Adventures In Wonderlands: Problemista, Alice through the Looking Glass & The Rare Blue Apes of Cannibal Isle
The classic set-up of “stranger in a strange land” is pretty common in pop culture. Television, movies, books, and plays often have a character arriving in a new place and stumbling through a journey where they are met with roadblocks and ridiculous rules, to say nothing of the bizarre characters. In some cases, these places are familiar to us in that we recognize them as a version of our reality. Other times, they’re completely alien, a world we as the viewer are seeing and traveling through for the first time as well.
In these films, we have different wonderlands and very different adventures. Some are nonsensical, some are designed to be impossible to navigate, and some are just straight up bizarre but all of them present an odyssey to the protagonist that stands in the way of what they want and where they’re trying to get to.
Even in places familiar to us, the logic of everything can be hard to understand. Alejandro (Julio Torres) in Problemista (2024) is faced with the Sisyphian task of getting a sponsor for his work visa to stay in New York. He starts assisting Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), a histrionic art critic whom he meets at the cryogenic facility where her terminally ill husband is being preserved. Alejandro needs to curate an art show and calm Elizabeth’s constantly wracked nerves in order to get her to sign off as his sponsor, all while climbing through contradictory hoops with immigration. He follows behind her, quite literally in some scenes, like Alice tracking the white rabbit, a creature that is habitually panicked and running late.
Alejandro’s not allowed to make money, on the books, at least. Yet he still needs to pay bills in an expensive city so he turns to Craigslist to find cash. In the surreal, dream logic world of Problemista, Craigslist is the digital version of the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. He speaks in riddles and offers up unsavory suggestions until Alejandro, desperate and in debt, accepts.
Nothing in Problemista is clear-cut despite the fact that it takes place in essentially our world. It depicts a layer of struggle on top of the one we all face in trying to stay alive, fed, and sheltered with Alejandro having a ticking clock (or an hourglass) counting down until the date he’ll be deported. This is an Alice who doesn’t want to leave wonderland and will face the riddles, the monsters, the hoops, and the hydra in order to stay.
All that ‘almost Alice in Wonderland’ goodness in Problemista put me in the mood for actual Alice in Wonderland. Come with Alice Through the Looking Glass (1998).
Kate Beckinsale plays a full grown adult Alice in this trippy, funky version of the book. Though dated in many ways visually, the layout of the world and how Alice moves within it is, for lack of a better word, very cool. It uses the chess board set-up from the book so when Alice enters or leaves a space, she has to move through a colored barrier that warps around her.
The forested wonderland has both a magical fantasy and realistic quality, reminding us how gorgeous the woods, sunlight, open fields dotted with massive trees, and quaint bridges are without anything special or surreal happening around them. Alice encounters a few of the old favorites like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum as well as the Looking Glass characters that don’t get brought into most Alice in Wonderland adaptations. Beckinsale is a more confident Alice than most, and even in the face of strange contradictions, she seems to grasp that the world is cock-eyed, not her. Like Alejandro, she jumps from square to square, challenge to challenge, and manages her way to the end of the journey despite the oddness standing in her way.
If the first two movies in this piece are too close to reality for your tastes, then get ready for this one. The Pirates of Cannibal Isle (1975), or The Rare Blue Apes of Cannibal Isle, is what happens when a sexplotation director attempts to make a children’s movie. I guess. This musical centers on a mute young boy who runs away from home with his pet duck Mr. Quack Quack. The pair wind up on a mysterious island inhabited by anthropomorphic crocodile pirates, who I assume are cannibals though I don’t remember them eating other crocodiles. (That’s not to say they didn’t or that maybe there was a scene in the movie that didn’t make it through to the version I saw but alright, they’re cannibals.) The boy and his duck befriend an anthropomorphic blue ape Rum Tum when they’re all captured by the pirates. The now trio are able to escape and make their way through Cannibal Isle facing real life danger like snakes and predators while the pirates chase them down, hot on their heels.
Did I mention there are songs? Several of them.
Eventually, the three of them make it to safety where they are greeted by the rest of the rare blue apes. They sing a song about how amazing they are and the boy and his duck are brought back to the family home upriver.
As Letterboxd user Christopher Barrell says in his review of this movie, “??? beyond description.”
The Rare Blue Apes of Cannibal Isle is just whacky and genuinely fun, though I can’t help but think of how hot and uncomfortable those animal suits must have been. In one scene, a few dopey pirates are dumped overboard, and I was pretty sure the actors were about to drown as these heavy costumes got water-logged. The scenery is beautiful, and since this was filmed on location in Malaysia, it does the same thing that Looking Glass does, albeit accidentally: real life places just looking gorgeous because sometimes real life is gorgeous. I can’t fault the acting too much since most of the cast was children or adults in unwieldy costumes. I can say for sure that the duck that played Mr. Quack Quack deserved an award.
What also deserves a ton of praise is the score. I am not kidding when I saw that these songs got stuck in my head, especially the rare blue apes family song. It’s unfortunately short so I had to listen to it on repeat in order to get my fill of it. Highly recommend people check it out. It’s on Youtube.
Wonderlands and odysseys come in so many forms. Despite how different these three movies are and how different the motives of each character, we can see overlap in how the stories play out: a goal out of reach and a maze with no clear answer. Those of us who like these kinds of films (and books) find that they resonate on a true level since how much of life is made up of mazes and goals you’re not sure are possible?
Throw in a few singing crocodiles for a change, life. Shake up this “reality” formula a little.
