The Tory Party

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

I could write a heckle, due to I saw Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory this weekend, but there wasn’t much to heckle. It was good — hella good — with a unique and consistent identity and real humor and good nature and my sister sitting next to me going “GYUHHH” every time Johnny Depp got a close-up. (I was all like, come on, how can you have a hang-up that bad for a dude who’s just an ac-woh my Gawd Hal Sparks GYUHHH!!)

Why can’t they JOIN FORCES?

My background on the remake issue is that I’ve read the books, not a huge fan but enough to know the Vermicious Knids are from Glass Elevator hello-o-o Entertainment Weekly? Enjoyed the `71 version, not married to it. So I`ll just rant randomly, which I know should give you an arrythmia of startlement.

• Deep Roy rewls. It’s kinda lame that he doesn’t get to do any real speaking or singing — Danny Elfman does all that, which would bother me more if that Corpse Bride trailer wasn’t making me all Skellington-fuzzy-like inside with excitement. So let me make the obvious moves and 1) point out his porn-ready name and 2) check IMDb to see what else he’s been in, `cos so far when people ask me, I`m all like, Danny DeVito’s sidekick from Big Fish, and then I get all misty about Big Fish, and that’s no good.

  Okay, IMDb just blew my mind. Deep Roy is a busy dude, doing stunts and puppeteering (PUPPETEERING?) for approximately a bazillion years, which may be what you can break into if you are a little person with an extraordinary tolerance for pain. Hold on to your butts: you know Alien From L.A.? That Golan-Globus Kathy Ireland movie that might be my favorite Mystery Science episode? He was in that, as “Mambino,” which I`m going to guess is the big-eyelash guy’s sidekick. Oh, but I`m not done.

  He was in Pink Panther Strikes Again, Flash Gordon, Return of the Jedi, Return to Oz and Dark Crystal. Is your childhood moviegoing experience complete? Hang on…

  
  IS YOUR MIND BLOWN? (click for big version)
  Image from Deep Roy Ultimate Fan Site

  How cold and hollow would my youth have been without the efforts of Deep Roy? Damn right he better get some Oompa Loompa face time.

• Would have been so hard to get some other people of color in the picture? I mean, if a worldwide contest really turned out such an Aryan crop of winners, it`d be mighty suspish. Mike Teavee especially would be an easy fix — though the kid who plays him is very good, and, as I pointed out to my sister, going to be hot when he grows up.

  
  You got Emily Watson’s number?

• The Wonka backstory provides further evidence that Tim Burton has an orthodontia hangup, with which I strongly sympathize — you know he still has bad dreams about braces and teeth-breaking, and he RILLY wasn’t loving the wires scene in Poltergeist III. As for whether it adds to the story, I think it would have been enough to allude to it without working to resolve it, although the squeaky white-and-purple rubber glove payoff is high.
• Missi Pyle is from NCSA. We rule.

  
  We make good things better. Also Soul Plane.

• The Magnetic Fields kinda sound like Joy Division. Thought I`d mention it.
• Tim Burton is almost fifty years old. That’s crazy. HEY WAIT! He designed the characters for the “Family Dog” episode of “Amazing Stories” — OF COURSE HE DID! How could I not have known or realized that? All while I was watching The Incredibles, I was like, yup, I can see the Brad Bird family resemblance between the Incredibles/Iron Giant/Family Dog mommas, but I totally missed that the dog is pure cone-nose, shark-tooth, marble-toed Tim Burton! This is almost as bad as when I had to be told that Paul Coker helped design the Rankin-Bass Christmas special characters. Some comparisons, for the kind of people who care about this stuff:

  
  Paul Coker and Jingle & Jangle

  
  Tim Burton and Family Dog OMG how hot does Corpse Bride look?

  It weirdly surprises me when artists don’t look like what they draw. Like, Don Martin’s head isn’t a cylinder. Rick Tulka is composed of more than a few perfectly positioned lines and shades. Sergio Aragones is actually quite slim. The sight of Hermann Mejia doesn’t make me go into spasms of ocular ecstacy (just guessing — I don’t actually know what he looks like.)

  
  A Mejia illustration for MAD magazine —
  He can parody the cinematography! What the crap?!

  While I`m off on an illustrator/animator geek rant, IMDb sez Tim Burton inbetweened on Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings. Least. Rewarding. Job. Ever. This is why I came to terms with the fact that I don’t have the constitution to be a real-life animator. That and my inability to stay on model. Or delegate. Hmmm.

• The cinematography was insane. My sister asked me why the actors looked the way they did — all plastic and gleamy — was it makeup or cinematography or digital or what, and I acted like I knew what I was talking about and said prolly all three. Verily there was diffusion filter out the cinematic ass. One effect of whatever it was is that Johnny Depp’s skin comes out looking translucent and womanly. For me, it was just nicely unsettling. For my sister, it activated her Dave Navarro rapture receptor.

  
  Whatever floats your boat

• I was talking at a party about what makes Johnny Depp so great. Like his Willy Wonka, he doesn’t play too hammy or too dry, and what he comes up with is wholly original. Like, it would take five different comparisons to explain what this Willy Wonka is like — he’s can make a dry comment and Missi-Pyle-alarmingly-intense face in the same instant. You`d want to meet him, but you`d get creeped out by too much (a moment where he repeats a pat marketing-type speech is a nice touch) — like his reaction to Mike Teavee.

  
  This pretty much sums up the whole movie

Corrections

Stuff I was wrong about lately — not necessarily on this website, because I am full of crap much more often than that.

