Siteseeing

Ah, back to the original purpose of this blog... links!

- Silent PC building guide
- $1000 Apple 20" Display = $400 Dell model
- Compfused home of the Neverending Fall and Cursor Snatcher
- Dr MegaVolt!

Willy Wonka

Weird fixation on movie entries lately, sorry about that. I promise my life has much more going on in it than that. It's just, for some reason, I can't convince myself that the whole idea of blog-as-personal-diary is anything other than incredibly stupid, so I limit myself to the fantastic and bizarre and ultimately, those experiences that can be shared.

Saw Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory with some good friends the other night, and couldn't help but be very intertained by this completely average movie. There is a lot to criticize: the fantastic visuals lack restraint, the pacing is hackneed, and the film fails to create a sense of wonder and magic that I found in the book. There are snippets of it here and there, but also plenty of moments that kill the momentum.

I thought the comparisons of Johnny Depp's performance to Michael Jackson were unimaginative and half-baked. It literally boils down to "they both have white skin. there are kids around" but that's it. Depp's Wonka is a strange disconnected man who doesn't exactly like kids, and lashes out at them like a big child himself.

The addition of back-story flashbacks to Wonka's past and his overbearing father do just what I thought they would do - derail the film and send it in directions it doesn't want or need to go. Although I love Christopher Lee's performance, in fact the side story itself is perfectly ok, but it just doesn't fit into the rest of the film.

But none of that matters. The best I can say about the film, its ultimate strength, was that it made me feel like a kid again. ALL of my friends said pretty much the same thing. It wasn't that I was watching it in a theater full of children, I was, but somehow I didn't hear them until the movie's weaker 2nd half. No, Depp manages to capture a child-like quality that Jacko could never have, Depp's Wonka might be cut off from the world but he still holds a child's fascination.

It's kinda weird, I've read enough reviews that suggested this film wasn't kid friendly, that's Dahl's original vision and Burton's adaptation are too dark. But sitting in a theater full of them, listening to them laugh and talk excitedly afterwards, and I couldn't help but wonder if our society was just a little off about the whole thing.

A Trip at 30 frames per second

Movies and/or snippets of movies I have caught in the last, oh, 2-3 months.

-The death scene in Throne of Blood, the ferris wheel scene in The Third Man, the ending of Chinatown, the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan
-Banannas and Manhattan, both for the first time
-Street Fighter, a strange kung fu film whose central hero my friend refers to as "that nice rapist"
-The Forbidden Zone, Danny Elfman's first
-The Forbidden Planet, introducing Robbie the Robot!
-Incubus, otherwise known as "Esperanto, the Motion Picture"
-Peter Jackson documentary collecting Tolkien's references to Finnish and Welsh epic poetry in his elven languages
-Only 1 episode of Family Guy
-The one and only show of FolleyVision with special performance by "that guy from police academy who makes noises with his mouth."
-THX 1138
-The Aviator
-F for Fake (Howard's Revenge!)
-Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
-Batman Begins (surprisingly good!)
-another Folleyvision staring a perfectly proportioned 3 foot tall james bond
-A Double Life
-Tao of Steve
-The Seventh Seal
-Ian McKellan's performance at the end of Moulin Rouge
-overrated season 2 of the Sopranos