Alice In Wonderland

[DRW50]

My biggest problem with Burton is that his films seem empty behind all the giddy angst and smirky emoness. Even back with stuff like Batman, at the time people praised the film because they said the point of the film was to show how hollow the modern world is (as epitomized by the deadly grin the Joker put on the anchorwoman), but just about every time I have seen a Burton movie in recent years, it's the same hollow stuff, and also so self-important. It's like someone playing the same song again and again and again and again.

I agree that Willy Wonka was popular with schoolkids. They showed it at my school one year and we enjoyed it. That was the first time I'd ever seen it.

Was the movie a bloated mess? Yes. I know I wasn't very interested in Charlie or his grandfather and once the more entertaining kids disappeared I lost more and more interest in the film. But the movie was still very affecting, sometimes in spite of itself. Charlie's downtrodden mother in the laundrette singing "Cheer Up Charlie," which is lachrymose and the song is not that well written but the actress somehow makes you feel for her. The strangely riveting sequence where Willy Wonka slowly limps towards the crowd, who are saddened at what a broken man he has become. He falls, and the crowd gasps -- then he goes into a full roll, and jumps up, as the crowd cheers. That type of mindf*ck is, to me, truer to the dark and manipulative nature of Willy Wonka than what was in the Burton movie. And the "Pure Imagination" number, which is beautiful, and the number in the tunnel is genuinely terrifying. Veruca Salt is wonderful entertainment -- she gives the movie a huge spark of life and it's never really the same after she's gone. Then the last moments, with Charlie, Willy, and the grandfather in the glass elevator, which is, on paper, extremely syrupy and cloying, but is saved by a beautiful performance from Gene Wilder, and somehow becomes moving.

I think this movie was a movie which, for better or worse, really got into the mind of a child, from the gorgeous colors, to the vibrant characterizations. And when I watch the film as an adult I still see moments which stay with me, which nick at something. Even the Oompa Loompas, who are so preachy and who now remind me of several people I know who won't stop tanning, have some sort of odd appeal. You know how slick the film is and how much better this or that could have been, but that cover of gloss is, somehow, as effective as it is alienating. It's not something which critics, who are more likely to want something that tells them how intelligent and brilliant they are and they can use to tell their readers about their brilliance, would get.

I don't know what Roald Dahl would have preferred, but I vastly preferred Gene Wilder's work to that awful Michael Jackson impersonation from Johnny Depp.

Depp used to be quite an actor, before he decide to delve headlong into endless self-parody. That amounted to everything with that remake. It was crass and so busy staring at its own navel that the audience was an afterthought. For that reason, even though it was successful at the time, I'm not surprised if more and more people have tired of the film after the heavy marketing and press campaign wore off.

It doesn't help that more and more, the focus is on Depp and Burton when you hear about these films. The movies themselves seem to be an afterthought. You half-expect to hear they will next be remaking the Berenstein Bears or Welcome Back Kotter. It could be anything, it all looks the same after a while.

[EricMontreal22]

I loved Pippi and the Witch Mountain movies as a kid.

And LORD no, I never meant the EddieMurphy Dolittle!! I never even saw that. I meant the Rex Harrison musical which was one of a number of expensive, musical flops (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was another) made in the wake of Mary Poppins' success, based on popular kids films, that lost so much money that they helped do in the musical genre. Big flops (though both Chitty and Dolittle got best song noms) that, like Willy Wonka, somehow gained in nostalgia that by the 90s they were seen, oddly and udneservedly, as classics, getting stage adaptations, etc...

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*is deeply upset that you of all people, someone who seems to live all his media in the past , would think first of the crappy Murphy movie...*

Although, I'd say that the Jerry Lewis films largely fit into your category of films based around one comedian and his lame facial expressions...

[EricMontreal22]

Carl I'll agree that Burton's films tend to be all image and style, no substance (which is why his better films like Ed Wood and even Sweeney usually come from sources and scripts he played no part in) though I think a lot of critics have pointed that out... It's not too rare a criticism.

To me the old 70s Willy Wonka looks so plastic--even as a kid that was my prob, it doesn't look colourful and imaginative it looks hoakey and fake. But oh well--I do know it's popularwith a LOT of people who saw it as a kid (Roald Dahl, for what it's worth, hated it, but I am not sure he woulda loved Burton's any more...)

[DRW50]

Doctor Doolittle was later seen as good? I knew Willy Wonka and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang were but I didn't know that was.

Are you talking about the Eileen Brennan version of Pippi Longstocking? I remember seeing that a long time ago. It wasn't too bad. As the theme went, Pippi Longstocking is coming into your world, a freckle-faced kind of girl YOU WANT TO KNOW!!! There were some fun little musical numbers, scrubbing the floor with sponges on their feet, and one on the deck of the ship I can't remember right now.

I remember that after I saw the movie I wanted to see some other version and ended up seeing some of the Pippi Longstockings made in Sweden 30 years ago, which were...bizarre, and Pippi looked kind of scary, and there was, I believe, a lot of walking around with a donkey, and dead spaces.

