My Day
So, I had the day all to myself.
I was good in that I hit the grocery store and picked up the living room so we'd have somewhere around the tree for presents. I will also be doing laundry tonight. Shopping must happen before I teach tomorrow.
I was good to myself in that I played "City of Heroes" all morning with some online friends. Then while I picked up the living room I put "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" into the DVD player.
I have a long history with that particular intellectual property.
I can remember the first time I tried to watch "Willy Wonka", the Gene Wilder version, as a young child. That's because--already very unsettled at the idea of the kid possibly drowning in the chocolate river--when the bubblegum kid turned into a blueberry, I was terrified and had had enough. Swore off it completely and did not watch again.
Decades later, while working in a used-book store in grad school, I was bored and there was "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". I was on a bit of a kid-lit kick, having read the "Narnia" books recently among others, and figured the book couldn't be anywhere near as bad as the film. I was amused, charmed, and could see just why these brats deserved the punishments they got. I cried once or twice for poor Charlie.
Flash forward a bit more, and I finally watched the movie all the way through. Certainly not as scary as before and I was rather taken with Gene Wilder's performance, but I felt the book had been diluted heavily for the sake of movie audiences.
And now that I've seen Tim Burton's version, I think he got it right. Even with the addition of a backstory for Wonka that contributes to a rather schmaltzy ending, this is Dahl's book brought to life. The alterations to the two kids for a new century are very well done (Violet the hyper-competitor and Mike the video-game hacker). The role of the parents, and how they contributed to their children's dispositions, was also front and center as Dahl almost certainly intended in his original book. Johnny Depp's Wonka was much more brittle, and I'm not sure I liked that interpretation. I liked him best when he was either following his own logic so closely that he left the others behind or was so excited about what he was showing that he bumped into something or otherwise lost the thread of what was going on.
In general I liked the special effects. I liked Deep Roy's look for the Oompa Loompas, but I wish they'd gone with several actors rather than just him. Every scene with multpile Oompas just reminded me that I was seeing special effects, even though Roy refilmed those multiple shots many times to vary the reactions.
But what made this movie grip me in a way that the 1971 version didn't, was a much more realistic feel for poor Charlie. Overdone as his house and home situation were, this time I cried when Charlie failed to get a Golden Ticket the first two times, and I cried again with joy when he finally found one. Freddie Highmore is an excellent young actor, and didn't go overboard on the saccharine in the same manner as his 1971 counterpart.
A good way to spend the afternoon.
I was good in that I hit the grocery store and picked up the living room so we'd have somewhere around the tree for presents. I will also be doing laundry tonight. Shopping must happen before I teach tomorrow.
I was good to myself in that I played "City of Heroes" all morning with some online friends. Then while I picked up the living room I put "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" into the DVD player.
I have a long history with that particular intellectual property.
I can remember the first time I tried to watch "Willy Wonka", the Gene Wilder version, as a young child. That's because--already very unsettled at the idea of the kid possibly drowning in the chocolate river--when the bubblegum kid turned into a blueberry, I was terrified and had had enough. Swore off it completely and did not watch again.
Decades later, while working in a used-book store in grad school, I was bored and there was "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". I was on a bit of a kid-lit kick, having read the "Narnia" books recently among others, and figured the book couldn't be anywhere near as bad as the film. I was amused, charmed, and could see just why these brats deserved the punishments they got. I cried once or twice for poor Charlie.
Flash forward a bit more, and I finally watched the movie all the way through. Certainly not as scary as before and I was rather taken with Gene Wilder's performance, but I felt the book had been diluted heavily for the sake of movie audiences.
And now that I've seen Tim Burton's version, I think he got it right. Even with the addition of a backstory for Wonka that contributes to a rather schmaltzy ending, this is Dahl's book brought to life. The alterations to the two kids for a new century are very well done (Violet the hyper-competitor and Mike the video-game hacker). The role of the parents, and how they contributed to their children's dispositions, was also front and center as Dahl almost certainly intended in his original book. Johnny Depp's Wonka was much more brittle, and I'm not sure I liked that interpretation. I liked him best when he was either following his own logic so closely that he left the others behind or was so excited about what he was showing that he bumped into something or otherwise lost the thread of what was going on.
In general I liked the special effects. I liked Deep Roy's look for the Oompa Loompas, but I wish they'd gone with several actors rather than just him. Every scene with multpile Oompas just reminded me that I was seeing special effects, even though Roy refilmed those multiple shots many times to vary the reactions.
But what made this movie grip me in a way that the 1971 version didn't, was a much more realistic feel for poor Charlie. Overdone as his house and home situation were, this time I cried when Charlie failed to get a Golden Ticket the first two times, and I cried again with joy when he finally found one. Freddie Highmore is an excellent young actor, and didn't go overboard on the saccharine in the same manner as his 1971 counterpart.
A good way to spend the afternoon.