How long will it be before nobody here gets that?
I miss you, lissener. You could be a one-trick pony sometimes (Nomination for Understatement of the Decade), but you were coherent, lucid and fun to talk to.
As opposed to posters like myself or I burning your dog?
Bathtub meth is bad for you!
It was sort of a joke/friendly warning so that the OP doesn’t meltdown like lissener did.
This is based on a faulty premise. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is not “the original.”
Roald Dahl created the original, and he thought Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was a stinking pile. Personally, I liked Willy Wonka, and will never turn my back on it, but it’s not what you need to measure Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory against.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory does not need to be remade, and that’s all to the good, because it hasn’t been.
If Peter Jackson produced a faithful adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, would you complain that it didn’t conform to the vision of that Victor Fleming movie from 1939? I’m sure we agree that The Wizard of Oz doesn’t need to be remade, but I’d really like to see a modern version that makes a fresh approach to the book and takes advantage of improvements in technology.
Generally, though, I agree with you about pointless remakes. Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Bleah. Psycho? Shot for fecking shot, but with a different aspect ratio, so the composition is all screwy? Burn it! If you’ve got the balls to go back to the Robert Bloch novel, ignore everything that Hitchcock and his ensemble brought to their adaptation, and start fresh, have at it! This is what Tim Burton did with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He managed a much better adaptation of the book than Mel Stuart did, in my opinion.
Tim Burton is really the perfect person to adapt Roald Dahl, because Roald Dahl’s stories are fucking creepy. Creepy, but fun. That never really came through in Willy Wonka. Too sweet.
That’s not to say that Tim Burton isn’t guilty of making a pointless, stupid remake. Planet of the Apes. Maybe if he went back to Pierre Boulle’s much weirder novel, it would have been interesting.
As for Ebert, he’s a gas-bag. Who cares?
I think of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” as a book, not a movie. the Gene Wilder film version was a pretty mediocre and forgettable effort. My assumption, even before I read it confirmed in reports about the new film, was that this was a new adaptation of the book.
Thanks for letting us know where you’re coming from as you evaluate films…
Ebert annoyed me when he reviewed The Human Stain and gave away the “surprise”. He tried to absolve himself by saying that the director really didn’t want to keep it a surprise, but that doesn’t square with my version of reality – it seems to have been an intended revelation that changes the way you think about characters. KIt certainly wasn’t in any of the publicity for the film I’ve seem or in other reviews. Not that it’s a movie I particularly want to see, but Ebert very deliberately blew it for a lot of potential viewers, and to no purpose I can see. I’ve stopped watching him.
[nitpick] The remake of TCSM was directed by Marcus Nispel, a well known music video director, not Michael Bay.[/nitpick]
If you want a really pointless remake, how about the shot-for-shot remake of Psycho?
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has sold over 13.7 million copies worldwide, and has been translated into 32 languages. I think you over estimate the original movie.
Well, not one single film needs to be made. An artist needs to express something and chooses film as the medium. But film does not need to be made any more than marble needs to chipped away till it looks like an angel.
The ‘system’ that you despise is not ‘the studio system’ but ‘capitolism’. Many other countries underwrite film production. That is one reason why their film makers create movies where people talk to each other and say interesting things, (which freqeuntly get remade here in the USofA, sometimes with Ted Danson, with mixed results)
I hate the originial Willie Wonka movie with a passion that I only reserve for the Beatles and the Wizard of Oz. I recognize that the former two are incredibly important to popular culture; I just don’t enjoy them at all. I can’t say anything the same of the original Willie Wonka movie.
I went to Burton’s remake/reimagining/whatever, and I enjoyed it. So there. I got into it, laughed a lot, and had fun. It was weird without being simply fucking annoying, which is my problem with the originial movie.
And I generally agree with Ebert’s reviews. Much, much more often than other critics’ reviews, like that Scott fella from the New York Times, or that punk-ass Nick LaSalle from the SF Chronicle (I grew up there and still read the paper occasionally). If ever there were a pitworthy critic, it is LaSalle.
First of all, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is a brilliant movie. Yes, Tim Burton’s made some questionable films, like “Planet of the Apes”, a really terrible terrible remake that managed to make LESS sense than the original bizarre movie, if such a thing is possible.
“Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” had a few good points…Gene Wilder’s version of Wonka. But it was a pretty bad movie overall, the pacing was horrible, the acting (aside from Wilder) was terrible, the little punk cast as Charlie was especially horrible in that 1970s child actor way. And I still can’t get over the fact that Charlie stole the Fizzy Lifting Drink and got a second chance. No, sorry kid, you’re a fucking degenerate thief, get the fuck outta my factory with the other garbage. I said Good Day! It was a very bad, forgettable adaptation of a brilliant book.
Now, the new movie may not be to your taste. But it isn’t crap, it wasn’t just a mindless studio hack job. Tim Burton controlled this movie, not the studios. He is the perfect person to bring the original book to life. You can like or not like a movie, that’s a matter of personal taste. But this wasn’t a mindless crap ripoff movie (like Burton’s “Planet of the Apes” was). This movie deserved to be made. People will be watching this movie 50 years from now. Not to say that you “should have” enjoyed the movie, no one should have to watch a movie that they don’t like, no one can be forced to enjoy a movie they don’t like. But this movie isn’t guilty of the crimes you imagine it is.
And yet you can rememebr he stole the drink and quote a line?!?! :dubious:
That doesn’t sound forgettable to me. And God who can sponge those little disgusting orange guys from your mind once you’ve seen them sing and dance.
That said I enjoyed both versions on their own merits. Willy Wonka had memorable music. Charlie did not.
Charlie was closer to the book in spirit.
Wilder’s willy Wonka was more sly and subversive. Depp’s was just weird and reminded me too much of a Carol Channing/Michael Jackson Hybrid. (That’s not a complaint)
Charlie’s add on story of Wonka’s background was crap.
Willy Wonka’s add on of the test wasn’t great but fit with the spirit of the film (Really roten kids get their just deserts really good kids get rewarded if they are truly good inside despite the occasional shortcoming)
Veruca Salt was better in Willy Wonka.
Mike TeeVee was more insuferable in Willy Wonka
I prefered Willy Wonka’s Charlie, but Charlie in Burton’s film was very good in subtle moments.
Both Violets left me cold
Augustus in Charlie is much fatter (Does this say something about the size of kids in the span of the 30 odd years between the two films?) And more gluttonous.
Remakes are par for the course in Film. Live with it!
There were three versions of Frankenstien before the 1931 Whale version. The Bogart Maltese Falcon was a remake as well. I mean how many versions of Dracula are there? Some later ones better than the earlier.
I went to Charlie and am having to restrain myself from seeing it two or three times more, because I’m a book guy. I’ve never seen Willie Wonka (as I wasn’t a child during my childhood), and refuse to see movies adapted from books that change the name OF the book. it’s the mark of crap.
'course, I’m a trifle odd.
The fat kid was computer-generated partially, it definitely seemed, like the people in Polar Express.
SPOILERS
I’ve already changed my opinion on the movie, guys; yeah, I was wrong, I was comparing it to Willy Wonka b/c I thought it was a remake, and then I figured it was a rip-off. I did enjoy the movie at first- up until they entered the ‘paradise’ part with the candy- and then it seemed so similar to Wonka but so pointless in its differences- and the flashbacks to his childhood, as you’ve said, were shittily done, but I wouldn’t have removed that aspect of the story- and his performance, which I even liked in the movie, didn’t have enough time to do anything.
I guess when the movie started covering the same material in the factory, but with Oompas who sung songs (IMDB people agree that a better job could have been done on concepts, the sound of the lyrics over the damn loudness of the music so it doesn’t just come out as perfunctory noise, etc.) when they aren’t even in a musical like in Wonka 
it just seemed like a ridiculous way to rip off the first film, which it wasn’t, it was just poorly written songs and a failure to stray more from the source material (which the movie never set out to do) that I hated. Do the Oompa Loompas sing in the book?
I even liked the way they ended the movie, actually- damn good in my book, even if it is, as one IMDB guy put it, the same tired family-as-all-important ending we’ve gotten forever.
SPOILERS
Couple questions for this Pit Cafe thread 
When the kids were logically asking Wonka how the Oompas knew to sing Augustus’s name in the first musical sequence, talking about its staged-ness, and when Wonka seemed to be pretending to conduct the Oompas in the second musical sequence, did anyone else who hadn’t read the book think that it was gonna end up that Wonka set those traps for those kids in a bitter way b/c of his childhood? It just doesn’t make too much sense to me…
And in the last shot, is Charlie’s house inside the Wonka factory?
Deuce Bigalow fucking owned. I haven’t seen the sequel yet.
So you’re the guy who saw it!