The new book “The Obamas” by New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor spills fresh dirt on a Oct. 2009 costume ball which included “Alice in Wonderland” star Johnny Depp and the film’s director, Tim Burton.

The event was kept from the public by the transparency-loving First Family for political reasons, Kantor says.

The book reveals how any official announcement of the glittering affair — coming at a time when Tea Party activists and voters furious over the lagging economy, 10-percent unemployment rate, bank bailouts and Obama’s health-care plan were staging protests — quickly vanished down the rabbit hole.

“White House officials were so nervous about how a splashy, Hollywood-esque party would look to jobless Americans — or their representatives in Congress, who would soon vote on health care — that the event was not discussed publicly and Burton’s and Depp’s contributions went unacknowledged,” the book says.

However, the White House made certain that more humble Halloween festivities earlier that day — for thousands of Washington-area schoolkids — were well reported by the press corps.

The problem is that the story is wafer thin and not at all engaging. The other problems are that none of the relationships work, Alice has no character development (she enters and exits Wonderland an annoying feminist), and other than Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen, not a single character is in the least interesting. About halfway the movie that old “Transformers 2″ feeling crept over me. The one that says, “This is like watching someone else play a video game.”

I never make box-office predictions. Sometimes, not even in my head. Over the years I’ve just been so wrong so often that it’s become a waste of brainpower. For instance, after suffering through the overwhelming punishment that was “Transformers 2,” I was sure it would tank in its second week. Who could recommend such an ordeal? Well, just about everyone. It went on to gross over $800 million worldwide.

Has something changed?

For a couple of decades now Hollywood’s tried to slip one past its customers and get ahead of word-of-mouth by spending tens of millions of dollars on advertising to gin up anticipation before dumping the film on a few thousand screens on opening weekend. This front-loading allows the studios to scoop up a ton of cash by packing in we suckers based on our excitement as opposed to what we’ve might have heard from friends and neighbors. You can’t blame the studios for that. But…

If the movie sucks, what’s supposed to occur is a dramatic second-week box office drop-off, and lately that’s not happening as often as it should.

Story-less junk like “Alice in Wonderland,” “Transformers 2,” “Alvin and the Chipmunks 2,”and “Avatar” just keep chugging right along as though they don’t suck. Which is troubling. Hollywood watches movie-going trends and if I’m spotting this, you can bet they are. And what are audiences saying?

They’re saying 3D spectacle is good enough and that there’s no need for filmmakers to put any serious time into producing a smart story, interesting characters, or sharp dialogue.

Dear Hollywood,

Just put a lot of cool, colorful shit on a huge screen for a couple  hours and we will come.

Hugs & Kisses,
Your Audience

Hopefully, this is nothing more than a fad that will soon pass. Hopefully, before too many “great looking” but poorly scripted movies are past the point of no return in the production pipeline, audiences will tire of the fad, reject a few of these and wake the industry up.

At least that’s what we should be holding on to.  The alternative — the idea that movies could now make money delivering only visual spectacle and nothing else is too depressing to seriously consider.

The film “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” tells the story of Greg Hefley, a young adult entering into middle school as one of the smallest kids in his class. His older brother has told him about the hardships of middle school and Greg walks into school knowing that he needs to have a plan for success in order to survive. He works hard to make himself popular in school (trying to climb up the popularity ladder). In his quest for popularity, Greg joins the wrestling team, participates in a school play and wears business attire to school to make himself look “cool.”

He spends nearly the entire film trying out new schemes to become more popular, schemes that often backfire and cause him to become less cool than his otherwise “uncool” friends. Near the beginning of the film, Greg had realized that his friends were not well-regarded at school. Therefore, he tried unsuccessfuly to distance himself from them and then he tried to make them cooler. Both ideas failed when one of his friends, in particular, became much cooler than him, according to the popularity scale. 

