I've been a pretty big Tim Burton fan since I can remember. Beetlejuice is one of my all-time favorite movies and he's continued some solid output even in recent years with solid movies like Big Fish and the darkly comic Sweeney Todd. I'm also a pretty big fan of Lewis Carroll's two Alice novels. Even though I find the books are unfilmable, that didn't stop me from enjoying the Disney cartoon as well as the 1985 TV movie that I used to watch ad nauseam as a kid. Both took a whimsical and musical approach to the source material, because I can only imagine they also concluded that the books as were indeed unfilmable.

Ever since I was a kid, Alice in Wonderland was a story that creeped me out. I wonder if Alice in Wonderland can even be called a story. From what I remember of the book, it’s almost an anthology of poems, misadventures and strange characters that occur almost independently of any coherent story. In fact, Lewis Carroll invented Alice's adventures on a rowing expedition with some of the young children he seemed overly fascinated with, one of whom was named Alice. If Carroll was the Michael Jackson of his time, then Alice in Wonderland was his Moonwalker - an entertaining if not perplexing exercise in nonsense.

Alice In Wonderland was the number one movie this weekend, taking in $116.3 million domestically to set a new record. As reported on Sci-Fi Wire, "Even accounting for ticket-price inflation, that's the biggest-ever (domestic) opening in the first quarter of the year, easily beating the record of $83.8 million set by The Passion of the Christ in 2004."

I thought it might be an interesting film, but after finally seeing some actual footage of the movie and not merely some character still shots, I actually think the upcoming Alice and Wonderland film looks really good. It's still obviously a Tim Burton film, but the imagery isn't "as" dark and some of the characters and effects look great. Too bad they won't let anyone embed the film, so you'll just have to jump over to zap2it to watch the trailer.

You have to wonder how long Tim Burton can keep doing his routine before it gets tiring (if it hasn't already). You take a fairytale-esque story, make it dark, and then add in Johnny Depp or Helena Bonham Carter (or both) to round it out. He's done that how many times now? His latest film following that formula is his upcoming adaptation of Alice In Wonderland, which has just released a few pics from the film, most notably Johnny Depp dressed up as The Mad Hatter, which is bound to give me nightmares tonight. It's like a zombie and Carrot Top had a baby.