I even read all the books. I hadn't thought about those in a long time.

[EricMontreal22]

I think the ones I saw as a small child were the badly dubbed Swedish ones. LOL my aunt loved Pippi and I borrowed all her books--I was 6 or so, I liked them but never got into them the way I did with the Oz books, or the Five Children and It books or even the (much darker than the movie) Mary Poppins books or Narnia.

Yes, Dr Dolittleby some is seen as a classic now lol and did have a long running UK stage musical (it ran, granted, partly because people loved the comboof live animals and Jim Henson created puppet animals)

[DRW50]

I saw the big budget movie first and then found the old Swedish ones on huge video cassettes. My reaction was, HUH? I think I remember flies swarming, and dead spots on the soundtrack, and Pippi looked crazy, which is probably how she was supposed to be, but it was jarring. And yes, the dubbing...I have a real problem with dubbing.

We can agree to disagree about Willy Wonka but I hope you watch the scene again where he does the fake limp and the fall. That's one of my favorite movie scenes ever. Gene Wilder came up with that himself, to show how untrustworthy Willa Wonka was.

I'm sorry Dahl hated it, although I wasn't surprised when I heard that years ago. I would have never read the books if not for the movie. They were fine (I thought the Great Glass Elevator was better than the first book), but I always prefer the movie, just because of some of the cast and a few of the songs.

[EricMontreal22]

Apparently the Pippi movies I'mthinking of were edited from a Swedish TV series in the 60s--but I did see, when I was 6 or 7 in theatres the New Adventures of Pippi attempt to ressurect the franchise--I think I liked it but have no recollection--this is the one you mean with Brennan?

(I don't think it was a big success, at least in N America...)

[DRW50]

Yes, that was the one with Brennan. I was probably one of the few to see it. I went on a kids day at the theater or something, with my mother.

[EricMontreal22]

Fair enough, (I just found all those famous articles from when the novel first came out about whether your kids should read them--one librarian said how when her boy read Dahl it was the same as when he watched violent tv shows--he'd end upall wild eyed and riled up LOL). To be honest I prob saw Willy Wonka when I was 9 and starting to get cynical (I was a weird kid)--if I had first seen it when I was 4-6 and obsessed with Oliver!, Wizard of Oz, Mary Poppins, even Bedknobs and Broomsticks (which itself is an inferior attempt at a Poppins--Walt bought the rights to the book when it looked like they couldn't get the Poppins rights, telling the Sherman Bros songwriters they could just shove their songs into it lol) I probably would have more nostalgic feelings about it.

(Dahl didn'tlike much in the way of screen adaptations of his work one of the few he likes was Roeg's version of The Witches, which I love, but he hated its happier ending--as I do too... Can'tbelieve they're remaking that one too)

[DRW50]

The thing with the Willy Wonka movie is it in is many ways a cynical film -- the kids who are cynical and bitter are "punished", but they are far more memorable than Charlie, so they stay with you. I was a cynical kid so I liked that. But I can see that the film may seem plastic.

Funny you mention Bedknobs and Broomsticks, I used to watch that over and over when I was young. One of the first tapes I had. I didn't like the ending with the armor battle but I liked the music and most of all I liked Angela Lansbury. She makes "The Age of Not Believing" into a moving standard and she and David Tomlinson are great with "Portobello Road" and "Eglentine." Portobello Road is one of my favorite movie numbers ever. The animated portions, especially the "Bobbing Along Singing a Song" number, are fun. Pauline Kael tore the movie apart, from the closeups of the childrens mouths as they spoke to slamming Tomlinson as an "asexual pixie" or something like that. She had a lot of good points, but I think the movie holds up overall, at least to the end.

It's interesting that a lot of these movies which were flops I find far more watchable than the later, more popular films in these genres.

I think Veruca also helped inspire my love for strong female characters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7nG3KvZDA

[EricMontreal22]

LOL! Explains so much about you

I LOVE reading Kael's reviews cuz she writes so well, but I rarely agree with them (in particular try reading her weird take on anything gay... she basically got mad at one movie, forget which, for having an image of a happy, comfortable gay man as she said the truth that she knew from her own experience of gay men was they were all sad...).

I was a cynical kid too, but maybe in a different way And yes, I love Angela Lansbury in Bedknobs (well I love her in anything, and not just cuz of her career defining Sondheim roles in Anyone Can Whistle and Sweeney Todd). Have you seen the recent full edit of the film? It was severely chopped up shortly after its first release and for a long time the full version was deemed lost. Like a lot of Disney's 70s film it's not great, and is kinda directionless, but still has a lot of charm (see also The Rescuers and Aristocats--though I won't even give that much credit to the nadir of Disney animation, the atrocious Robin Hood)

[DRW50]

I'm not sure if I have seen the full version. Is there new footage?

