Wonderland

CAST: Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska and Helena Bonham Carter. Directed by Tim Burton. BACK STORY: There's no mistaking the singular surrealism of Lewis Carroll, but despite the familiar faces on the movie posters it would be a mistake to call Burton's vision a pure adaptation of the author's 19th century writings or even a live-action remake of Walt Disney's 1951 animated film. "It's a completely different and new story, but it has a lot of the same characters in it," said Wasikowska, the 20-year-old Aussie who portrays Burton's older Alice.

With its saturated colors, chrome-plated furniture, pink feathery plumes and outrageous animal chairs (ghoulish octopus, goth rhinoceros), the latest makeover of Greystone Mansion into decorator show house isn't exactly a lesson in try-this-at-home design.   No matter. Visitors who appreciate an over-the-top experience will find plenty in the Fendi Casa mirror TV, the crazy color combinations (red and turquoise in a tribute to Italian fashion designer Valentino), the patterned wall applications and the opulence loaded into the sprawling 1928 Tudor mansion.

With its saturated colors, chrome-plated furniture, pink feathery plumes and outrageous animal chairs (ghoulish octopus, goth rhinoceros), the latest makeover of Greystone Mansion into decorator show house isn't exactly a lesson in try-this-at-home design.   No matter. Visitors who appreciate an over-the-top experience will find plenty in the Fendi Casa mirror TV, the crazy color combinations (red and turquoise in a tribute to Italian fashion designer Valentino), the patterned wall applications and the opulence loaded into the sprawling 1928 Tudor mansion.

It was Tim Burton's 2010 version of "Alice in Wonderland" that made the famously blue-frocked daydreamer a steampunk princess. Lewis Carroll's heroine was certainly adventuresome and tart-tongued, but Burton's film turned her action hero. This Alice slew the Jabberwocky and restored justice to Wonderland, taught the Mad Hatter to love again and all those awful Victorians to respect a young woman's choices. This Alice had size-altering cordials, but she also had a sword and a mission.

The search for a warm-weather “Nutcracker” continues with “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,” Christopher Wheeldon's three-act dance fantasy, which the National Ballet of Canada brought to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Friday in its U.S. premiere, beginning a five-performance run. Like the Russian Christmas classic, the new work (co-commissioned by Britain's Royal Ballet) begins at a party for adults, involves its child-heroine in dreamlike changes of scale and battles with bizarre adversaries but also contains such formal divertissements as a Waltz of the Flowers and an Arabian Dance.

More than a children's classic, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," the 1865 book by Lewis Carroll, is ground zero for a multi-tentacled media franchise that has been going strong for nearly 150 years. The Victorian forebear of a variety of 20th century artistic movements, drug cultures and fashion trends, it has inspired untold authors and musicians, served as the basis for dozens of film and television versions, and been tailored and twisted to fit almost every narrative form imaginable, from musical theater to soft-core porn to video game.

Ask Ken Ralston, the visual effects supervisor for "Alice in Wonderland," what was the biggest logistical problem posed by the fantasy film and, like the Cheshire cat, the corners of his mouth pull back in a slow grin. "What part of it wasn't a challenge? All the characters in the film, all the weird combination of effects and the always-lovely fact of too little time to finish everything ? all of it was a challenge. To think of one thing that was bigger or more difficult than the rest, I can't do it. It was one giant challenge.

It was Tim Burton's 2010 version of "Alice in Wonderland" that made the famously blue-frocked daydreamer a steampunk princess. Lewis Carroll's heroine was certainly adventuresome and tart-tongued, but Burton's film turned her action hero. This Alice slew the Jabberwocky and restored justice to Wonderland, taught the Mad Hatter to love again and all those awful Victorians to respect a young woman's choices. This Alice had size-altering cordials, but she also had a sword and a mission.

Alice in Wonderland Walt Disney, $29.99; Blu-ray, $39.99/$44.99 Give Tim Burton credit: When asked by Disney to make a live-action, 3-D version of "Alice in Wonderland," he didn't take the safe route. With the help of screenwriter Linda Woolverton and skilled computer-animators, Burton reinvents Lewis Carroll's creation as the story of a young woman (played by Mia Wasikowska) who returns to the surreal land she dreamed of as a girl and gets involved in an epic battle between queens.

