For Saturday evening's "Escape the hot condo" activity, we headed over to Walnut Creek and visited Borders Books, and then saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at 6:30. Borders was a sad sight, for they had Harry Potter decorations up everywhere, bunting with wizard-ish sigals and props and book displays... and not a copy of the new Harry Potter to be seen. They were completely sold out, either that day or perhaps even Friday night during their midnight sale. (If they had one. I assume they did but wasn't there to see; the crowds I blogged about Friday night were at a Barnes and Noble some miles distant.)
Malaya and I didn't care; we weren't looking to buy the book anyway, though we'll probably get it this week whenever we next hit CostCo for food and other things. But really, how can a major bookstore, the only one in a huge shopping mall in Walnut Creek, not have enough copies to even last one full day of the biggest book launch in history? (At least until HP book 7 comes out in a few years.) Not the best advance planning there, was it?
The book store was just a side trip to kill some time before the movie though, and after browsing around a bit and using their bathroom (always shorter lines than in the movie theater), we headed over to the Chocolate Factory.
In
yesterday's blog I quoted some critics who didn't much care for the film, or at least for Johnny Depp's performance in it, and I suppose I have to agree with them, at least a little. I didn't spend the whole movie with Michael "Magic Fingers" Jackson on my brain, as Ebert did, and I didn't find Depp's look and manerisms so odd that they kept me from feeling involved in the story, but all the same, Depp's portayal of the recluse chocolatier was not the highlight of the film, as I'd expected it would be.
What was the highlight, then? I really couldn't say. Nothing in it sucked, but nothing was stand out brilliant either. The sets were great, the special effects were pretty good, the segment with the nut-sorting squirrels wasn't as cheesy as it looked in the trailer, and none of the child actors was "fingernails on the blackboard" awful, as child actors often are. The songs were actually catchy and enjoyable, the digital effects to shrink and turn one guy into hundreds of Oompa Loompas were pretty seamless, and the hero child and his family were well acted and cast.
Really, the only major problem with the film was that it was a children's film that we attended opening weekend at an early showing. The audience was therefore chock full of children, and they did as children usually do in movies -- they talked all through it. Not to be annoying, just talked as kids do when their over-indulgent parents haven't properly trained them that there are times to babble out every though in their heads, and times to stay silent. So during the film there were constant loud voices asking, "What did he say then, Mommy?" and "I bet he's the bad guy!" and "Oooh, he's going to get in trouble now!" and so on. It was like really bad play-by-play announcing, with several kids announcing every obvious plot twist a few seconds after it happened. And yes, it's very easy for me to condemn parents for not properly-training their children in these dwindling months before I am married and then inflicted with no-doubt-unwieldy rug rats of my own.
The other thing that didn't work for me about the film was the unreality of it. It's obviously a fantasy, with magical things happening to various characters, and there's clearly no way Willy Wonka's candy factory could exist under any working law of physics. I can accept that without a problem, but at the same time some of the things were meant to be realistic, and it made for a weird juxtaposition of fantasy elements with reality. There were factory assembly lines (not in Wonkaville) that looked sort of realistic, but that had people doing the sort of simple, mindless, and repetitive tasks that robots were invented for. Most of the architecture and aspects of the world looked like they were straight out of the 1800s, and then there were video games and computers and satellite dishes that were completely modern.
They combined in odd ways too; the world media was in a frenzy about the five golden tickets, and every winner was immediately on TV, and yet somehow no billionaires offered millions for a winning ticket, people weren't hijacking shipments of the candy bars on their way to the stores, and guys weren't running through candy stores weighing every bar or using a metal detector or x-ray machine to try and find the golden tickets without paying for them (which is exactly what happens when they include valuable metallic cards or holograph cards in packs of sports trading cards). Also, these five kids and their guardians were the first people to enter Wonka's factory in a decade, the entire world wanted to see what was inside, and yet none of them took or smuggled in a camera?
Plus, they all knew that one of the five kids would win a special prize beyond all other prizes, and at least three of the other kid/parent teams were super competitive and scheming, and yet none of them made any effort to outlast the others and win the prize. The basic theme of the story (I've never read the book and hadn't seen more than bits and pieces of the previous Gene Wilder-starring film.) seems to be bad parenting, in the form of parents who either exercise no control over their kids by spoiling them rotten, or by not setting them any limits. That's fine, but with one mother telling her daughter to "keep her eyes on the prize" and another insisting that she win almost as a birth right, why didn't the parents make any effort to get their kids to win the super special unspoken prize? They just sort of let the kids do whatever they wanted to, and thus the kids did something stupid the first chance they got and were eliminated. True, that's sort of the cautionary moral of the tale, but the parents watched their kids get (nearly) killed almost without objection. They should have either displayed a twisted sort of caring love, or been like the
crazy coach dad types and screamed about how they were being stupid and letting down the team. (As you know, there's no "I" in team. Although there is a "me," ironically.)
It wasn't great, but it was enjoyable, more for the overall story and performances than for any individual aspects of the film. This isn't my real review, I'll bang that out tomorrow, if I have a chance, but just to put up the scores while it's still fresh in my mind:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 2005
Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: 5
Humor: 5
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 4/8 (adults/children)
Overall: 7
It's adequate and enjoyable and probably great for families, but it certainly wasn't the film I would have made if I'd been directing/writing it. But since my film wouldn't have been suitable for children, that's probably for the best.
