wesa and sm101 have both popped up on me tonight with a link to the trailer for the new "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", so I guess that just went up. Let me give you my opinion, since you didn't ask for it:No.
First, I'm a huge Gene Wilder fan. On the flipside, I think Tim Burton is vastly overrated, and I think Depp is a post-prettyboy with two good roles in him. Burton was interesting in his early years, but the more he does, the more self-indulgent and boring he gets, and the less I like it. Add to that my normal level of hatred for Hollywood, and their inability to make anything but remakes and sequels lately, and it's not hard to guess my feelings.
I'm just so fucking sick of all the remakes, and reimaginings, and sequels, and bullshit...hardly anything original that's worth a shit has come out in years, especially in the realm of fantasy (of all types, whether horror, sci-fi, dark comedy, medieval fantasy, the works). It's all big-budget explosion-and-cheesecake fare, full of as many huge effects and action sequences bracketed by quotable catchphrases as they can squeeze into it, so that hopefully you won't notice that the story is weaker than a newborn kitten. And, since over half of Americans didn't read a book last year (I wish I made that statistic up...), they never have to worry that someone will notice that the book that the movie is "based" on is so different from the movie that it might as well not bother claiming any connection. And with the new ripe farmland of comics and games that they can reap "story" ideas from, they don't even have to worry about THAT, apparently. They can just ignore basic plots, settings, even characters and, oh, the whole fucking thing, and just write their own (take "Doom" for instance...I'm surprised they are even bothering to keep the name).
And that's not even touching on remaking classic films and CHANGING THEM. I mean, how crass do you have to be to pull that shit? To take a film that has been seen and loved and downright revered for decades, and not only remake it but fuck it up? Regardless of how fucked up it may have been in the first place, it's a classic for a fucking REASON. But give a director enough praise, and suddenly he thinks he's Cecil B. DeMille. Peter Jackson is raping "King Kong" as we speak (Jack Black?!?). And now, Tim Burton is fucking up "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory".
And people wonder why I'm a movie nut, and yet I don't go to theatres hardly at all.
