Saw it tonight. LOOOOOOOOOOOOOVED it! Johnny was incredible. I heard that he originally was going for a midwestern accent but ended up with a Valley Girl sound. Whatever, I wouldn't change a thing.

The Oompa Loompas were great, the kids were great, the parents were great, I'll be going back this week or next weekend to see it again. AND, I absolutely can't wait for Corpse Bride. Looks to be as good, if not better, than Nightmare Before Christmas.

Anyone else seen it yet?

Cher

Just saw it today and I also thought it was good. It's not stellar, but is a huge improvement over the original. Johnny was good, but annoying in a few scenes. All the kids were good picks, especially Charlie. The Oompas were good, but I wished the words in their songs weren't so muddled.

Compared to the original? A lot more humor, a little darker, a lot more story, and almost twice as long running time. It was also more faithful to the original story.

I agree with Cher - go see it.

enjoyed it.

depp was amazing. better than wilder, in my opinion.

i went with someone who has never seen the original, which was weird. afterwards, all of these people were talking about how they liked the old one better...i guess they just wanted an exact remake.

i also wish that i could have better understood that lyrics to the oompa loompa songs, although i loved the guy who did them (my dad said he was the snail rider from the original _neverending story_). i really liked the cast, and i liked how dark the humor was. wonka's flashbacks were amusing, as well.

in the past week i've seen _war of the worlds_, _wedding crashers_ and this movie...this was my favorite, no contest!

Very good movie. I thought the flashbacks were alright, but not part of the book.

If you want to know what the oompa loompa's are saying just pick up a copy of the book, they used the exact wording from the book.

It feels odd to me to hear people talk about the other movie as "the original". Both films are adaptations of a *book*, and the *book* is "the original". Each movie took the same story in very different directions. The new movie is not a remake of the old movie; it is a new adaptation of the book.

I actually saw the new movie first. My wife and I rented "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" (WWCF) last week, after I had been to see "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" (CCF). I had seen bits of WWCF as a child, but never the whole thing. The oompa-loompas totally freaked me out. Anyway, it's just amazing to compare the two. WWCF really looks cheap after the visual splendor of the new one (not an insult; the new one had a *lot* more money available, and special effects technology has improved a lot). After viewing WWCF, I was musing to myself "I wonder why they changed the squirrels to geese", when it suddenly became crystal clear that of course they had no way to realize the visual of 100 trained squirrels. The chocolate river in WWCF did not look like chocolate. And the oompa-loompas still freak me out.

Of course, the standout question is Johnny Depp vs. Gene Wilder. These two performances could have been on different planets. I think Wilder was more in keeping with the description in the book (although both films dropped the goatee), but I thought Depp did a fantastic job creating this character, if you accept the lonely, misanthropic direction they were going with his backstory. I need to see it again, because I did think it was rather ironic that although the film kept the *name* of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, they actually focussed the film far more on Wonka than the other film did, and they changed the name! I was highly amused to learn from the DVD that the name change was actually driven by the desire to promote the line of Wonka Bars that Quaker Oats was going to produce. The whole movie was really an ad for the chocolate. And then something went wrong with the chocolate bars, and they had to be recalled, and so there was this whole movie to push a product, and there was no product. (Quaker Oats then got out of the Chocolate business -- the Wonka bars you see in stores now are made by Nestle.)

So, I thought the film was visually stunning, but I had a hard time accepting the radical re-envisioning of Wonka's character (as compared to the book). It was amazing to hear lines word-for-word unchanged from the book, but read by Depp with completely different interpretation and subtext than Dahl originally implied. The Wonka in the book was not an isolated creative genius, being driven solely by his need to create. The Wonka in the book loved children (good children) and wanted to make people happy. Very different creations.

I did appreciate how, aside from the Wonka backstory, they kept very close to the book. I was appalled at the "fizzy lifting drink" scene in WWCF. How *dare* Grandpa Joe take the high road and call Wonka a cheat and a swindler when he and Charlie were no better than the others -- they just happened to steal something less lethal than what the other kids did. I guess you could argue that it makes Charlie more human; that he made a mistake, but it really seemed out of character for the two of them to do that in the first place.

Anyway, I did think the new one was a brilliant film. I need to see it again and try to see it on its own terms, as a film, to see if it works as a film, instead of just comparing it to the book. I am glad I didn't have CCF stuck in my head as a point of comparison, though.

Did you know that Dahl worked for Cadbury Chocolates? Just a fun bit of trivia.

Cher

my two cents- other than mindless gushing about how much i adore the infamous mr. burton and the licentiously beautiful mr. depp-

i kept feeling through the movie as if depp's incarnation of wonka was not leaning a little heavily on early marilyn monroe with translucent snatches of june cleaver thrown in for flavor. somehow, depp can do these things and maintain a very heterosexual flavor, God knows how he pulls *that* off.

I left the theater begging my husband to learn to walk in two inch heels.

LOL! What a WONDERFUL response. Anyway, I heard somewhere that Johnny said he was trying for a midwestern accent (which really shouldn't have been all that hard since he originally hails from Owensboro, KY which is very close to So. IN) but ended up with something more like a Valley Girl accent.

Cher

AGAIN with the heels!

i'm sorry, what can i say? i thought this was a fetish board.

brusay and i snuck into the movie while we were waiting for 'wedding crashers' to start. i loved what i saw, but i still haven't seen the entire thing.

Is this the movie about the factory owner who fired all of his workers and replaced them with cheap undocumented third-world labor?

Nah, you've got it mixed up with the book!

Brilliant movie. I'd say it ties with the other adaptation from the book.

Both Wonkas (Wilder & Depp) are brilliant... different ways.

I liked how the new one wasn't as much of a musical (the songs weren't too bountiful and they were short), and the oompa loompas weren't orange.

The new one is a keeper, as much as I thought it was going to be irrelevant beforehand. 20 minutes in, I knew it was giving the first adaptation a run for its money.

~fff