Jeff once again shows his committment to intense labor
Mike foolishly attempts to wake Jeff
Mike is proven to be foolish
Mike threatens Jeff with the marker of shame, to no avail
while Chung takes the proper approach
Aggravated, Chung turns from markers of shame...
to detachable Soda alcove chair arm of shame
but Mike shows Chung how it's really done
Interviewer: "What is Bananas about, Woody?"
Woody: "The film is about the lack of substance in my movie."
Interviewer: "You mean in America?"
Woody: "No, there's lots of substance in America, The theme is that the film is empty. The lack of substance puts you to sleep. It's an hour and a half nap."
Interviewer: "Why have you made it then?"
Woody: "To confuse my enemies who, are legion."
Interviewer: "And what do they want?"
Woody: "To make me think like them."
Interviewer: "Which is what, exactly?"
Woody: "Numerically."
Interviewer: "And you think?"
Woody: "In letters, usually."
Jeff: Sure, I know all about CS174!
Jeff: This is what CS174 is all about.
Mike: Actually, the expectation of X is proportionally significant to the covariance of Y given X and...
Chung: Uh, that's great, Mike... I'll just point to this. Right, Jeff?
Jeff: .......
The new Chocolate Factory film is awesome. This is Tim Burton's most enjoyable film in years.
Tim Burton applies his visual magic yet again. He's an uneven director, having made some great films (Edward the Scissorhand, Big Fish, Batman, Nightmare Before Christmas) and some terrible ones (Mars Attacks!, Planet of the Apes). But his films are consistently stunning. When you attend a Burton film, you accept that you might not like it, but you expect to be blown away by its unique, quirky and nontheless stunning visuals.
In that, the film hardly disappoints. The movie opens in London and follows Charlie around in a somewhat Gothic re-imagining of the well-known city. The interiors of the factory are no less striking, filled to the brims with details complete with bold, primary colors. The camera jumps around with delightful agility, and the scenes confirm that Burton seems to construct his films through set pieces. Simply, the film is pure eye candy.
Yet it's not completely shallow. Clearly it has no deeper meaning than the obvious morals, and Charlie pretty much completely disappears in the middle of the film as each kid gets his or her just desserts. But the beginning and the end of the film, where Charlie gets to look cute and precocious by uttering heart-warming aphorisms about the importance of family are surprisingly effective. Sure, his family (and indeed, he himself) are not well developed characters, but we don't care. We are ready to love them anyway.
This is a film that could've gone terribly wrong. It brings in Willy Wonka's back story as a child of a dentist. But instead of being overly sentimental, the flashbacks in history are mercifully brief, to the point, and, indeed, bring about some of the funniest scenes in the film.
And Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka is creepy and weird. But instead of being off-putting and irritating, he is quirky, lovable and very very funny.
In fact, this is probably the funniest movie I've seen all year. Tim Burton and Johnny Depp's quirky sense of humor is in full swing here, and if you're in the mood, like I was, this film is funny. Very funny. And clever, on top of that. There is a great reference to Edward Scissorhand toward the beginning (the first Burton-Depp collaboration) that no one seems to get. There is a clever parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey when you least expect it. And there is the film constantly making fun of itself, its cinematic devices and the story's illogical technologies. This film is a joy.
Burton had been in kind of a lull recently, but with Big Fish and now this, he has earned back my confidence. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is an inconsequential film, mere confectionary of no importance. But boy does it taste great.
I am torn. Here is a truly spectacular film that fails miserably in what it tries to do. Roger Ebert is fond of saying that movie reviews are "not about what the film is about, but about how the film is about what it is about". I don't completely subscribe to that notion (certainly what a film is trying to say will have to factor into how much I like it). And Crash fails the former and succeeds in the latter.
It is beautiful filmmaking, without doubt. The scenes are tense, wonderfully edited and accompanied by the most heart-breaking music. It is an impressive debut from directors Haggis and Moresco, and they do everything right here. There is especially a scene involving a little girl and a gun that you start to expect from the beginning of the film, but turn out to not be what you expected at all. It's breathtaking.
But the film mainly serves to tackle the problem of racism in the LA area, and as such, it is a miserable failure. Whenever dialogue touches upon racism, the film oozes with an inappropriate sense of self-pride. Every turn, when a character speaks a (rather forced and unconvincing) racist slang, the film turns to us and gleefully says, "see? see? Can you believe these people are saying the darnedest things?" As such, these scenes turn into a parade of "racist just to be racist", and "shocking just to be shocking" scenes.
Not to say the film doesn't have any valuable insights into the racial dynamics of the LA area. It does an adequate job of portraying the power struggle between the whites and the blacks. But the other ethnicities get short-changed. The hispanics have no depth of culture except they are stereotypically against stereotype. And the middle-eastern man (forgot the nationality) hardly dredges up any sense of sympathy. And wouldn't you know it, the Asians are completely screwed over once again, with fewer than then lines of dialogue, some of which are used to portray Asians women as stereotypically argumentative, unreasonable jerks, and others are used to portray Asians as stereotypically greedy and unethical. If Asians can't even get their fair share in a movie about racism in LA (where Asians make up a large portion of the population), then we truly have no hope in the near future.
And so I'm very impressed by the filmmaking, but dismissive of what the film is trying to do. What the film is about is unfair, childish and (ironically) simply stereotypical, but the film is beautiful going about it.