The horehound! The horehound!
From Likely Stories, enter the dark world of CHOCOLYPSE NOW.
Have I ranted here about autistic fiction? That’s when your story means the world to you and nothing to anyone else. Phrased differently, you have an audience of 1.
I’ve written the stuff. Be honest — so have you.
D.
All wrapped up in a neat and tidy package
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
I’ve had a night to sleep on it and a day to think about it. I didn’t want to rush to judgment on something as important as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As you might guess from the fact that this is my second post on the Wonka Mythos, Roald Dahl’s story means a lot to me. Here are my thoughts, as spoiler-free as I can make them.
Johnny Depp successfully conveys Wonka’s essential sadism. Like other glove-wearers W.C. Fields and Michael Jackson, he despises children, doesn’t even want to touch them. (Oops. Best not take that Jackson analogy too far.) And the only thing Depp’s Wonka hates worse than children is their p-p-parents. It’s safe to say that Wonka, like his creator Dahl, is a misanthrope.
Casting shines. I never much cared for Peter Ostrum’s Charlie (1971), or Jack Albertson’s Grandpa Joe. I thought the true stars of the original movie were Gene Wilder and Julie Dawn Cole (the “I want it NOW” girl, Veruca Salt, cool enough to get an alternative band named after her — my #1 goal in life, by the way), with an honorable mention to Gunter Meisner (Slugworth). Everyone else in that flick? Feh.
In the new CCF, Depp creates a Wonka who is every bit as memorable as Wilder’s Wonka — not better, but decidedly different. This cast, however, has lots of merit. Helena Bonham Carter (as Charlie’s mom) is looking less chimp-like with every post-Apes film; Noah Taylor plays Charlie’s dad. Taylor might be most memorable from his parts in Tomb Raider and The Life Aquatic, but I remember him best from Max, a 2002 film with John Cusack, in which Taylor played a young Adolf Hitler.
Freddie Highmore and David Kelly (as Charlie and Grandpa Joe) are likable without being nukable. This is an especially important quality for Charlie, since he’s so damned squeaky clean he might otherwise be gag-worthy.
The new CCF lacks Julie Dawn Cole; I was hoping she’d have a bit role. But Julia Winter’s Veruca Salt isn’t half bad. The other kids do a nice job, but nothing too memorable. Missi Pyle’s a stand-out as Violet Beauregarde’s mom; the way she looks at the men (even Depp, whose sexuality in this movie is ambiguous, to say the least) sez ‘balls-for-lunch’ to me. Her ferocious stare reminded me of the alien-prostitute in Mars Attacks. Tim Burton might be repeating his jokes, but I forgive him.
Christopher Lee plays, well, Christopher Lee. You’ll know what I mean when you see his performance. His discussion of the horrors of caramel and lollipops had me laughing.
The Oompa Loompas? Big improvement on the original. The songs are funny this time around, not preachy (weeell . . . one of ’em is preachy), and Deep Roy is fun to watch.
Finally, the set design rocks, but would you expect less from Burton?
Screenwriter John August (Big Fish) has grafted a backstory onto CCF. While this does bring Christopher Lee into the movie (a good thing), it also turns the tale into something as two-dimensional as Mike Teavee. Good parents are good. Bad parents are bad. Get it? Let’s repeat: Good parents are good . . .
Indeed, I sensed a lot of effort to vet all ambiguity out of the original screenplay. Remember how, in the 1971 flick, you never found out whether the bad kids survived their squeezing/taffy-pulling etc.? Let’s just say their outcome is no longer left in doubt.
Just to make sure you understand the movie*, Depp begins the flick a nauseous shade of green, not unlike my son’s undead warlock in World of Warcraft. By the end, he’s warm and pink.
Last kvetch: our expectations are repeatedly raised, with no pay-off. Missi Pyle’s man hunger? It goes nowhere. Violet and Veruca announcing to one another, “Let’s be best friends! — Best friends, forever!”, then walking off together, arms linked — that’s gotta lead to something, right? Nope.
On a one to four Wonka Bars scale, I give this a three. That’s what I would give the original, too.
Jake — my nine-year-old — would give this movie a four**, so take my crits with an everlasting gobstopper.
Next up for Burton Watchers: Corpse Bride, an animated feature film in the style of The Nightmare before Christmas.
D.