As with many other family friendly movies, the movie has a positive message for kids about accepting people and their quirks, in spite of how “uncool” those quirks may be. However, unlike films like “Avatar,” this film is not preachy in advancing its message. In fact, one of the parts of the film that I really enjoyed was that the hero was not always a likable character. Greg does a lot of scheming in the movie and he even causes one of his best friends to get into trouble for something he did. When Greg admits the truth to his friend, he does not tell any adults about what he did, leaving his friend in trouble. Additionally, when he admits the truth to his friend, he does it in a half-hearted way and he tells his friend that they can both learn lessons from what is clearly only Greg’s mistake.

Greg is a likable character though, and Zachary Gordon does a great job in the role. Gordon makes the lead character extremely likable and tremendously mischievous at the same time. Greg may be a wimpy and sometimes manipulative kid but he is one that the audience can root for. He  also may be cynical at some points but he also has some tough adversaries, including his older brother who likes to intimidate him and a girl at school who likes to embarrass him.

Additionally, the story of the film is also creative and imaginative. One of the running stories in the film is a rumor about a rotting piece of cheese outside the school. Students who touch the cheese are inflicted, according to the school rumors, and have to pass “the cheese touch” on to other people or else people will avoid them. It is a fun little side story that will likely remind viewers of their own youthful beliefs, including the danger of getting “cooties.”

On the negative side, the film often engages in potty and gross adolescent humor that is often unnecessary. The movie would have succeeded more without that childish humor. However, “Wimpy Kid” is a solid and often funny film about middle school that families will enjoy. The “kid” might be considered wimpy but his film is definitely a strong one.

“Alice in Wonderland” borrows elements of both of author Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, telling the story of a grown Alice who is set to marry the oafish son of her deceased father’s business partner. But as her trophy wife future pans out before her, she gets cold feet and flees her engagement party, inadvertently chasing a rabbit in a waistcoat and falling down a hole into a strange world. Once there, she learns that it is her destiny to rescue “Wonderland” from a swollen-headed Red Queen, obsessed with beheading others. As a rebellion brews in preparation for the foretold day of victory, Alice must reconcile that to save Wonderland she must battle the terrifying dragon-like Jabberwocky. Despite the dreamy atmosphere of Wonderland, Alice slowly realizes that if she accepts the task of slaying the Jabberwocky, it might kill her.

**SPOILERS COMING INCLUDING THE FINAL ACT**

Tim Burton’s vision is complete: dragon and horse flies with miniature dragon and rocking-horse bodies, decaying heads floating in the moat outside of the Red Queen’s castle, oddly shaped villains with long or lumpy bodies, vibrant colors everywhere. He expertly incorporates favorites from Carroll’s stories: food that makes you grow, drink that makes you shrink, talking animals, squat little twins, walking cards and chess pieces, and a tea party madder than September 12, 2009. But the story doesn’t quite match up. At the heart of the tale, we have a tame, Disney “classic” which has been told more effectively in “Mulan.” The film’s title character is portrayed as an early feminist, not content to sit back and let men have all the adventures. It doesn’t fit in the world of Wonderland.

While Burton has a long-running relationship with Disney, including the cult favorite “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” nothing about Burton is classic Disney. And everything about Woolverton is. Burton is about the quirks; Woolverton, the classics. What follows from their relationship starts in a stereotypical picture-perfect English party scene with understated characters who are all about conforming to societal norms. Thus, emotions are minimal. Mia Wasikowska, as Alice, should defy societal norms; instead she plays her emotions close, giving her performance a dreamy, trance-like quality for the better part of the film. Indeed, until Alice enters Wonderland, nothing drives the plot except the knowledge that at some point, we will get to a more interesting land.

But in Burton’s Wonderland, Wasikowska hardly wakes up, starkly contrasting her performance with Johnny Depp’s split personality Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter’s spoiled and angry Red Queen, and even Anne Hathaway’s airy White Queen.

But visions sync beautifully in the Red versus White battle, as an army of playing cards clashed with an army of chess pieces led by a claymore-weilding Depp, accentuating Alice’s epic battle with the Jabberwocky. But Depp’s bizarre jig to out-of-context techno music immediately after the battle quickly breaks the spell. Even the White Queen looked a little embarrassed at the performance.

