Alice in Wonderland vs Return to Oz

I have had a busy week, with no writing so far and it's Sunday already! April should be a better month though, with Easter and another long weekend that I'm taking at the end of the month. Whole DAYS for writing. I shall be like A Real Writer(TM).

As part of that busy-ness, I saw Alice in Wonderland on Wednesday, with buddies from my old job. We went to Imax and got the full 3D experience, which was a tad overwhelming at times when there were character close-ups. I was only able to focus on, like, a single nostril or an eyelash, rather than their whole face.

Verdict: D. It's "missing something", as Julia put it, and I agree. Like a soul. Or a heart. I didn't care for any of the characters. En passant, why is it called Alice in Wonderland when in this movie it's not, it's "Underland"? So, I giggled a few times, got vertigo a couple of times. I liked guessing who all the voices were. Even though I didn't care for any of the characters, I thought the casting was absolutely brilliant. But those things don't really add up to anything that can redeem the shabby story. It's not the one you know; it's a made-up sequel where an adult Alice returns to Underland where the Red Queen has run amok with her Jabberwocky.

The story makes me think of Return to Oz. Have you seen Return to Oz? The 1985 'sequel' to the Wizard of Oz. But it ain't no musical. It's dark and crazy and terrifying and enthralling and everything Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" wanted to be.

In Return to Oz, Dorothy is sent to a mental institution because she refuses to stop talking or dreaming about this "imaginary" world. She manages to escape before she can be given electroshock therapy (yeah, you heard me right!) and finds her way back to Oz. But it's a world changed from the one she last visited: the evil Nome King has taken over in co-operation with the wicked Mombi. Mombi's minions are the Wheelers, a gang of gurgling gulping punkish creatures who have wheels instead of hands and feet. The Nome King has turned everyone to stone and Mombi has chopped off all the beautiful maidens' heads, which she keeps in a room of glass cages AND SHE WEARS THEM, changing her head at whim. There's a desert that turns everything living that touches it to sand. There's the crumbled and deserted ghost town that was once Emerald City, a destroyed Yellow Brick Road, the imprisoned Scarecrow... This movie is actually based on the books, in a way the musical wasn't, so it's not really a sequel but a whole new imagining.


I adored Return to Oz as a kid. It was absorbing and scary and awesome. And the best thing is, I watched it again about 5 years ago and it was still cool. There's movies you loved as a kid that don't stand the test of time but this one does (I'm sorry, Dark Crystal, but those weird puppet voices freak me out, I can't stand em. That one has to stay in my childhood).

I can't help but compare Burton's Alice in Wonderland with Return to Oz, as the storylines are so similar and so are the character roles, and they are both filled to the brim with quirky weirdness. But in Return to Oz, you care about the characters. You WANT Dorothy and Tik-Tok and Jack Pumpkinhead and Gump and Bellina to succeed.


Dorothy is resourceful and good-hearted, she doesn't pine & mope into the sunset like Alice or declare that she can't do something (Don't you find Alice a bit... bland?). The Wheelers are wonderfully scary and would knock over the Red Army without a backward glance. Mombi is sadistic and mean and would KICK the Red Queen's ASS. The Red Queen cares too much, she wavers on whether she wants to be loved or feared. Mombi has no such qualms.


As for the Knave of Hearts, his limp-wristed posturing is no match for the vengeful and deep voiced and threatening Nome King -- even if the Nome King has a secret achilles heel issue... I guess we'd have to compare the Mad Hatter to Jack Pumpkinhead, the latter being a bit sappy, so this might be the only case where Alice in Wonderland has the edge. But that weird talking dog Bayard is boring compared to Tik-Tok, the fierce metallic army of Oz with his twitching brass moustache and habit of winding-down at inconvenient times, and the Dormouse is cute but ineffective and not quite as entertaining as Gump, who is quite possibly the weirdest character I've ever seen in a movie, being half moose and half couch (that's right: he's furniture).

Plus, in Return to Oz, there's Bellina the talking chicken, and a tree that grows lunchboxes! I think I want to watch it again now...

Sweet spicy kisses

I've lived in the UK for almost 4 years and the country still surprises me. Like this time I had a jonesing for ginger kisses and went to the supermarket and found out that they don't have them here! Can I hear a big WTF? Yes, that's what I said. Sweet soft gingery cakes sandwiched over creamy filling? Nuh-uh, not here in the UK, they appear to be an Antipodean delicacy.

So I found a recipe and broke out my inner Stepford Wife again.



Recipe from here

biscuits:
125 gm flour (1 cup)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
115gm butter
85 gm caster sugar
1 egg
2 tsp golden syrup
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 Tbsp hot water

filling:
30 gm butter
120gm icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
2 Tbsp boiling water
1 Tbsp preserved ginger, finely chopped
(I didn't think this looked like enough so I added more butter & icing sugar)

Preheat oven to 180 deg C. Line baking trays with baking paper.

Sift together flour, baking powder and spices.

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Then beat in the egg, followed by the golden syrup. Fold in the sifted dry ingredients. Dissolve the baking soda in the hot water and add to the mix. Put small teaspoonfuls of the mixture on the trays and bake for about 10 minutes then remove to cooling rack.