I like Mary Poppins, although, as seems to be a recurring theme for me, I got tired of the movie before the end -- that maudlin "Feed the Birds" was a sharp downturn for me and I never got back into it (Dick Van Dyke in the old man makeup did not help). I think the problem is Julie Andrews is too good to be true, whereas Angela Lansbury is so relateable. Angela was ahead of her time.

I was fascinated by Pauline Kael as a critic even though I don't agree with a lot of her opinions, but yes, her views on gay men are depressing, if typical of that time. I remember the review you mentioned. She also used to talk about how the gay men she knew liked to be beaten up, and that she met a bruiser in leather who told her he wished he had someone who could beat him up. She also had a scathing review of Funny Lady where she told Barbra Streisand to stop catering to gay men, because the same men who were singing her praises in the screening room were the men who were making nasty comments about her clothes and appearance as they walked out of the theater. I also remember a hilariously insane comment she made about lesbians, in that you should feel sorry for lesbians, because sexually they can't actually do anything to each other.

[EricMontreal22]

MP like most of the imitations that came out later suffers from being too long, and too sequency (prob cuz the novels are essentially many short adventures), though I think it's a brilliant film (and Feed the Birds is lovely lol).

HA I remember the same comment about lesbians! Either we read the same review or maybe it was quoted in the book Celluloid Closet. LOL. Funny as I always kinda assumed she was a lesbian (based on what, I have no idea). At any rate, sexually, she was lacking in imagination if that's why she felt sorry for them LOL (she also doesn't seem to get that the fact that the gay men are bitching about Babs' clothes just proves all the more to what high esteem they hold her )

[DRW50]

I read all her books that I could find. I have always wondered if there were more that weren't published in books, I assume there were, I just never have seen them. Those quotes were mindboggling, although she did seem to stop them by the late 70s.

I just loved her writing style. My favorite was her review of Madame X (the Lana Turner version). It's not Madame X, it's Brand X. And then referring to how tightly wrapped the actresses were in that film, it's not mother love, it's mummy love. Another favorite was her blistering putdown of various Westerns in the mid-60s, and also, her hatred of a genre I hate, the "sick soul of America" movies of the late 60s/early 70s.

Have you ever seen Thoroughly Modern Millie? I like the movie, probably more for the cast than the movie itself, although the movie is entertaining. It's odd because I could swear I read the movie was quite popular yet whenever I hear about the film it is often done in tones which would suggest it was a flop.

[EricMontreal22]

(This is so wonderfully off topic )

From Wiki re Bedknobs:

Bedknobs and Broomsticks was originally intended to be a large-scale epic holiday release similar to Mary Poppins, but after its premiere and shortlived roadhouse exhibition, it was shortened from its two and a three quarter-hour length (while the liner notes on the soundtrack reissue in 2002 claims it was closer to three hours) to a more manageable (to movie theatres) two hours. Along with a minor subplot involving Roddy McDowall's character, three songs were removed entirely, and the central dance number "Portobello Road" was shortened by more than six minutes.

Upon rediscovering the removed song "A Step in the Right Direction" on the original soundtrack album, Disney decided to reconstruct the film's original running length. Most of the film material was found, but some segments of "Portobello Road" had to be reconstructed from work prints with digital re-coloration to match the film quality of the main content. The footage for "A Step in the Right Direction" was never located; as of 2009, it remains lost. A reconstruction of "A Step in the Right Direction", using the original music track linked up to existing production stills, was included on the DVD as an extra to convey an idea of what the lost sequence would have looked like. The edit included several newly discovered songs, including "Nobody's Problems", performed by Lansbury. The number had been cut before the premiere of the film. Lansbury had only made a demo recording, singing with a solo piano because the orchestrations would have been added when the picture was scored. When the song was cut, the orchestrations had not yet been added; therefore, it was finally orchestrated, and put together when it was placed back into the film.

The soundtrack for some of the spoken tracks was unrecoverable. Therefore, Lansbury and McDowall re-dubbed their parts, while other actors made ADR dubs for those who were unavailable. Even though David Tomlinson was still alive when the film was being reconstructed, he was in ill-health, and unavailable to provide ADR for Emelius Browne. Elements of the underscoring were either moved or extended when it was necessary to benefit the new material. The extended version of the film was originally released on laserdisc in 1997, and on DVD in 2001 for the 30th anniversary of the film.

The reconstruction additionally marks the first time the film was presented in stereophonic sound. Although the musical score was recorded in stereo, and the soundtrack album was presented that way, the film was released in mono sound.

A further, shortened version of Bedknobs and Broomsticks was re-released theatrically on April 13, 1979, omitting all but 2 songs "Portobello Road" and "Beautiful Briny Sea".

A new edition DVD called Bedknobs and Broomsticks: Enchanted Musical Edition was released on September 8, 2009. This new single-disc edition contains a new digitally restored and remastered version of the film, the Sherman Brothers Featurette (available on the old DVD), a new Special Effects documentary and the lost song "A Step in the Right Direction".