The film ends with Alice returning to England and, predictably, rejecting her suitor. She goes on to do greater things in classic Disney fashion. Avril Lavigne’s unspectacular “Alice” plays as the credits roll—a choice that pretty much sums up the film.

I’m admittedly not acquainted with Carroll’s book, and only vaguely remember the 1951 fully-animated version that the Disney studios also created. But the key in reviewing a movie is in determining how it stands on its own as entertainment, and on this front, “Alice” mostly succeeds. It’s fun to look at and most of the performances are inspired, with relative newcomer Mia Wasikowska able to hold her own in an endless series of absurd and sometimes frightening situations.

On the downside, I found some of the gibberish talk by the Mad Hatter and the sometimes endless stream of odd-character introductions to be annoying at times. And while this is fine entertainment for teens and adults, parents of young children should realize that this movie is nearly a full two hours long, has some seriously violent moments in Alice’s fight with the dragonesque Jabberwock and even features a quick shot of a bad creature’s eye getting graphically gouged out. Also consider the fact that Alice drinks from any bottle and takes any pill in sight without questioning it – a fact that has inspired generations of drug-favoring hipsters to consider “Alice” a favorite story, but which might be concerning in the modern age, which is far more sinister than Carroll’s Victorian era.

The comparisons between “Avatar” and “Alice” are ripe for exploration not only because of their similar themes, but because this weekend “Alice” is poised to finally knock “Avatar” out of the weekly box office stratosphere due to the fact it’s the first major 3D film to come along since James Cameron’s epic invention entered theaters more than 10 weeks ago and became the highest-grossing film of all time. The major difference between the films is in their tone and casting – “Alice” maintains a fun if somewhat confusing tone of apolitical wonder, while “Avatar” jams a series of anti-military, pro-environment messages under its awe-inspiring visuals.

“Alice” also centers on a couple of star performances to work its magic, as opposed to “Avatar’s” cast of mostly unknown leads. Most people still wouldn’t know “Avatar” star Sam Worthington’s name enough to rush out for his next film, but the first thing people seem to ask about “Alice” is, “What’s Johnny Depp like?” As the Mad Hatter, he looks like Elijah Wood if Wood had become an honorary member of KISS – wearing a mountain of white makeup under a red-orange fright wig. He also takes the “mad” part a bit too literally at first, speaking in gibberish and sporting a frankly creepy grin throughout his first scenes before settling into a more nuanced and even kind tone after a flashback reveals what drove him into insanity.

Meanwhile, Helena Bonham Carter steals the show as the bulbous-headed Red Queen – an evil, shrieking harpy who loves to humorously use animals (a pig serves as her footstool) and shriek “Off with their head!” She makes a one-note freak into a vibrant, humorously frightening monarch that should draw even more public acclaim than Depp. And Crispin Glover as her evil assistant, the Knave of Hearts, surprisingly proves that he’s able to be more than a freak or a geek and becomes an effective badass villain, second only to the monstrous Jabberwock.

Ultimately, this “Alice” is destined to make a pile of money, but once viewers emerge from the dark theater and into the real world, the fantasy won’t maintain a long-lasting pull on their hearts and minds.

Most of the films on the list fall into my ambiguity zone – I couldn’t care less one way or another. Yet some fall into the “there’s absolutely no way I’d waste $10.50 plus the cost of snacks on this one” category.

Here they are, in order of their release. You may or may not agree with my assessments,  so have at it in the comments section:

Valentine’s Day (in theaters now): Another vanity project that crams in as many big names that would say “Yes.” Directed by Garry Marshall, the “all star cast” includes (in alphabetical order) Jessica Alba, Kathy Bates, Jessica Biehl, Bradley Cooper, Eric Dane, Patrick Dempsey, Hector Elizondo, Jamie Foxx, Jessica Garner, Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway, Ashton Kutcher, Queen Latifah, Taylor Lautner, George Lopez , Shirley MacLaine, Emma Roberts, Julia Roberts, Taylor Swift and Carter Jenkins. The movie follows the “intertwining storylines of a group of Los Angelinos as they find their way through romance over the course of one Valentine’s Day.” In other words, yet another cross-generational movie about how the beautiful people deal with love. Yawn.