*Wasn’t it Woody Allen who had a film in which they repeatedly flashed “Author’s Message” on the screen?
**Jake has read this review, and he says, “Three-and-a-quarter Wonka Bars. I deduct almost a whole Wonka Bar because the movie ignores Charlie.”
So there. Pay careful attention to your protag, you YA writers!
Tonight on Chelicera: my lovely wife explains how to detonate weapons-grade uranium — the easy way!
Technorati tags: Willy Wonka, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, roald dahl, Johnny Depp, movies
I Had a Migraine Yesterday
so I didn’t post the answer on how to detonate a nuclear warhead. Sorry about that unresolved cliffhanger.
Okay, I’m still under the weather so this will be short. According to Luis Alvarez, Nobel Prize winning physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project:
“With modern weapons-grade uranium, the background neutron rate is so low that terrorists, if they had such material, would have a good chance of setting off a high-yield explosion simply by dropping one half of the material onto the other half… Even a high school kid could make a bomb on short order.”
Luis Alvarez, Adventures of a Physicist (Basic Books, 1987), p. 125.
You may not get maximum yield, i.e. biggest bang for your buck, but it would certainly make the evening news and that’s what terrorism is all about.
Allegedly, a plutonium warhead would require shape charges in order to achieve detonation which is not quite so simple. For more information to keep you up at night, this is a link discussing Aum Shinrikyo, terrorism and nuclear bombs.
However, nuclear warheads are not the most lethal weapon in the arsenal, albeit the most spectacular and expensive. I will continue this discussion later.
I’m sorry. Do I look like a white supremacist?
Sometimes I wonder about that swastika birth mark on my forehead. Most folks recognize it for what it is: a Harry Potteresque stigmata, proof of my postnatal brush with the ultimate anti-Jew. Others see it as a sign of shared values.
It must be there, that swastika. How else can I explain yesterday’s patient, a guy who felt it necessary to complain about the Mexican Problem in Southern California? Or any of the dozen patients who, over the years, have bitched to me about all the Mexicans and Asians in our state? What do I say to people like that? (“Mr. Dickwad, I’d like to introduce you to my Japanese-American wife and my half-hakujin son.”)
Religion Can Be a Bitch
While watching the news on the July 7th London bombings, I saw a brief discussion on the methodology of the attack. The speaker stated that terrorist attacks are like theatrical events; the point is the intended emotional impact upon the audience. The number of deaths or injuries is not neccessarily important.
After a few days of letting that stew in my brain, I decided that statement was inaccurate since terrorist groups may have vastly different goals. The Japanese religious group, Aum Shinrikyo, also known as Aum Supreme Truth is a good example. They are most famous for the March 20th, 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, 1, 2. The well-coordinated attack killed 12 and injured several thousand.
In 1984, Shoko Asahara founded the religious organization later called Aum Shinrikyo. He drew his theology from Tibetan Buddhism, a deity called Shiva, some elements of Taoism, the Book of Revelations in the New Testament, the writings of Nostradamus, physicist Nicola Tesla’s so-called death rays, and the science fiction Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Asahara’s sanity is questionable at best.
Asahara MAY have begun as a sincere practioner of Buddhism, yoga, and meditation. Eventually, his group grew in size and wealth, attracting young and highly educated people recruited from some of the most elite Japanese universities. By 1989, though, Asahara’s group had become a cult, requiring followers to turn over their personal savings, cut all ties with family members, and use various drugs to facilitate “proper” behavior. Kidnappings, assaults and threats against recruits and their families were also reported which led a lawyer, Tsutsumi Sakamoto, to work on lawsuits against the group. In November, 1989, members of Aum Shinrikyo murdered Sakamoto, his wife, and their one-year-old child.
These first murders were precursors to the terrorist attacks that they believed would trigger Armageddon, a massive war that would kill almost every person on earth. Religious terrorists kill for a goal that is based upon their faith; political terrorists still deal within the real world. While Osama Bin Laden may wish to defeat the western industrialized nations, even he is not willing to risk total annihilation of the human race.
Enough for tonight. Coming soon, how to explode a nuclear weapon if you have weapons grade uranium. Hint: it’s easier than you think.
