2022 Directed by Krystin Ver Linden
Alice spends her days enslaved on a rural Georgia plantation restlessly yearning for freedom. After a violent clash with plantation owner Paul, Alice flees through the neighboring woods and stumbles onto the unfamiliar sight of a highway, soon discovers a shocking reality that lies beyond the tree line.
앨리스
i dont know what this film is. i could see this film and not understand a thing. sorry to this film.
Saw this back at Sundance, but was skimming through it since I had other films to watch. Honestly I didn’t need to rewatch this since I knew how most the scenes would play out, but… I wanted to see how I feel about this now. The movie has an unnecessary 40 minute prologue when Alice is still a slave, in my opinion I would trim this down to 15-20 minutes at most, since the scenes are repetitive and we don’t need a crash course on why Jonny Lee Miller’s character is the villain and needs to be stopped/killed. It struggles to balance the two genres of a slave drama and blaxploitation; along with other themes that are rushed or forgotten…
"Doing the right thing... is never wrong" -Alice,
- 2022 Ranked: boxd.it/eWNQo
- Sundance 2022: boxd.it/f5MjG
Maybe this premise is just too big to write a successful script around.
I really didn't like this. For me it never quite feels like it accomplishes what it wants to... which is a lot. The basic premise is an engrossing one, which makes the film very watchable. But, in the end I am just not sure the film has a message more nuanced than racism bad... which is true but has been covered in more interesting ways in film. I found the first twenty minutes a bit of an uncomfortable waste and the ending nowhere near as cool or impactful as it should have been. Keke Palmer and Common do quite well but, for me, not well enough to save this script that is a bit all over the place.
Not for me, but qive it a try.
Someone put Common in a movie that knows what to do with him. I’m begging.
To be completely honest, I hated the beginning of Alice, which was gratuitous and disempowering. When Alice "travels" to 1973, it's the opposite. Based on writer/director Krystin Ver Linden's research, the credits specify that this film is for those who remain oppressed worldwide and for those that remained enslaved throughout the Twentieth Century.
Lead actress Keke Palmer did a great job. I thought some of her reactions to the modern world were overkill like fainting and freaking out when she sees a truck, but that's mainly the script's fault. Some of the musical cues felt random. However, I loved Palmer's fro and her character's confrontation with the people who exploited her.
There were some minor inconsistencies with Alice's character: she…
keke palmer continues to be divine but everything else here, including alicia witt’s interesting take on a southern accent, can go. immediately. post-haste. get the fuck on.
this was not it! this was so far from being it holy shit how is this real
SUNDANCE 2022
Film #8
I’m conflicted by first time director Krystin Ver Linden account of a woman who realizes her entire life as a slave has been a lie. It was rough going at first. You get a half hour of dehumanization. We've seen many of these scenes before, the whippings, being chained up, verbal abuse and it's painful. However the film really picks up once Alice, played by a sensational Keke Palmer, escapes and realizes she's in 1973.
I always enjoy movies that show characters being in shock at discovering a world they didn't know existed. That's why I like films like Time After Time and of course the Back to the Future trilogy. This is no time travel…
God almighty, what the fuck did I just watch? Let's get the few positives of Alice out of the way first. Common is good, the production design and cinematography are fairly nice, and the soundtrack features some kick-ass soul music. Really, though, my primary takeaway is that Keke Palmer possesses an otherworldly brilliance as an actress. If she can be great in Krystin Ver Linden's unbelievably ridiculous, terribly written film, she can truly do anything. Palmer will receive an Oscar nomination someday, or quite possibly a win, but it will not be for Alice. The storyline and pacing are too preposterous for this to even function as magical realism or a fable. There are more plot holes than actual plot.…
ALICE spends too much time on its least interesting & tiring elements (pretty much the whole first act). It steadily gets better but never reaches the levels of greatness it could’ve. Credit to Keke Palmer for giving it her all in service to a film that can’t match her efforts.
Sundance #59
What this film does right, like the direction and set design, cannot make the rest of the film good.
another #girlboss entry, except this time we’re girlbossing our way out of slavery. most of the black femme empowerment here is extremely superficial. alice decides to free everyone from the plantation she ran away from based on watching pam grier movies, seeing other black women on magazine covers, and reading one book. this arc transforms alice into a slavery-as-choice / slavery-as-mental-construct film—when alice goes back to the plantation, nothing has changed except for her mindset. she returns with a gun, a weapon she had access to prior to escaping, and successfully takes down her previous master, implying that self-actualisation is all that was / is needed for black liberation. ver linden doubles down on this through the slave owner’s words, “i never…
