All right, so I haven't been updating this as much as I planned thanks to my new job and other various shit happening in my life. But here I am now with not a lot to talk about personally, so I am going to rant about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
I saw the movie tonight and have to say I was a little disappointed. It nailed many of the details from the book that the first film lacked (the Bucket house, Loompaland, the squirrel room) and some of its updating was excellent (particularly the characterization of Violet and Mike Teevee), but it also missed the mark in many regards. The pace of the whole film felt rushed, which was particularly egregious considering that most of the third act was dedicated to the silly backstory about Wonka's father that was invented by the filmmakers. Overall, I will still take the Gene Wilder version.
However, the one element of the film that works brilliantly is Depp. His interpretation of Wonka is vastly different from either Wilder or the book, but he reinvents the character brilliantly and shed new light on the entire story for me.
Depp plays Wonka as a reclusive germ phobe who can't stand the kids he makes a business of delighting ( despite Depp's physical appearance, he's actually more Howard Hughes than Michael Jackson). In this regard, he is similar to Roald Dahl himself, who, like most great children's authors, despised kids. Why is it that people who do not particularly like children are so good at pleasing them? Watching Depp, I realized that it is because if you don't like children, you don't bother condescending to them. Depp's Wonka is so horrible with children because he does not differentiate them from adults (whom is not particularly good at dealing with either). Similarly, Dahl was beloved because he did not talk down to kids. He, like Wonka, worked in a world of childlike imagination but did not treat it as child's play. He treated it as deathly serious business.
What is the point of all this? I don't know.
I saw the movie tonight and have to say I was a little disappointed. It nailed many of the details from the book that the first film lacked (the Bucket house, Loompaland, the squirrel room) and some of its updating was excellent (particularly the characterization of Violet and Mike Teevee), but it also missed the mark in many regards. The pace of the whole film felt rushed, which was particularly egregious considering that most of the third act was dedicated to the silly backstory about Wonka's father that was invented by the filmmakers. Overall, I will still take the Gene Wilder version.
However, the one element of the film that works brilliantly is Depp. His interpretation of Wonka is vastly different from either Wilder or the book, but he reinvents the character brilliantly and shed new light on the entire story for me.
Depp plays Wonka as a reclusive germ phobe who can't stand the kids he makes a business of delighting ( despite Depp's physical appearance, he's actually more Howard Hughes than Michael Jackson). In this regard, he is similar to Roald Dahl himself, who, like most great children's authors, despised kids. Why is it that people who do not particularly like children are so good at pleasing them? Watching Depp, I realized that it is because if you don't like children, you don't bother condescending to them. Depp's Wonka is so horrible with children because he does not differentiate them from adults (whom is not particularly good at dealing with either). Similarly, Dahl was beloved because he did not talk down to kids. He, like Wonka, worked in a world of childlike imagination but did not treat it as child's play. He treated it as deathly serious business.
What is the point of all this? I don't know.