Charlie And The Chocolate Factory

[poliphilo]

Tim Burton "dark"? "Playful" would be nearer the mark. Hitchcock is dark, Aldritch is dark; almost any director you care to name is darker than Burton.

I admire Ed Wood. I love the silliness of Mars Attacks. Otherwise I've been disappointed.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is dreadful.

It travesties Dahl. Dahl is never sentimental. You want dark? Dahl is dark. Burton can't handle him.

Bleeagh- the gloopiness of that ending. One hug from Daddy and everything is fine again.

Every other Hollywood movie these days seems to be about little lost boys and their daddies.

I have a word for you- a bright shiny new word; I just coined it:

Daddyporn.

Whatever happened to Mommy, by the way?

But enough of that. Johnny Depp is a pretty good actor. He's too good for most of the dreck he appears in. Here he impersonates Michael Jackson. Which raises "dark" issues that Burton sweeps under the carpet.

And all that great White Hunter stuff with the Oompah-loompahs- racist or what?

And there's too much CGI. Everything looks beautiful, but there's no energy. The more I see of CGI the more I hate it. The airbrushed sheen of it. Unreal. Fakey. It's killing the movies.

This is supposed to be a kids' film, so why isn't it more fun?

The Gene Wilder version was gaudy and vulgar but it was tons of fun. The songs were better too.

To recapitulate: Sentimental, evasive, racist, fucked-up, dull. Let's add misogynist. Mrs Burton (Helena B-C) makes a token appearance stirring the cabbage soup, but otherwise it's nothing but boys in clover.

Ooh, daddy; no-one can love me the way you do!

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I can usually tell if it's CGI. But I guess there must have been times when it was so convincing it fooled me.

There's a recreation of 1930s Chicago in Road to Perdition which is pretty damn good. I don't have a problem if CGI is used as a substitute for back projection and glass-shots and stuff like that- essentially to fill in the background; it's when it usurps the foreground that I get angry.

The first film that made me think things were getting out of hand was Gladiator. That computer generated Colosseum never fooled me. If they'd have used it as background I'd have accepted it, but no, they had to pan their cameras lovingly across the statuery...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Even at a great distance you can tell whether a soldier is a real soldier or a CGI soldier.

I watched Waterloo the other day. It's one of those old-style epics where the producers got the Soviets, desperate for money, to let them have the bulk of the Red Army- cheap.

Real live soldiers as far as the eye could see- thousands of them; bliss!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

One of the villages round here was taken over by the company filming Yanks. They took down all the TV aerials and parked tanks in the square. The film is largely forgotten but locals still regard it as the highlight of their lives that they once saw Vanessa Redgrave walking down their street. My father in law was offered a part as an extra and turned it down- twit!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I liked Spielberg's AI. That's a film where the CGI seems (mainly) appropriate.

I'm sure there will be other films that use CGI creatively. At the moment, though, it's a relatively new toy and it's being used promiscuously and thoughtlessly.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think AI was Spielberg's last masterpiece. On the evidence of his recent output, I don't expect him to make another.

[idahoswede.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, is Helena B-C Mrs. Burton nowadays? See what happens when I don't read the supermarket rags? Last I heard, she was busy breaking up Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

To be honest I'm not sure whether they're actually married, but they're one another's significant others. At least they were last time I looked.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Heavy sigh: that will last till she's not young anymore.

I heard a movie star talking about his recent marriage vows, which included: "...until we no longer love..."

Good grief. Why bother?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't really get it either. I guess these people are too conventional to do without marriage, but too superficial to take it seriously.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I found the entire movie so heavy and depressing that it haunted me for hours--that claustrophobic factory with its ugly scenery and weird Johnny Depp, who was irritating and creepy without being amusing, ever.

You have it exactly about CGI: "The airbrushed sheen of it."

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's heavy and funereal without ever justifying this by coming to grips with the issues it raises.

I think it's a very confused piece of film making.

[queen-in-autumn.livejournal.com]

The worst bit about the whole Daddy element was that it was tacked on by Burton. It wasn't in the book at all! For some reason, Burton had to 'explain' why Wonka is the way he is. He also twisted the bit about Charlie having to give up his family to inherit the factory. As I recall, in the book it was Wonka's idea to get Charlie's family!

Burton seemed to be dealing with his own issues there, not Wonka's. (Although it did get Christopher Lee on the screen -- and while I didn't like the part his role had in the movie, I did enjoy him.)

"Whatever happened to Mommy?"
But that's a fairy tale motif. 'Everyone knows' that a truly present mother would never allow Bad Things to happen to her children. Thus, the Step Mother, or the dead mother, or the just-barely-present mother. And Wonka has always been a story about the boys: Charlie, Grandpa Joe, Wonka.

As for the Oompa-Loompas and rascism: that too is inherent in the book -- Wonka's great white savior bringing the aborigines out from their caterpillar-eating misery and making them happy factory workers who live on chocolate.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The Daddy element certainly feels tacked on. The ending is so peremptory! Why do we have to understand Wonka anyway? He's a glorious monster. Glorious monsters don't need explaining.

