ALICE OF WONDERLAND IN PARIS (1966) is very marginally an Alice film, being primarily an anthology of children’s stories: the mouse protagonist of Anatole invites Alice to Paris to try different classic cheeses; she agrees because she wants to meet Ludwig Bemelman’s Madeline (who gets a couple more stories). One I’ve been curious about, though I can’t say satisfying my curiosity has enriched my life in any other way. “I have figured out the difference between the horns of a dilemma.”
A few months back I mentioned how uninteresting I found Fox’s X-spinoff THE GIFTED, focusing on the mutant underground in a world where both the Brotherhood and the X-Men have disappeared. To my surprise, as I kept watching it actually improved. Garrett Dillahunt is enjoyably creepy (as he usually is) as a sinister anti-mutant scientist, and Skyler Samuels makes a good mutant villain as the hive-mind Frost Sisters (a riff on the comics’ Stepford Cuckoos) — having one sister start talking and the other finish the sentence comes off much more unsettling with a real person than it would on a comics page. I’m still not sold, but I will be watching when S2 returns. “If your eyes turn blue you’re a dead woman.”
To avoid stretching tomorrow’s books post to excessive length, I’ll add some extra entries here—
HENCHGIRL by Kristen Gudsnuk is one of those books where the bits are more than the sum of the parts. The story of Mary Posa, half-hearted member of a supervillain’s gang, works in small doses but the doses don’t add up to a satisfying story. Part of it is that Mary’s turn to evil midway through doesn’t quite work for me, another problem is that I can’t tell a lot of the supporting characters apart. Good enough I’d have loved for it to be better.
THE VISITOR: How and Why He Stayed by Mike Mignola, Chris Roberson and Paul Grist spotlights an alien who appeared in Conqueror Worm and revealed he’d been watching Hellboy for years. This story shows what he was doing all that time, including falling in love with a human and fighting the Oghdru Hem on his own. I enjoyed it, but definitely not something to read if you’re a Hellboy newbie.
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