Alice

[Graham Smith]

After the success of the made for TV 2 parter, Tin Man, SyFy channel dug back into the pile of childrens books and pulled out Alice. It was done by the same production group that did Tin Man so you would expect that they would have learned from their prior success - they didn't.

While Tin Man had it's faults, it only rarely felt forced. There were familiar things but they were very different and the story actually flowed quite well. It was clever.

Alice, on the other hand, felt forced almost from the very beginning and almost nothing about it felt as if it really belonged. The architecture made no sense at all and seemed to be stuck in just for visual effect. As for the story, it was more forced than the characters were.

As for the cast, I'll just say that some good actors were wasted on poorly written parts and the directing was awful. Tim Currey was given a throw away part that lasted all of 5 minutes and could have been played by any 1st year acting student. Harry Dean Stanton fared a tiny bit better time wise but his character was equally useless. Then we come to Colm Meaney and Cathy Bates - both completely wasted.

Bottom line, if you have completely run out of books to read and there are no Gilligan reruns on, you might want to watch it, if only to see how not to produce a TV movie.

[kevin c]

I saw some of Tin Man - that was OK. I saw all of 15 seconds of Alice and gave it up.

SyFy's movies generally make me wince. The acting and scripts are mostly second rate. The CGI stuff is the worst of it - for me special FX have to help make the show seem more believeable, or at least be bangup exciting, and SyFy's does neither.

[Graham Smith]

The odd thing is the reviews. Of course, there are the typical fan-boy reactions of "Wonderful Return to Wonderland" and the typical professional critics who would pan "Gone With The Wind". But there are a lot of normally neutral reviewers who liked this. Maybe I was expecting too much and need to look at it again for what it was rather than what I expected. But I just think that they tried too hard to be clever and fell on their little faces.

[bierman]

Seems to me that BSG was the only good show SyFy ever did. Haven't watched a thing on SyFy since it went away....