Don’t touch that squirrel’s nuts! It’ll make him crazy!

Charlie and The Chocolate Factory

Rating: 4 out of 5.

If Tim Burton was forced to shoot on location, would it then cease to be a Tim Burton film?

Probably not, but it sure does help.

When I began researching Burton’s films over the past two decades, I found quite a few of his films had been shot on location. However, as brilliant as these films may be, they still lacked the initial visual style that only Tim Burton could produce on a sound stage or on a studio back lot.

Please don’t misunderstand me, though. All of Burton’s films have that specific “look and feel.” You can easily tell when you’re watching something that has had the “touch” of Tim Burton. His eccentric and off-beat sense of humor. His dark gothic images. His personal quest to have his lead protagonists as misunderstood and sometimes deeply disturbed outcasts.

The man is notoriously known for his fantastic vision and his ability to take that vision and create it into something tangible. In order to do this, he has to create his own controlled environments on a studio back lot. Here are some obvious examples from the past 15 years: Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, Sleepy Hollow and Planet of the Apes.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory isn’t any different.

I was extremely skeptical about seeing this movie. The trailers had me confused and puzzled during the onslaught of mostly crappy Hollywood blockbusters this past summer. I was even more concerned that Tim Burton was going to destroy a perfectly good movie by “re-inventing” it. Most remakes are fairly sub-par to the original material, especially when the original is usually so widely loved and respected. Treading in this water will almost always mean failure or at the most garnering a mediocre response. Almost always leaving us asking the eternal question of why?

Here are just a few examples:

Psycho 1960 / 1998
Charade 1963 / The Truth About Charlie 2002
War of the Worlds 1953 / 2005
Planet of the Apes 1968 / 2001
Manhunter 1986 / Red Dragon 2002

I grew up with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. This film held a special place in my heart as a child and still stakes a claim there today. It was a fantastically executed morality play on the horrors of poor parenting and spoiled children. I never read the book, either. While it may have been a requirement for some to complete a book report on the material, I never thought twice about picking it up just for leisure.

Where Burton went wrong in Planet of the Apes, he went in the polar opposite direction with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Burton, with the help of screenwriter John August (Big Fish, Go), take a possible disasterous re-make (or “re-invisioning” … or whatever) and turn it into an enjoyable and equally palatable movie.

Johnny Depp’s depiction of Willy Wonka is reminiscent of a deeply scarred and reclusive Mister Rogers (which is exactly what he was trying to do). While Depp does a brilliant job here, I still admire Gene Wilder’s portrayal more. Unlike Depp, Wilder gave age and maturity to the role, while at the same time the ability to “snap” at a moments notice, depicting the struggling duality in Wonka’s personality.

The Oompa Loompas were an interesting touch as well. Rather than employing several little people, Burton hires one and digitally multiplies him. Deep Roy (who you might recognize as the man who rode the snail in The Neverending Story) plays the Oompa Loompas with great ease, bringing additional enjoyment from the four musical numbers they perform for each of the four bad children.

Danny Elfman’s score is fun and creepy and in many ways still sounds too similar to everything else he’s done in the past (especially with Burton). Elfman also provided all of the singing voices of the Oompa Loompas, overdubbing himself dozens of times to create an Oompa Loompa chorus.

In conclusion, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a fun and delightful remake. The visuals are a nice added feature, too, compared to the dated material back in 1971. The slight tongue-in-cheek humor is still there, as well as the wild imagery, with an additional bonus of seeing what happened to the other four children after their mishaps in the factory as they’re escorted from the premises. A majority of the story is still there from before, and with a cast that’s better than the original (except Wilder), Charlie is a great version to bring home to the whole family… just don’t forget to pick up the original while you’re at it.

Who are you, man?! … I’m Batdog!

Underworld
Rating: 1 out of 5.
From the Property Assistant of Stargate and Independence Day!

You may balk at the first line of my review, but I’m serious. How does one jump from a property assistant to a feature film director, let alone have a gapping hole of 7 years in between, without doing anything? Len Wiseman, conveniently engaged (oops, now married) to the lead actress in this film, brings to life this poorly-executed cinematic turd.

I feel so horrible about this film that I’m opting not to give the DVD it’s usual advertising link on the right hand side of the review. Those feeling compelled to purchase this movie, I truly feel sorry for you. There are better things out there to entertain you … and this is not one of them, either.

I was a little more naive when I rented this movie over a year and a half ago. Today I wouldn’t even think twice about passing it by while it sits on the shelf at your local soon-to-be-bankrupt video store collecting dust. I seem to feel the need to visit a video store about once every nine to twelve months, thinking that I could be that much more satisfied if I actually put my hands on the movie that I want to watch that night. I guess that’s what happened back in March of 2004, when I walked the mostly vacant aisle of “New Releases.”

As excited as I was grabbing this title from the shelves of a cookie cutter rental facility, the only thing that I found truly exotic and entertaining about this supernatural monster action/thriller was the skin-tight vinyl and rubber outfits of Kate Beckinsale. Even that was frustrating since everything was so well under lit, you couldn’t make out too many of the curves of this unbelievably beautiful woman.

Kate Beckinsale (Pearl Harbor, Serendipidy) stars as Seline, a vampire death agent who hunts down lycans (werewolves) in attempts to even the score of a war that has been waging between the two species for the past thousand or so years. Scott Speedman (Dark Blue) enters the picture as a man pursued by the lycans for some sort of blood research. When Seline discovers that the lycans are after a human, she decides to intervene, which is not the will of the other vampires and all hell breaks loose. Seline awakens the vampire clan’s fearless leader, Viktor (Bill Nighy, much more entertaining in this), in attempts to restore power to the vampire hierarchy which seems (at least on the surface) to be based in some sort of corruption. The end product rather seems to be a political and social statement about racism.

In what seemed to be a possible interesting entry in the ongoing boring horror genre, Underworld failed in almost every way. It was very stylish with it’s action sequences, editing techniques and concept. However, it eventually fell into the abyss of all the other unoriginal sci-fi/horror/action films of the past 5 years: overdone blue-tint filtering cinematography, just enough CGI effects to make it stand out like a sore thumb and the fact that it’s really hard to sympathize with lead characters that you really don’t give a rats ass about.