—–

Alice in Wonderland (March 5): Alice in Wonderland is indeed a strange tale. Alice’s curiosity prompts her to follow a talking rabbit with a pocket watch down a hole and enters a land of odd creatures where nothing is as it seems, replete with talking animals and a power crazy queen whose army is a walking, talking deck of cards – and of course, she finds it was all a dream. The 1951 Disney animated film made this a favorite of children of all ages – which is why the idea of creepy Tim Burton taking over kind of bums me out. I was initially excited about seeing his version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but in the end was disappointed. Instead of Willie Wonka being a fun-loving man who just enjoys making candy and takes us along on his wacky adventures, we got Johnny Depp as a Willie Wonka whose father was dentist and ruined Willie’s childhood by forcing him to wear a horrible contraption on his head to straighten his teeth and wouldn’t allow him to have any candy. Because Willie’s childhood was “taken away” from him (think Michael Jackson, whom Depp reportedly used as inspiration for his character), he becomes a man desperate to relive his childhood. Sad. Depp is once again teaming up with Burton for Alice. Depp’s a fine actor, but I shudder to see what the two of them will do to this story.

—–

Green Zone (March 12): Matt “I Love Howard Zinn and I’m smarter than Sarah Palin” Damon in a movie about war. That pretty much sums it up.

—–

Wall Street 2 (April 23): Gordon Gekko is back. Sigh … again with the remakes. But Wall Street is once again in liberals’ sights as a symbol of all that is wrong with the world. The plot via IMDB: “As the global economy teeters on the brink of disaster, a young Wall Street trader partners with disgraced former Wall Street corporate raider Gordon Gekko on a two-tiered mission: To alert the financial community to the coming doom, and to find out who was responsible for the death of the young trader’s mentor.” Everyone’s favorite nerd Shia LaBeouf joins Wall Street veteran Michael Douglas in the sequel, directed once again by Oliver “I Love Castro” Stone. What’s not to, er, like?

—–

A Nightmare on Elm Street (April 30): The first Nightmare movie was shocking partly because it was different: a child murderer preys on the children of a lynch mob who killed him by entering their dreams. How can that be topped? Has Hollywood become so bankrupt in the idea department that it has to remake horror flicks from the 1980s?

—–

Sex in the City 2 (May 28): Haven’t we seen enough of these self-absorbed, sex-addicted, relationship-phobic women who have nothing better to do than to shop, do lunch and talk about … well, sex? Frankly, they’re getting a little long in the tooth for this sort of thing. Before you know it, they’ll be starring in Sex in the Nursing Home. And for the record, I am not one of those SJP haters…I happen to think she’s an attractive and talented woman. But let’s move on already.

—–

A-Team (June 11): When I was in high school, the A-Team was one of the top TV shows. Yes, I am showing my age. I watched it occasionally, but knew people who scheduled their evenings around it. A bunch of ex-U.S. Army Special Forces guys are on the run for a “crime they didn’t commit” become soldiers of fortune whose clients are always somehow oppressed. It was a product of its age: over-the-top action and over-the-top characters. I do enjoy watching reruns, but again wonder why Hollywood can’t seem to get out of the rut of revamping either old movies or old television shows for today’s audiences. The only bright side I can see are appearances by original A-Team stars Dirk Benedict and Dwight Schultz.

—–

Karate Kid (June 11): In the original film, Ralph Macchio plays Daniel, a teen whose divorced mother moves them from New Jersey to California. A fish out of water who is bullied by the local jerks – who happen to all belong to the same karate school run by a creep with a violent streak – Macchio is befriended by Mr. Miyagi, under whose handyman exterior is an accomplished martial artist and who teaches him that martial arts are more than just about beating up your opponent. “Wax on, wax off” became a catchphrase of the day (heh, I still say it). The new movie has the single mom and her son moving to China, but the rest of the plot is pretty much the same. As you might have already figured out, I’m not a big fan of remakes and am leery of films that don’t have an original storyline.

