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.