As power couples go, Shereen Arazm and Oren Koules are downright steroidal. She's a club/restaurant maven who owns or co-owns L.A. hotspots Terroni, Geisha House, Bella and her latest creation, Wonderland. He's a producer of the "Saw" film franchise and CBS' "Two and a Half Men" and co-owns the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team. Whew. But as Shereen can tell you, even power couples need time off the grid. Read on. Girls will be girls On Friday nights, my husband is usually busy on the set of his show, so I try to make it a girls' night out with friends.

With its prominent use of CGI and helter-skelter mash-ups of fairy tales from across the literary spectrum, ABC's new fantasy-based drama "Once Upon a Time in Wonderland" is like a "psychedelic romance," said writer and co-creator Edward Kitsis during the Television Critics Assn. press tour in Beverly Hills on Sunday. A spinoff of the 2011 ABC show "Once Upon a Time," which was also created by Kitsis and "Wonderland" co-creator Adam Horowitz, this new show finds the famous Alice (Sophie Lowe)

While most of the EDM establishment is cavorting at Winter Music Conference in Miami, some of the genre's biggest names will head to L.A. for Beyond Wonderland, one of Insomniac's bigger annual events. Swedish House Mafia's Steve Angello, Afrojack, pop titan David Guetta and rising acts such as Maya Jane Coles, Art Department, Damian Lazarus, Arty and Rebecca & Fiona top a pretty thorough bill of contemporary EDM. San Manuel Amphitheater, 2575 Glen Helen Parkway, San Bernardino. 4 p.m. Sat. $75-$150.

MALUKU ISLANDS, Indonesia - Perched on the edge of a skiff, I felt a trickle of sweat inch down my cheek. A heavy scuba tank pulled at my back as I adjusted my mask, feeling claustrophobic in all this gear and anxious about making this dive. How did I get here? I had come a long way to be sitting on this gunwale under a brilliant sun somewhere in Indonesia's Banda Sea: flights from Los Angeles to Bali and Flores, then motoring on calm seas past volcanic islands and coral atolls, white beaches and palm trees.

Blockbuster-starved studios rarely reach Hollywood's Emerald City, but Walt Disney Studios appears headed there this weekend. The studio's $200-million-plus 3-D production is set to open this weekend with a massive gross of about $90 million, according to those who have seen prerelease audience surveys. (Disney is predicting a softer opening of roughly $75 million.) Not only would that make for the biggest debut of 2013 by far -- "Identity Thief" currently holds the record with its $34.6-million February launch -- but the strong opening could help jump-start what has been a slow year for film-going.

Spring and summer are the ripe seasons for dance mega-fests and their six-figure headliners, which means March is the month when the weirdos come out. L.A. hosts a nice slate of outsider electronica this month that dips into disco, noise, bass music and svelte minimalism. Here's the best of the lot this month. On Friday, pool-party-skulking house savants Guy Gerber and Droog hold down at Sound (1642 N. Las Palmas Ave.), while the disco revivalist Daniel Wang brings roller rinks and big pianos back at the Eagle (4219 Santa Monica Blvd.)

After complaints about drug use and noise, a Los Angeles-based rave company is moving one of its annual concerts from its longtime home in San Bernardino to Devore, but some neighbors of the new venue are angry about the change. Insomniac Inc. decided to shift the Beyond Wonderland rave from the National Orange Show Events Center near downtown San Bernardino to the San Bernardino County-owned San Manuel Amphitheater after tensions with Police Chief Robert Handy and residents. It stages at least two other raves a year at the events center.

Santa Claus is really up against it this Christmas. In conversation with parents at work and parties this holiday season, I was startled to learn that some of them are rethinking the holiday legend for their kids. And not for the usual religious and cultural reasons. A few want to spare their kids the Santa traumas they suffered: being bullied for believing, the betrayal when they found out the truth. With so many multicultural families, they don't see the point of clinging to an Anglo-centric Georgian legend.

The search for a warm-weather “Nutcracker” continues with “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,” Christopher Wheeldon's three-act dance fantasy, which the National Ballet of Canada brought to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Friday in its U.S. premiere, beginning a five-performance run. Like the Russian Christmas classic, the new work (co-commissioned by Britain's Royal Ballet) begins at a party for adults, involves its child-heroine in dreamlike changes of scale and battles with bizarre adversaries but also contains such formal divertissements as a Waltz of the Flowers and an Arabian Dance.