Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Having looked forward to a Tim Burton remake for quite some time, I was a little disappointed by the remake.
I loved the original film. Gene Wilder was excellent as the quirky and eccentric Willy Wonka, the songs are funny and fitting, and it has a simple quality to the whole thing.
Once I heard Tim Burton and Johnny Depp were combining to make a version, I became intrigued. One aspect I have always found fascinating about the story is the dichotomy of this wonderful factory of sweets, chocolates and delights and the scary reality of the place.
Gaudy, vaudeville, and at time, nightmarish, this huge gothic factory which should be like a small piece of heaven, is, in reality, something closer to a bad LSD trip manifest in the world.
Nothing better personifies this than the proprieter himself. Willy Wonka is mad. Plain and simple. His genius has helped him create the impossible to delight the world, but the flipside is that his presence is very disturbing.
The film did not quite capture this in the manner I was hoping for. It is still well worth the ticket price, and the disappointment is much more my fault than that of the film.
Two things annoyed me.
Firstly, the fact that everyone referred to chocolate as 'candy' started to grate. It an American film, they call sweets candy, and that is fine. Chocolate is chocolate though.
At one point, David Kelly (who plays Grandpa Joe, well) looks at a bar of pure chocolate, and calls it candy. It broke my suspension of disbelief a little.
Secondly, I did not like the new emphasis on Willy Wonka and his family. While Christopher Lee is a welcome addition to any film, it made the ending a little saccharine for my taste.
Otherwise, I thought it was very good. I liked the new Oompa-Loompas and their songs, I thought Johnny Depp was brilliantly weird, and the factory looked cool. I just wish they had made it a little bit nastier and scarier.
posted by Gynax Gallenor @ 13:41
3 Comments:
Everyone is talking about this movie!! And i really wanna watch it! Why oh why did I choose this job!?
Well, we already had this argument, but in the spirit of self-promotion...
I preferred this movie to the first one. Why? Because it's better acted, better written and funnier. It's also nastier, and as someone who loves Roald Dahl for his unsentimental view of children (and humanity in general), that's a good thing. Fair enough, I was never a huge fan of the original, but I think a lot of people overrate it.
Burton's film has flaws, notably the excision of one particular plot point, which reduces the sense of drama overall. However, the inclusion of Willy Wonka's backstory makes sense if you accept that the film is as much about the chocolate maker as about Charlie. It also doesn't rule out a film of "Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator," which is far more nuts than the first book. Vermicious Knids, after all...
Nastier? I really don't think so, the squirrel bit aside - that's just plain Hitchcockian. If you're unconvinced - let's compare the subliminal beheaded cockerel count for the two films:
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: 1
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: 0.
Says it all really.
Again I like C&tCF, but I thought once they'd disposed of the kids, the ending was a little flat. Burton ommited the plot element you mentioned to focus on the Wonka Sr and Jr angle, which was every bit as sticky, sweet and tooth destroying as a Wonka bar.
And the new Charlie is, well, very, very dull. He's a whiter than white paragon of virtue who can do no wrong - an unrealistically virtuous poor child straight out of Jude the Obscure or Dickens. In fact, thinking about it now, I'm reminded of that scene from Monty Python's Meaning of Life where Michael Palin comes home and tells his gazillion kids that he'll have to sell them to the workhouse. After two or more viewings, I think the new Charlie will become intensely irritating. The old Charlie had a bit of impish childish spirit to him and had to bloody earn the factory. The new one is a cardboard cut out.
As for Gene Wilder vs Jonny Depp, I'm afraid it's Wilder by a nose. I never really saw Wilder's Wonka as being sugar coated - he had a manical gleam in his eye, was postively sociopathic about by the fates of the naughty children, and the bit at the end where he says Charlie broke the rules and tells him to get out - how harsh is that? Depp Wonka is mad too, to be sure, and a little scary - but is too much a pastiche of Micheal Jackson and Ed Wood for my liking. You can't imagine him uttering anything so sampleable as "We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams."
At the end of the day, I think the old Wonka is the better piece of entertainment. C&tCF has the bigger budget and the better cast, but somehow, it manages to miss the point of the story.
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