Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

I could write a heckle, due to I saw Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory this weekend, but there wasn’t much to heckle. It was good — hella good — with a unique and consistent identity and real humor and good nature and my sister sitting next to me going “GYUHHH” every time Johnny Depp got a close-up. (I was all like, come on, how can you have a hang-up that bad for a dude who’s just an ac-woh my Gawd Hal Sparks GYUHHH!!)

Why can’t they JOIN FORCES?

My background on the remake issue is that I’ve read the books, not a huge fan but enough to know the Vermicious Knids are from Glass Elevator hello-o-o Entertainment Weekly? Enjoyed the `71 version, not married to it. So I`ll just rant randomly, which I know should give you an arrythmia of startlement.

• Deep Roy rewls. It’s kinda lame that he doesn’t get to do any real speaking or singing — Danny Elfman does all that, which would bother me more if that Corpse Bride trailer wasn’t making me all Skellington-fuzzy-like inside with excitement. So let me make the obvious moves and 1) point out his porn-ready name and 2) check IMDb to see what else he’s been in, `cos so far when people ask me, I`m all like, Danny DeVito’s sidekick from Big Fish, and then I get all misty about Big Fish, and that’s no good.

  Okay, IMDb just blew my mind. Deep Roy is a busy dude, doing stunts and puppeteering (PUPPETEERING?) for approximately a bazillion years, which may be what you can break into if you are a little person with an extraordinary tolerance for pain. Hold on to your butts: you know Alien From L.A.? That Golan-Globus Kathy Ireland movie that might be my favorite Mystery Science episode? He was in that, as “Mambino,” which I`m going to guess is the big-eyelash guy’s sidekick. Oh, but I`m not done.

  He was in Pink Panther Strikes Again, Flash Gordon, Return of the Jedi, Return to Oz and Dark Crystal. Is your childhood moviegoing experience complete? Hang on…

  
  IS YOUR MIND BLOWN? (click for big version)
  Image from Deep Roy Ultimate Fan Site

  How cold and hollow would my youth have been without the efforts of Deep Roy? Damn right he better get some Oompa Loompa face time.

• Would have been so hard to get some other people of color in the picture? I mean, if a worldwide contest really turned out such an Aryan crop of winners, it`d be mighty suspish. Mike Teavee especially would be an easy fix — though the kid who plays him is very good, and, as I pointed out to my sister, going to be hot when he grows up.

  
  You got Emily Watson’s number?

• The Wonka backstory provides further evidence that Tim Burton has an orthodontia hangup, with which I strongly sympathize — you know he still has bad dreams about braces and teeth-breaking, and he RILLY wasn’t loving the wires scene in Poltergeist III. As for whether it adds to the story, I think it would have been enough to allude to it without working to resolve it, although the squeaky white-and-purple rubber glove payoff is high.
• Missi Pyle is from NCSA. We rule.

  
  We make good things better. Also Soul Plane.

• The Magnetic Fields kinda sound like Joy Division. Thought I`d mention it.
• Tim Burton is almost fifty years old. That’s crazy. HEY WAIT! He designed the characters for the “Family Dog” episode of “Amazing Stories” — OF COURSE HE DID! How could I not have known or realized that? All while I was watching The Incredibles, I was like, yup, I can see the Brad Bird family resemblance between the Incredibles/Iron Giant/Family Dog mommas, but I totally missed that the dog is pure cone-nose, shark-tooth, marble-toed Tim Burton! This is almost as bad as when I had to be told that Paul Coker helped design the Rankin-Bass Christmas special characters. Some comparisons, for the kind of people who care about this stuff:

  
  Paul Coker and Jingle & Jangle

  
  Tim Burton and Family Dog OMG how hot does Corpse Bride look?

  It weirdly surprises me when artists don’t look like what they draw. Like, Don Martin’s head isn’t a cylinder. Rick Tulka is composed of more than a few perfectly positioned lines and shades. Sergio Aragones is actually quite slim. The sight of Hermann Mejia doesn’t make me go into spasms of ocular ecstacy (just guessing — I don’t actually know what he looks like.)

  
  A Mejia illustration for MAD magazine —
  He can parody the cinematography! What the crap?!

  While I`m off on an illustrator/animator geek rant, IMDb sez Tim Burton inbetweened on Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings. Least. Rewarding. Job. Ever. This is why I came to terms with the fact that I don’t have the constitution to be a real-life animator. That and my inability to stay on model. Or delegate. Hmmm.

• The cinematography was insane. My sister asked me why the actors looked the way they did — all plastic and gleamy — was it makeup or cinematography or digital or what, and I acted like I knew what I was talking about and said prolly all three. Verily there was diffusion filter out the cinematic ass. One effect of whatever it was is that Johnny Depp’s skin comes out looking translucent and womanly. For me, it was just nicely unsettling. For my sister, it activated her Dave Navarro rapture receptor.

  
  Whatever floats your boat

• I was talking at a party about what makes Johnny Depp so great. Like his Willy Wonka, he doesn’t play too hammy or too dry, and what he comes up with is wholly original. Like, it would take five different comparisons to explain what this Willy Wonka is like — he’s can make a dry comment and Missi-Pyle-alarmingly-intense face in the same instant. You`d want to meet him, but you`d get creeped out by too much (a moment where he repeats a pat marketing-type speech is a nice touch) — like his reaction to Mike Teavee.

  
  This pretty much sums up the whole movie