"Perhaps I'll cut HIS head off, thought Alice to herself."

– voiceover from Alice, adapted from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

I found this on Netflix one day and, despite the fact that it had a 2.7 star rating, put it in my instant viewing queue. Besides, it has 4 stars on Amazon and a 7.5/10 on IMDB, and anything in that ballpark is usually pretty good, sometimes even great, so I took the risk. It just depends on how unorthodox the film is, how far it strays from lowest common denominator.

Today, I finally watched the movie. Despite my reservations about the voiceover (as it does get repetitive), I liked it overall. So Netflix's rating, in this case, was mostly wrong.

Alice is a surrealist retelling of the classic postmodern story about a little girl named Alice who finds herself in a strange place called Wonderland, where she has wonderful and sometimes scary adventures with eccentric characters, most of them animalistic. In this version, I don't recall actually hearing the word "Wonderland," but there are references to Mary Ann, if that sways any of you purists out there.

Two of the most interesting and original aspects of this movie are the use of stop-motion video to capture the Wonderland creatures/characters and the way each character is (and many random objects are) reflected in the real world. The rabbit is actually Alice's own stuffed rabbit. The caterpillar is a sock with eyes in this version of Wonderland, and if I looked hard enough, I'm sure I'd notice a sock lying around somewhere in the real-world shots. And the list goes on.

At times, this movie is beautiful. At times, it is quite disgusting, and that quality comes from both the visuals and the sound effects. For instance, when the rabbit starts eating his own stuffing (sawdust), the crunch is so vivid, and the visuals are so startlingly in-your-face, that it makes me kind of uncomfortable, almost sick. While I thought the voice for the English dub was going to be annoying (and yes, the close-ups of Alice's mouth are annoying), instead, I found that the girl who voices the narrator/Alice does a fantastic job of mirroring the sound effects and reflecting the sometimes disturbing visuals of each scene.

The final shot is one of my favorites, as we get one last look at Alice's room in the real world and – well, I won't spoil any more than I already have, but I recommend this film if you love the Alice story and its adaptations, especially if you were disappointed in Burton's latest one, or even if you weren't. At the very least, this Alice is something new to try.

Except, at 22 years old, it's actually almost as old as I am.

"There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't."

– Unknown author/coiner, but I found it at Board of Wisdom

I've been making websites since I was about 12 or 13, when I taught myself HTML (HyperText Markup Language) from a book. Yes, I was a geek—am a geek. That said, I've worked with HTML (and the newer CSS) off and on for over a decade.

In 7th grade, I redesigned my school corporation's website, and the director of my jr./sr. high school's computer club (called Buddy Step-Up, which is since defunct) liked it enough to ask if we could take over the corporation's web design. We got it approved, and my design went live. It went through a couple of different iterations after that; it's now unrecognizable, and frankly, I'm not a huge fan of the latest design, which uses Javascript and is rather slow (sorry Ben, if you're the designer; it's nothing personal!).

In any case, I'm not yet up-to-date on the newest version of HTML (which is 5.0), not that it's officially "released" yet, but it is available for people to use while the bigwigs work out the bugs. So, I guess I would like to learn some of the new tags added in version 5.0. I know about the video tag, and it's very easy to use. What I don't know, however, is how to make something like this nifty little page that lets the user drag the text boxes to the trash can. While this looks very simple and, at first glance, not very useful, I think there could be some interesting applications for it. One thing I could do is make a website with short stories on it, and then use this code in order to provide the reader with a way to track what he/she has already read. The reader would drag a story to a trash can, or something else, and it would disappear. He or she could then go through the rest of the stories (or other website elements), out of order, until there is nothing left to read. Then it's time to log off.

Granted, this trash can webpage is actually done with HTML and Javascript, which I don't know at all, but I do know that it wouldn't be possible without the update to HTML. Maybe it's time to learn Javascript, at least the basics.

I've done programming before but never with Java or Javascript. On the other hand, I did use Alice for a class in undergrad; it's like a front-end to Java, and it's very cool. The user can program in Java without realizing it. It's just like making an animated story. Seriously, it's just drag-and-drop, moving characters and other elements around to create an animated Java program. It's designed for high schoolers and college students, so it's very use to use, once you know the basics of the program. Check it out if you're interested in programming; ignore this paragraph if you're not.