• It’s “malice aforethought,” not “malice of forethought.”
• Kate Chopin didn’t write “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman did.
• It’s Thoreau who says something like “don’t travel — find yourself at home.” In Walden, he illustrates the idea with a quote by William Habbington:
  

  
  Direct your eye right inward, and you`ll find
  A thousand regions in your mind
  Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
  Expert in home-cosmography.
  

  Rawk.

• My feelings on Paris Hilton are positive. My sister reminded me that as recently as February, 2005 I was totally hatin`. Now, with a reversal so complete that I can’t even remember what I was hatin` about, I am now pro-Paris Hilton. Same thing happened with Starbucks. I think my sister is slipping me mellow pills.

Sorry for all the crap.

Cast of “Firefly”

The fates are conspiring to rile me up about the upcoming Serenity movie. It all started with recognizing Morena Baccarin in that Secret pit stick commercial three weeks ago. Since then, through just vague channel surfing, I’ve espied:

• Nathan Fillion as the wrong Private Ryan in Saving Private Ryan.

  
  Whose howwwwse? Ryan’s howwwwwse…

  My head about sploded. It’s about to splode more as I see on IMDb he was Caleb in Buffy’s 7th season, which was shortly after I started watching it (I`m a late bloomer) and OMG he was so evil I can’t believe I didn’t realize that was him! BWA!

  
  I will sacrament yo` ass!

  Hey, wait. He used to be on “One Life to Live.” Nothing wrong with soaps, `cause if you can act on a soap, you can act anywhere (plus I remember when Sarah Michelle Gellar was Kendall), but you’ve got to see this picture. Note how the bangs weigh down his head:

  
  DP got a little nuts with the gels here

• Ron Glass in the Rashomon-style “All in the Family” where Meathead, Archie and Edith have conflicting recollections of two repairmen that came to fix the refrigerator. He was all stretched and bebe-faced and plays what are really three characters with this inimitable if-you-saw-me-at-a-party-you`d-totally-sit-next-to-me Ron Glassedness. Ron Glass rules. Plus he kills at “Family Feud.”

  
  Image stolen from Sitcoms Online

• Alan Tudyk as a German Abba geek in 28 Days. No-o-o, not “28 Days Later,” because then I wouldn’t have had to watch 20 minutes of predictable Viggo-Sandra romance just to confirm whether I just saw Alan Tudyk in the background right there RIGHT THERE did you see that?

  As I`m scoping out his IMDb listing I see he was also in

  • An episode of “Arrested Development” I haven’t seen — damn this school thing for cramping my TV-watching style!
  • Some voices in Ice Age — wot wot wot?
  • A lot of stuff I haven’t gotten around to seeing, like Dodgeball and A Knight’s Tale, and stuff I`m not likely to see unless similarly surfing by it on TV, like Patch Adams and I, Robot.

    
    If I`d known this was happening, I mighta gone to see it

    Ah, the perils of being a good character actor!

• I didn’t see Adam Baldwin in anything lately, which is actually a statistical improbability, because he is in EVERYTHING. When I saw him in “Firefly,” I was like, hey, is that Krycek? No, he’s not Krycek, though he did have a recurring role on “X-Files” and apparently I`m easily confused. I did spell “Krycek” right on the first try, which is a little scary.

  
  Not Krycek

• I also haven’t seen Gina Torres in anything lately, but I don’t have to, because her performance as the end of days Big Bad in “Angel” is BURNED INTO MY MIND FOREVER. Then there’s “Hercules,” and “24,” and “Alias.” She was no slouch in “Cleopatra 2525,” either, which may or may not have shared a back-to-back action pack with my beloved “Jack of All Trades.” Heh heh RAWK.

  
  Also approximately 14 feet tall

Speaking of seeing people in unexpected things, I saw Jeremy Piven in a weak-ass episode of the new “Twilight Zone,” which was painful because it had 1) Olivia D`abo in it, who will always be the mark of the B despite being way better than Katie Holmes, and 2) Jeremy Piven giving everything he’s got to stre-e-e-etch the 25 minute plot into an hour. He is like a sexed-up Paul Giamatti, or the Adam Baldwin of comedy. Discuss.

Anyway, as the Piven finally gets some credit in “Entourage,” I remember my first established OMG-I-like-Jeremy-Piven moment (not that his work in One Crazy Summer goes unnoticed) was some kind of celebrity stunt show where he was going to sumo rassle with a real sumo rassler. He was high-energy and self-effacing, and prolly him talking to the camera was the best part of the show. Then he described himself as “160 pounds soaking wet,” and I larfed, because I was 160 lbs bone-ass dry. Heh heh heh BLACK WIDOW!

And I saw Billy Zane on “Charmed.” That was weird. Like, s`up, I was in Dead Calm, where da donuts?

If you don’t care about TV, here’s a picture of a dog riding a horse I stole from the UK Sun.

If this doesn’t make you happy, something is broke

Songs from a Walk-In Closet

Three very silly songs for your Friday enjoyment.

• Pumpkin Pie: Sorta repetitive but fun
• Original Glazed: Formerly serious song converted for amusement purposes. I think it’s better this way.
• Wasting It On You: What happens when musicians break up. With whistling!

Fancy First Mint Moroccan + Moonlit Strong British Rising

More hot chicks. I can’t be stopped. The Moroccan is drawn from “This Side of Hell,” as mentioned, and the Brit comes from “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” Heh heh heh. I need to stop.

The Brit in color and then moonlit (yay for photo editor effects!)

Click for freaky big versions.