Through the Looking Crass: "Alice in Wonderland," "Green Zone," "Greenberg"

The new entry in the hipster-director-does-children’s-classic sweepstakes, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is somewhere between the self-fondling Where the Wild Things Are and the vivacious Fantastic Mr. Fox. The middling results are especially puzzling since, like Sondheim’s blood-splattered arias in Sweeney Todd, Lewis Carroll’s topsy-turvy dreamscapes would appear to be a perfect fit for Burton’s own phantasmagoric gifts. Perhaps that’s the trouble: Rather than engaging with and transforming the story, he merely leans on its most superficially Burtonesque elements (gothic reveries, chimerical critters), slaps on a coat of 3-D gimmickry, and calls it a paycheck. Even when he alters the original text -- when Carroll’s Lolita is turned into a grown teenager -- it’s less a decision to forge something truly personal out of the material than one to appease his bosses at Disney. Accordingly, Alice here (Mia Wasikowska) is one more Magic Kingdom Princess in humorlessly feisty tomboy drag, while the Wonderland (or, as it’s been evocatively yet emptily renamed, Underland) into which the Victorian Pierrette tumbles is as busy and joyless as one of Uncle Walt’s theme parks. Cluttered and noisy as it is, the scenery never goes beyond storybook illustrations tinted with starchy CGI, and the special-guest beasties -- Stephen Fry’s Cheshire Cat, Alan Rickman’s Caterpillar, Anne Hathaway’s White Queen, Matt Lucas’s Tweedledee and Tweedledum -- are shockingly forgettable creations. I sort of liked Crispin Glover’s eye-patched Knave of Hearts coming on to the oversized heroine with a purring "I like largeness." (Burton surely must have caught Glover’s unsettling Willy Wonka parody in Epic Movie.) But Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen is a hydrocephalic despot of shattering monotony, and Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter is laborious, party-trick pantomime that veers from Kabuki fop to Sylvester the Cat and then evaporates from memory. No "curioser and curioser" visionary, Burton’s Alice is a budding big-biz entrepreneur equipped with action-figure armor and Avril Lavigne anthem. Logic and proportion have seldom fallen so shruggingly dead.

Carroll himself would have been envious (or, I hope, ashamed) of the slippery wordplay and tortuous logic that’s gone into the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Baghdad in shock-and-awe 2003 is Green Zone’s Underland, Matt Damon’s chief warrants officer its inquisitive Alice, "weapons of mass destruction" the official gobbledygook. "Your job is to do the missions, not worry about how they're put together," the frustrated soldier is told after yet another one of Saddam’s alleged WMD nests turns up empty. (Greg Kinnear’s Pentagon weasel is no help, brushing aside the ugliness with a smug "Democracy is messy.") Time to go rogue, then, alongside media stooges (Amy Ryan), Iraqi sidekicks (Khalid Abdalla), CIA execs (Brendan Gleeson), and deposed generals (Yigal Naor). Green Zone’s indignation has struck several colleagues as bromidic and passé; still, even if it means wading through Brian Helgeland’s vapid screenplay ("I thought we were all on the same side!" "Don’t be naïve"), the notion of an ongoing war erected on lies is worth repeating in these times of rampant cultural amnesia and neocon revisionism. With Paul Greengrass compounding the tumult with his trademark Migraine-Cam, however, it’s hard to come away with a clear image, let alone a clear message. Routinely hailed as an "action master," Greengrass is a dumb-cluck Costa-Gravas faking tension by splintering the screen into handheld micro-blitzkriegs -- the resulting thousand whirling globs of mud makes you appreciate Bigelow’s sense of space and terrain in The Hurt Locker. (The bite-sized digital bursts get so insistent that an early vista of fireballs mushrooming around the bombarded city, meant to be distressing, becomes instead soothing to the eyes simply because it allows the image to last for more than three seconds.) Greengrass may rage against White House arrogance but, by propagating the worthless stylistic shakes of United 93 and The Bourne Ultimatum, he’s become locked into a wrongheaded stay-the-course quagmire of his own.

From Green Zone to Greenberg, from bogus political outrage to bogus emotional insight. In Noah Baumbach’s latest chunk of Commedia dell’Asshole, the eponymous protagonist (Ben Stiller, running his standard hostile-runt shtick at half-speed) is a depressive, self-absorbed, failed New York musician who, slogging through a post-breakdown haze, heads out West to take some time off from the world. Camped out at his vacationing brother’s Hollywood manse, he scribbles letters of complaint to companies, peeks nervously through curtains at the neighbors, matches droopy façades with a burnt-out pal (Rhys Ifans), and gets rejected again by the One Who Got Away (Jennifer Jason Leigh). In steps his Annie Hall, a young aspiring singer (Greta Gerwig) who plays moony board to Greenberg’s passive-aggressive darts. ("You have to look past the kitsch," he lectures her on the merits of late-Seventies soft rock when they first meet.) Surely the mumblecore movement (is "movement" the right word for so inert a collection of films?) took inspiration from the unappetizing navel-gazing of Baumbach’s pictures, so it’s only fair for Baumbach here to seize their thrift-shop naturalism and neurasthenic non-rhythms, along with mumble-muse Gerwig. (Her broken gestures are endearing, though she just can’t sustain the many close-ups she’s handed.) The glib stabs at Jean Eustache-like candor from The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding don’t get any less hollow by being transplanted to California; worse, like that trip to India a few years back by modern cinema’s other Little Lord Fauntleroy, the change of scenery doesn’t so much get the director away from his safety zone as reveal an indifference to the rest of the world that matches that of his solipsistic characters. Some breaks: Harris Savides’ limpid cinematography and a trenchant, extended party scene. Even smoggy old Los Angeles, however, deserves better than the furry turd in the swimming pool that’s become Baumbach’s most representative recurring image.

Odds and ends. A Prophet: Lukewarm air from Jacques Audiard about racial lines, business networks and spiritual transcendence inside Cell Block France; "the idea is to leave here a little smarter," or at least powerful enough to have thugs beat up your old boss. Endure it for superb performances by Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup, then check out Losey’s The Criminal to see this done right. The Crazies: Pretty not-bad remake of Romero’s 1973 rattler, with small-town folks picking up pitchforks and shotguns after a top-secret toxic weapon is employed on "the wrong population"; flamethrower-toting military personnel complete the war-at-home equation. Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell are good as quarantined fugitives, director Breck Eisner wrings plenty of grisly mileage out of car washes, baby bedrooms and gas station diners (and remembers the original’s subversive use of "When Willie Comes Marching Home"). The Runaways: Floria Sigismondi’s likably scrappy account of glam aspirations and menstrual blood in the bad-girl rock scene of late-‘70s San Fernando Valley. "Publicize your music, not your crotch!" Dakota Fanning shows spiky poise as jailbait punkette Cherie Currie, though Kristen Stewart seriously needs to drop the lip-chewing. (That dour-mouth thing may work for a Jeanne Moreau grand dame, but not for a Sundancey rendition of Joan Jett.) Cop Out: Do those synthesizers from shitty ‘80s action movies really deserve a feature-length tribute? Unfortunately for the audience, Kevin Smith thinks so: "I’m gonna show you some muthafuckin’ homage!" A bemused Bruce Willis and a sputtering Tracy Morgan belly-flop through territory already covered with far more wit and better fart jokes in Hot Fuzz and Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant reboot. By comparison, Zack and Miri Make a Porno looks like The Shop Around the Corner.