1. I like Tim Burton. His work is not "creepy", it is good interpretation of already creepy stories. Coraline scared me when I read it. Roald Dahl is a seriously freaky writer. Wonderland is a frightening place. We'll probably go see this even though the reviews aren't great so far.
2. The "Alice returns thing" is not something special and new made up for this movie, it appears to be a mixing of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. In fact, I'm rather disturbed that Burton would deviate from the original framework of the book. If you want to do Through the Looking Glass, please be my guest. I'd be happy to see Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee reciting long nonsense poems, the lion and the unicorn duking it out, and the mock turtle bemaoning his soupy fate. However, don't try to repackage parts of it as Alice in Wonderland. The Queen of Hearts cuts people's head off, the Red Queen is a cat (sort of) who runs really fast.
3. No, Lewis Carrol probably was not on drugs while he was writing his stories, however, drug use was very common in those days. One cannot really say whether or not he was an addict. Such things were accepted practices for men of quality. Certainly, it seems as though he was well aware of the drug culture of the time and we could argue for hours about whether the caterpillar is smoking tobacco in his hookah or something else as he instructs Alice how to change herself by eating mushrooms. Carroll didn't leave an instruction manual for his books; if he did we'd know whether he was making political commentary by putting a dodo in his caucus race or just being silly, but we don't. In the same way, we cannot really say whether his fondness for children was "deviant". We weren't there, and it's just not something that really came up in his saved correspondence.
4. I like both Willy Wonkas. Two of my favorite quotes in all moviedom are:
"We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams."
and
"Everything in this room is eatable, even I'm eatable! But that is called "cannibalism," my dear children, and is in fact frowned upon in most societies."
