way. Especially for a film, it is hard to take unglamorous characters and construct a critically and audience acclaimed movie. As a student screenwriter, I am taught to construct characters as universal as possible, but give them superhuman, supremely unique traits to give them that "hollywood hero" type persona. Jackie Brown presents a film without those frills, making it inadvertently supremely unique. It is a great film because of it's approach to telling a story of two middle aged people in the most basic way possible, admittedly their link to the criminal underworld may seem a little other worldly, it may not be my life or your life, but there are millions of people in the world that are in the business of crime. And if you can't appreciate the complexity of life past twenty five then you're missing out.