Burton likes Lee. He keeps giving him cameos. But why won't he give him a nice, big, juicy role? Lee's a wonderful actor. He deserves better.

You're right about the fairytale motif. I only miss Mommy because Burton is so fixated on Daddy. In Dahl's original the issue doesn't really arise.

As for the racism- why, when he's prepared to mess with other aspects of the book, is Burton not prepared to adjust the Oompah-loompahs?

[butterscotch711.livejournal.com]

I agree about the movie, but the misogyny and racism came straight from the book, I think! Dahl originally wrote the Oompa Loompas as African pygmies, and when people complained he re-wrote them as midget hippies. And the adult women in the book were just tacked on.

I loved Johnny Depp's performance, but the things I liked about it had little to do with the movie that was going on around it. If he was going to be *so* much like Michael Jackson, the movie really needed to run with all the associations that brings up.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Dahl was of a generation that hadn't quite got its act togther over racism, but he was obviously prepared to learn.

That Burton, in 2005, was prepared to run with the African pygmy idea strikes me as quite extraordinary.

I like Johnny Depp. But his performance here belongs in some other (better) film.

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

Haven't seen it, probably won't. Wilder is the Wonka of my youth, and I'd rather not sully that.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The Wilder film is an entertainment; the Depp film is- er- something else.

[sina-says.livejournal.com]

i so regret seeing this version of the movie. gah! i found the whole thing completely disapointing. it lacked all the creepy, beautiful ambiance of the first film. depp, whom i usually adore, was somewhere between boring and annoying. the computer reproduced oompa loompas were terrible. i think the money they spent on that would have been much better spent on... *gasp* hiring more than one damn actor. i felt gipped. and the songs! horrible.

really, i think the only redeeming moment may have been the squirrels. (which were actually dozens of trained animals!)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It had its moments.

Few and far between.

My favourite was the moment when the animatronic dolls in the welcoming committee caught on fire.

I agree about the Oompah-loompahs. They were horrid.

[qatsi.livejournal.com]

I know I'm in a minority here, but I preferred the remake immensely over the Gene Wilder version, which just seemed to dispense with anything sinister in preference to saccharinising the whole thing. Dahl's stuff is like a real fairy tale: there's a morality play in there somewhere, but plenty else going on besides.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Ah well,

My memory of the Wilder version is hazy. I'm not arguing that it was a great movie or anything like that, but it was fun.

Neither version is as good as Dahl's book.

[red-girl-42.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the new version, and I probably won't. I kind of suspected everything you just said about it. It looks creepy but not in a fun way.

When my son and stepdaughter were lobbying to see it last summer, I said, "You do know that it's based on a book, right?" They responded with shock and awe. So we climbed into my giant bed every night, opened up my ancient copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I read it to them, a chapter a night. They were rapt. And my stepdaughter was almost THIRTEEN at the time! They literally hooted out loud when Charlie found the golden ticket, they were so thrilled.

And somehow they forgot about seeing the movie. :-) Although I'd rent them the original if they wanted.

And you are right on about CGI.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Burton's Charlie is creepy in the wrong way. He just doesn't get Dahl. Dahl is dark, but jaunty and cheery with it. Burton imposes a funereal pace and goes easy on the jokes. And Depp, brilliant actor though he is, is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

Dahl is brilliant. A great children's author- right up there with Carroll and Milne.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Well, I thought it was fabulous. I also thought that, silly business with Christopher Lee aside, and the "leave your family" thing, it was a lot more faithful to the original than the Gene Wilder version. I thought the "leave your family" twist worked well with the more self-centered and otherwise clueless Wonka character that Depp created. I rather suspect the only reason Roald Dahl didn't include that was because he didn't think of it. If he'd thought of it he'd have put it in, I betcha.

I'm sure that part of that hunter thing was an echo of Depp's Raoul Duke character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In fact, I saw several echoes of previous Depp films there.

Anyhow, I saw it twice on the big screen. Once on opening night and once in the local IMAX, which is a really big screen.

I liked the Ooompa Loompas. I also liked the squirrels.

And I thought the reason for the Daddy/Dentist business was pretty obvious. Burton used every scrap of dialog and plot in the book, and added all those dentist scenes, and still only had an 89 minute film.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think you're right about the echo of Fear and Loathing- a Depp film I well and truly love.

Otherwise, we agree to differ. Burton may be faithful to Dahl's text, but he just doesn't get his spirit. He imposes his own trademark gothicism. He is funereal where Dahl is chirpy.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'd differ on that characterization, too. I would say the film is extremely chirpy in a gothic sort of a way. But then I was guffawing at most of the Ooompah Loompah numbers.

[zephyrcrow.livejournal.com]

You're delightful when you're being bitter. :)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thanks.