A trip to the flicks

Last Saturday my parents and I took the kids (son and niece) to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I think all five of us were looking forward to seeing the film. Well, maybe apart from my dad, who suddenly found he had to buy 5 cinema tickets at short notice.

Anyway, we got there, we queued up for tickets, we bought sweets for the kids and we waited 40 minutes for the next performance. The kids ate their sweets and ran around the foyer. Usually managing to keep out of everybody's way, but not always. Son Number One managed to knock over Niece Number One's box of sweets and send them flying all over the place. While we were still deciding if it was ok for her to put them back in the box, an attendant arrived and swept them all into the bin. She must have had a radar on or something. Maybe there were sensors in the floor - "WARNING! Sweets dropped on floor over here! Put "Operation Sweep-it-up-quick" into action!" I swear, it was like something out of a futuristic sci-fi movie, with little drones and robots waiting in the wings to be called into service, and not daring to miss their cue for fear of being scrapped at the next robot review meeting.

But I digress. We filed in and immediately my son took control of the
situation. After we'd decided what row to sit on he decided who was going to sit next to who. Until we told him that it don't really matter and everyone was going to stay where they were. He was bouncing around on his chair like a little jack-in-the-box, and I asked him if he was looking forward to seeing the film. "Yes," he said, "when I look forwards the screen is right there in front of me!" I still haven't worked out if he was taking me for a ride on that one.

The lights go down, the curtians open....... and we watch 20 minutes of adverts. Damn you, Perl and Dean! Then follows 10 minutes of trailers for new films, among which are such intellectual fare as "Sky High" and "The Adventures of Something Boy and Lava Girl"

Finally, the main movie starts. And was it worth the wait? Well, yes and no. Yes, it looked good. Yes, it was imaginative, Yes, it made me laugh out loud in places. But no, because it wasn't different enough from the original to make it worthwhile, in my opinion. No, because some of the jokes fell flat on their faces. No, because they tried to introduce some back-plot that wasn't necessary. This film had all the same elements of the original version (because they were both based on the same book) but I think the original film did it better. Johnny Depp is a fine actor but he still looks like a teenager, and Willy Wonka is definately older than a teenager.

There are two scenes in particular which kinda ruined it for me. The first was when they're just starting the tour of the factory. Wonka leads the party down an optical illusion corridor and at the end they all look like they're 50 feet tall. In the original film the shot lasts long enough for you to start thinking "Hang on, it looks like they're getting taller....?" but in the new version there's a two-second shot of them walking down the corridor and then they're all standing by the door. Huge. And the whole illusion just falls flat on its face.

The second scene was where Augustus Gloop gets sucked up into the tube after he's fallen in the chocolate river. This is a cue for an Oompa Loompa song. But everyone else (including Ma Gloop) just stands there watching the Oompas sing their song while Augustus is stuck in the tube. Surely his mother should have been running around imploring people to help her son?

Little niggles, I know. But they went a long way towards making me come out of the cinema thinking "it was ok I suppose" rather than thinking "Wow! I can't wait for that to come out on DVD!"

Now, I do believe that was my first ever movie review. I think I'll go celebrate with a bar of chocolate. Something's put me in the mood for confectionery, I can't think what though....