Making the filling by beating the butter, icing sugar and vanilla together with an electric beater, then adding in the boiling water a little at a time. Continue beating until the mixture is very light and creamy. Fold in the preserved ginger. (I actually melted the butter with the ginger in it first, before adding the icing sugar, etc).

Pair up the biscuits, matching sizes, then put a teaspoonful of filling on the lower half and stick 'em together.

This recipe made me 13 ginger kiss sandwiches (26 biscuits) but they're quite substantial, I think I'll make very small teaspoonfuls next time. And I'll definitely make these again; they're YUMMY. Softish and gingery and tasty, with a creamy icing filling, just like they should be!

Sixth book of 2010

Essence and Alchemy by Mandy Aftel

This book is responsible for one my ridiculous flights of fancy, where I get so enamoured of something (usually a Big Crafty Idea) and totally immerse myself in it for about, ooh, 4 weeks, before I get enamoured of something else instead. So here we go again with perfume. I'm already totting up in my mind all the ingredients I want to buy, the equipment, the beautiful perfumes I'm going to make...

This book is bad for me.

It's a rambling journey through the world of natural perfume. Covering a brief history of it, various types of scents, where they come from, what they mix well with. Base and heart and head notes. How to make your own. Much of it is very overwritten and purpled prose and "ohmygoodness esoteric amazing wow wow blah", I found my eyes glazing over (I don't remember thinking that when I first read this book. Perhaps I have become more cynical since 2004...) BUT the good bits are still good, which is looking at specific notes and what they smell like and how they blend with each other. Less flight of fancy, more actual useful knowledge.

If I indulge myself this time, it will be to 'dabble' rather than 'completely immerse'! Despite my protestation above, there's something about the magicality of natural perfume that I love. I love reading the lists of different botanical extracts and thinking how they might smell, how they might blend with each other.

50,032 words

Woah, it's Tuesday already. I've been meaning to make a "what I did this weekend" post but it's a bit late for that now. Apart from saying: I managed to break 50,000 words on In Finding! In spite of all my procrastination. A great goal like that is easy to motivate yourself to shoot for. A big ole round chunky number of words.

Honestly, I don't think I've ever written this many solid words on a project before. I mean, I've gone past 50k on a maybe 3 other stories, but they were full of holes and "write a scene here"s and all peterey-outy. In Finding is holding it together. And I feel quite well set up for continuing to the end (this is noncommittal because I acknowledge that I might just write myself into a dead end).

I hope the motivation continues, because I really want to finish this.

Right now, I am mid-way through this awesome scene... oooh it's a good one with drama and rain and rooftops and Big Reveals. I've had it partly written since the very start and now I'm getting to fit it into the story and complete it. Leaving the last writing session at such a point makes it easy to pick up the next time I sit down with the story.

Fifth book of 2010

Finding Serenity: Anti-heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Josh Whedon's "Firefly" by a collection of writers, edited by Jane Espenson.

This is one of the books my ex-colleagues got me from my Amazon wish list (bless).

I just loved the TV series Firefly. It was well-written, with real people characters, detailed worldbuilding, delicious dialogue, brilliant humour, and story arcs that you could see going the distance.

And then it was cancelled. Boo.

This is a collection of essays and thoughts about the show, looking at various aspects such as the nature of freedom, warrior women, the crossover between genres, the different cultures, etc. It was an interesting read, but somehow not as inspirational as I had hoped! Ah well, I still loved reading about it and I will probably buy the next book, Serenity Found, which is more of the same -- but this time taking into account the Serenity movie which hadn't been released at the time of the first book.

A cookie production line

Somehow, I have had a very productive evening. Where did that come from, and can I please have more? (I suspect it has something to do with not watching any TV shows...)

I wrote ~1000 words on In Finding. This means I could hit a total of 50k words on it this weekend, if I focus and don't get distracted.

I get easily distracted.

Then I made more cookies!


Choccie cookies with after-dinner mints pressed onto the top, fresh-out-of-the-oven, to get all oozy and melty. I found this recipe on Allrecipes.com. It's pretty tasty but I don't think it'll be a favourite. I feel like this is quite an American-style cookie and quite sugary compared to most NZ biscuit recipes.

Fourth book of 2010

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood.

An easy and enjoyable read -- I'll love any dystopian / post-apocalyptic story. This is like a sequel to Oryx & Crake, and yet not a sequel. It's more a parallel story. The women's story now, instead of the men's. Also, as I read about this book somewhere, it is more looking at the dystopian world from those on the lower rungs of society, rather than the cushy world inside the Corps. Some crossover in characters, but since it was a long time since I read Oryx & Crake, I found it hard to remember who was who and what happened to them in the former book.

I've read criticism of Atwood's cutesy & satirical naming of things but I really like them! (AnooYoo Spa, CorpSeCorps etc). Critics haved complained they aren't realistic enough, because a real marketer wouldn't call a product 'Chickie Nobs'... But that never crossed my mind. To me it's the build of the overall world and it fits.

Toby is a great character - prickly and real. I like her char development through her life with the Gardeners. I liked seeing her through the eyes of Ren, the other main char. She felt the most cohesive and fleshed out person.

I have to admit, I think Oryx & Crake was a better book, and I wish I had read it again before starting this. This one has less tension -- Blanco wasn't scary or threatening enough, nor was there as much fear of the pigoons, which I remember vividly from the first book. However, I still super enjoyed it, like most of her books.