Ken Kesey used to say that he did not want to see the film adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest any more than he wanted to pay to see his daughter raped in a parking lot. Whatever the merits of Milos Forman’s film and its relationship to Kesey’s book (I think the author mostly objected to the casting of Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy, where he envisioned someone who looked more like Paul Newman, or himself), I kind of feel the same way about Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

Not that she’s my child, but I may be one of hers.

For Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass, were the books that brought me to reading. So sick was my mother of reading them to me that she finally said, “If you want to hear these again, you’re going to have to learn to read yourself.” So I did. I’m sure I didn’t start with Alice — I had the usual Dr. Seuss stops along the way — but she was the goal, and to this day the John Tenniel illustrations are imprinted on my brain.

It’s obvious from the trailers, and the generally awful reviews, that Burton’s film has roughly the same relationship to the original books that Billy the Kid vs. Dracula had to its source material, which has not stopped it from having boffo box-office ($116 million its  opening weekend! Biggest 3-D movie ever!). As Anne Thompson put it in her Indiewire blog, the film’s success “proves yet again why studio marketers keep chasing the perfect match: branded family title + proven visual master + global movie star = blockbuster.”

What the mathematically inclined Charles Dodgson (aka Carroll) would have made of this equation is anybody’s guess. As Manohla Dargis pointed out in her generally despairing review in the Times, studios have tried to crack Alice’s code for years and have been mostly flummoxed. “Alice has no character,” said a writer who worked on the 1951 animated Disney version. “She merely plays straight man to a cast of screwball comics.”

“Of course the character of Carroll’s original Alice is evident in each outrageous creation she dreams up in Wonderland and in the sequel,” Dargis added,  “which means that she’s a straight man to her own imagination.”

I may be in the minority in finding most of Tim Burtons films rather inert: visually arresting, dramatically arrested. And I’m not sure you could make a good movie of the Alice books: my daughter came home confused, which is sort of the point, even after Burton tried to add some return/revenge angle to the proceedings. The logical author, in a sort of valentine to the girl he was illogically obsessed with, wrote a paean to a world beyond logic.

Of course we didn’t have these great FX when I was my daughter’s age. We had to create our own. Which brings us back to Kesey…