—–

Piranha 3-D (August 27): Since Avatar’s success, be prepared to be inundated with 3-D movies. In Piranha, a tremor under Lake Victoria unleashes the voracious ancient piranhas, leaving Sheriff Julie Forester (Elisabeth Shue) to save the hapless townsfolk. Poor Elisabeth. … true stardom has always eluded her and she is now relegated to doing films about man-eating fish that jump out of the screen at the audience. And it’s not even the very first horror movie about these killer fish (surprise!). Watch for appearances by Christopher Lloyd, Richard Dreyfuss and Jerry O’Connell (whom I really loved in his online spoof of Tom Cruise giving a creepy Scientology talk). Bottom line: If you loved Anaconda, you’ll probably love Piranha. If not, it’s probably best to save your money and your sanity.

—–

Jackass 3-D (October 15): What did I tell you? 3-D! And not just any 3-D movie, but a movie about a bunch of men who refuse to grow up and go around perpetrating stupid, dangerous pranks and stunts for their own amusement – and get paid for it. It’s based, of course, on the television show from MTV (remember when they actually used to feature music videos?) and the previous two Jackass movies. I’m sorry to say that Johnny Knoxville, whose career was launched by this series and whose biggest role to date was Luke Duke in the Dukes of Hazzard movie, and all of his friends are back. I’m not necessarily a comedy snob, but I don’t find humor in watching people hurt themselves.

Twenty years ago a retired lady bumped into me while I was in line to see “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” when she said, “Oh, you like to draw? You should come to the San Diego Comic Con. Here’s two free passes.” She came to my booth today and I gave her a big hug.

I had over ten young industry professionals who work in comics, animation and video games and tell me that they decided to learn to draw because they liked my work. An incredible 25-year-old Russian kid said that he was raised on a pirate version of my game, “The Neverhood,” I did with Dreamworks in the mid ’90s. I looked at his comic pages and he could draw better than I could. I drew a character for him and he gave up a tear.

I’ve been on the receiving end of so many people’s kindness on my way into this industry that it makes no sense to avoid helping other up-and-coming artists and writers. One thing is for sure; there will be no shortage of great ideas funneling through Hollywood for the next generation. But talent is secondary to what’s really important, that there are people of character and substance coming into this industry that make me feel like entertainment will be in good hands as time goes on.

But let’s get away from this raw sentiment before we might actually feel something and get down to the bottom line–today was my biggest day of book sales ever. I was limping around with a bigger wad of bills than Bill Maher in a strip club.

I loved seeing Lou Ferrigno signing headshots. He looks younger than I remember and his arms are still huge. Sure, Arnold won the title in “Pumping Iron” but he’s the hare to Lou’s turtle.

Patricia Heaton and David Hunt brought the family to my booth to get some books. She’s a true friend and we’ve been working on a few pitches. I loved introducing her to a few pals I’m in business with in Japan. Just to be ironic they started taking pictures of her.

There was a panel introducing Tim Burton’s “Alice In Wonderland” and the audience went nuts when Johnny Depp made a surprise appearance. Producer Sean Bailey talked about “TRON 2.0″ and the footage made the audience erupt with excitement.

My management (Gotham Group) in partnership with Darkhorse Comics has their big yearly drink-n-schmooze then I’m going out to drinks with some Disney executives. With all of this drinking I have a great excuse to be an even bigger jerk so I’m looking forward to that.

Friday brings the Oscars of the comic kingdom known as The Eisner Awards. My buddy Ethan “Eef” Nicolle is up for Best Humor Graphic Novel with his book “Chumble Spuzz”…I’d be nervous, but then again I have a lot of confidence in his work.

Tomorrow (Saturday, when I’m sober), I’ll be on a panel from 11:00am-12:01pm talking about Spirituality in Comics. It will be in room 3. Don’t be a stranger.