The Last Mimzy

I have a soft place in my heart for the Alice in Wonderland stories. They're deep. Oh they're not just deep in a Charlie Brown or Norman Rockwell sort of way, where we imput wisdom. They're pretty bottomless: logic, semiotics, geometric cosmology. I've spent a lot of time with them, and been uniformly rewarded.

Part of the wisdom in them concerns how people get things wrong when they "explain" them. There's something about logic that it runs out of its own sense quickly. So its a special amusement of mine to see how movies use Alice, and the various ways they twist in the wrong directions. It has its own magnetic force that forbids you from avoiding looking like an idiot. That's the joke.

The word around which this was built "Mimzy," is actually "mimsy." Its in a poem usually considered sonorous nonsense, in fact celebrated precisely for its nonsense. In fact, it was written while Carroll was a child and is a mix of Saxon and French words reflecting his father's obsession with the "pollution" of the homeland's language. This reaches into the Alice stories which came later by faking a photo that has Alice Liddell (for whom the stories were written) holding a stuffed animal identical to the one that features in the story. Presumably, Alice's toy was one of the earlier mimsies which though it made the girl brilliant, failed in its mission to return to the future with some unspecified payload.

My gosh, let's see. There's some Tibetan mysticism, mixed paranormal phenomenon and ordinary magic involved, yet strangely unmagical tasks are required. Oh, and it needs regular old electricity, lots of it. This prompts the national police to confound things. Michael Clarke Duncan plays the top cop, a sort of daft fellow bordering on affirmative action satire. A new age couple is clearly humorous.

I can't recall a bigger mess. The only thing not repulsive is the notion that magic is visible, has geometry and does not respect gravity.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.