Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (9)

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.