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Dec 17, 2020

The Top 10 Hunks of "Once Upon a Time in Wonderland"

Lewis Carroll never intended to create a coherent fantasy world, where people could actually live, with governments, economics, social structures, and logical rules.  Alice is dreaming.

So when later writers and filmmakers try to make a Tolkienesque alternate-world fantasy out of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, they rin into countless problems: incoherent geography, sudden time shifts, queens without countries, worlds without history.  They closer they stick to the source material, the worse the results are.

Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, a spin-off of Once Upon a Time, sticks too close.

Oh, there's a new plot, with new characters and the extensive back stories we expect from the original. But the convoluted interconnections make no sense.

The plot: An adult Alice returns to Wonderland to rescue her True Love, Cyrus (Peter Gadiot, left), who happens to be a genie.  She is assisted by the Knave of Hearts (Michael Socha, above) and the White Rabbit, and foiled by the Red Queen and Jafar from Aladdin.

Meanwhile, the Knave of Hearts turns out to be Will Scarlet from Robin Hood, who is searching for his lost True Love, Anastasia (not the heir to the Romanovs; the daughter of Rapunzel), who happens to be the Red Queen.

The White Rabbit and the Caterpillar are actual animals, but the Lizard is just a nickname.  You can't have it both ways.

There are woefully out of place puns ("Forget-Me-Knot") which destroy the versimilitude.

At least, like the original series, Wonderland is a hunk paradise.  Here are the top 10 hotties:

1. Michael Socha

2. Peter Gadiot





3. Matty Finochio as Tweedledee.  He and his Tweedledum counterpart are Anastasia's servants.







4. Lost alumnus Naveen Andrews as Jafar.













5. Raza Jaffrey as Taj, Cyrus's older brother and the heir to the throne of...um...genieland?















6. Dejan Loyola as Rafi, Cyrus's other brother, also a genie.









7.  Hugo Steele as Orang, one of Jafar's guards.














8. Steve Bacic as "The Grendel." In the original Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, it's just Grendel, his name, not his species.










9.  Darren Shahlavi as a genie hunter.












10.  Arkie Kandola as a bartender.  He's also a Vancouver-based Sikh comedian.














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How about another peek at Darren Shahlavi?



6 comments:

  1. "Alice In Wonderlan" rarely works on film- the book is too loose and crazy to fit coherent narrative which a movie-tv show needs to work- the hunk cast is attractive

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    Replies
    1. The plot has nothing to do with the original books; some characters come in, but are transformed in ways that make them unrecognizable.

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    2. Yes because the book has no real plot - Alice just wonders around and encounters fantastic creatures

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  2. One interpretation I always liked is the books are about math. So, "you can always have more but never less" being about negative numbers.

    And of course they are different, especially when you get into exponents (kalm), roots (panik!), and logarithms (don't even bother).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "Alice in Wonderland" is a lot of stories that Lewis Carroll told to the Liddell children at different times, woven into an episodic story. "Through the Looking-Glass" was a more deliberate work, so it has a conventional plot with Alice in a giant chess game.

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  3. I just want to see Michael Socha take off more clothes

    ReplyDelete

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