Technorati tags: terrorism, London, Bin Laden, al Qaeda, Aum Shinrikyo, Aum Supreme Truth
The Rulez Part Deux
In 1929, Bronislaw Malinowski published The Sexual Life of Savages. Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist, was an early pioneer of ethnographic field work. He (or perhaps his publisher) also knew how to title a book to move it off the shelves, but that’s neither here nor there.
Malinowski’s Trobriand islanders are gone now. Even in 1929, you could have legitimately asked how closely Malinowski’s analysis corresponded to reality — ethnographer bias, and all that lot. Nowadays, his work lies somewhere between history and fantasy.
I mention this because I’m about to do a mini-Malinowski: report on the sexual mores of a culture as described to me by one informant (yes, I’m sure M had several) regarding a people long since transformed by time and history: the French, circa 1955. Furthermore, I’m remembering this conversation twenty-two years later. How accurate is this? The sexual proclivities of Tolkien’s elves may have a firmer basis in reality.
Review: City Slab, Volume 2, Issue 2
Editor Dave Lindschmidt serves up some fresh meat on the Slab. Six good stories, some real gems among them. Check it out at Tangent Online.
D.
The Rulez
A while ago, I mentioned how I broke some key rules when I courted Karen. My faux pas didn’t trash our budding romance, and may have even helped things along. For me, that proves something: there are no rules. Rules are bullshit. At least, they were in 1982 when I came a-courting, and I can’t believe things are any better today.
But wouldn’t it be nice if there were rules? What could be better than a universally agreed-upon code of behavior to ensure that no one would be humiliated, ever again? Or is it unnatural for men to think about the rules when we’re used to thinking with our jewels?
Sex and the Single Wendigo
(Note added later: Dark Krypt doesn’t have an archive, so I’m afraid you can’t read it online. Now that I look at it, I see the need for yet another rewrite. I really have to stop doing that.)
One of my favorite comic pieces is up at the Dark Krypt: “Sex and the Single Wendigo”. What can be better than a sexy Carry Bradshaw-like heroine with a taste for men? And I mean a taste. Get it? (Wink wink, nudge nudge.)
Here’s a teaser. Trelyn and her latest victim Klaus are lunching with Trelyn’s girlfriends.
“Besides,” said Trelyn, “Klaus here has the imagination of a shrub, don’t you, darling?”
Klaus smiled dreamily, working his hand up to Trelyn’s shoulder.
Trelyn arched her eyebrows and whispered, “Watch.” She gazed into Klaus’s baby blues and said, “Gorgeous, in my West Side penthouse, the bed has rubber sheets. What do you think of that?”
At the word bed, his hand dropped reflexively to Trelyn’s ass. He gave her a squeeze, saying, “Whatever you like, Babe.”
“See?” Trelyn said. To Klaus: “Come along, darling. We’ll eat at my place.”
“Pig,” Noshmi said, once Trelyn had left with her Norse god. “Do you know she had a Jets linebacker all to herself last week? Three hundred plus pounds, and she never even offered to share.”
Warning: something got messed up in transit to the Krypt, and there are a lot of typos in which the opening quotation mark has been replaced by an A. Very annoying. I’ll email the editor, and we’ll see what happens.
D.
What Else Could Fitzgerald Be Investigating
I posted a version of this in the comment section over at Pen and Sword.
This is absolute pure speculation on my part and I’m not saying I believe this. But, is Patrick Fitzgerald, the independent counsel, also investigating the other CIA leak that featured many of the same players as Rovegate?
On June 2, 2004, the New York Times printed a story on Ahmad Chalabi, Iraqi sleazeball extraordinaire and associate of the Bush Administration. He allegedly told Iran that U.S. intelligence had cracked the code used by the Iranian spy service on their encrypted communications. Of course, the Iranians immediately changed their codes and the U.S. lost an extremely important source of information.
As for Chalabi, he is/was quite chummy with Judith Miller, the neocons and, apparently, President Bush himself. In 1989, Jordan convicted Chalabi in absentia of bank fraud, after he stole $300 million in bank deposits. But surprisingly, on May 11, 2005, King Abdullah of Jordan pardoned Chalabi. According to journalist Seymour Hersh, George Bush himself asked King Abdullah to pardon Chalabi.
Like Rovegate, this particular story features CIA leaks, neocons, Judith Miller and George Bush. Of course, there are many sleazy stories floating in the toilet called the White House. Who knows what Fitzgerald is investigating?