Sixteen Volts

When I was a teen, I read some scifi novel which I remember was good but whose name I can't remember right now. In the story, time had gone out of joint and people from various eras had suddenly come together. In the story, modern people showed the people of the World War I era how useless it would be for them to try to fight against modern weapons by having an ancient phonograph and a modern hifi stereo system play the same symphony side by side. If time ever goes out of joint for real this way and the people of the 1970's get uppity and start getting ideas, we could similarly show them the remake of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", which I finally watched today now that the Movie Network played it. The people of the seventies could not even begin to conceptualize how the sets and special effects of this absolutely magical movie were made.

Tim Burton has been consistently teaching us with his movies that wildly eccentric outcasts who live in the moment and eschew logic, linear thinking and other trappings of the middle-class lifestyle are wonderful but misunderstood heroes that we should look up to and in fact try to be more like them, instead of what they usually are in the real world, that is, scary and pitiful losers that most people shun and avoid for perfectly valid reasons. Add a musical score by Danny Elfman, and you know exactly what you are going to get. I don't think that I have anything else to say about this movie that others haven't already said, but I'll do my best. (God damn it, back before the movie came out, I could have been the first one to point out something about Michael Jackson, but now the whole thing is an old hat. The similarities were quite amusing, especially the part where he told the kids he was edible.)

I couldn't help thinking how very inefficient and... unhygienic Willy Wonka's factory seemed to be. In all those scenes with the chocolate river, I just couldn't bring myself to see that brown sludge as chocolate, if you know what I mean. It was pretty disgusting to watch. Of course, there was little attempt for any kind of realism in this movie, and even I am not petty enough to complain about it, but I do have to say that especially the business model behind the Everlasting Gobstopper would make even YouTube look like a paragon of potential profitability. I once read a hilarious piece that was written about the original movie, a "company memo" supposedly written for Willy by some accountant. This "memo" concerned the horrible production inefficiencies that take place in the chocolate production in Willy's factory, and offers suggestions on they might be improved. Damn it that I can't find this piece right now even with googling, but I'll post the link to it later if I find it, or if somebody can give me a tip about where it is at.

However, during my searches, I did fortunately come upon the post "Inutility" in an interesting-looking blog "American Stranger". The blogosphere is so clustered that it's hard to move away from your usual surroundings and reading grounds, so nudges such as this one are always welcome. There just has to be clusters out there that I have never even heard of, so maybe some time this weekend, it would be time for another tabu search.

I would like to note one immensely huge real-world inefficiency with this movie, though. Normally, you'd expect that with family blockbuster movies like this, there would be all kinds of licensing tie-ins going on with many kinds of consumer products. So back when this movie came out, you would have naturally assumed that Hershey or some other major chocolate manufacturer would have come up with a whole line of Willy Wonka -themed chocolates and prominently placed them in the supermarket candy aisles and checkout stands. But to my surprise back then, there was absolutely nothing, zero, zip, nada. The local dollar stores have for ages carried cheapo candies such as "Nerds" or "Gobstoppers", so obviously somebody out there does own the rights to names from Willy Wonka connected to candy, but these rights are probably locked up in some kind of legal limbo. Somebody probably simply seriously fucked up with this, and by doing so cost the movie and chocolate producers hundreds of millions of dollars. (Sorry about the f-word, but I don't think that anything milder would work with a screw-up of this magnitude.) When the movie came out, Cadbury did play TV ads in which a wacky top-hatted chocolatier conjured chocolate bars for customers at his curious chocolate shoppe. This character wasn't Willy Wonka, but it was close enough in all relevant respects so that the audience would certainly instantly "get" what was meant there.

I also have to wonder about Missi Pyle, the character actress who for some reason seems to have completely cornered the roles of prissy rich white bitches. Her face is quite distinctive so that she is not, uh, "movie beautiful", but it would be interesting to see her playing some totally different type of role. But this probably won't happen, any more than Jennifer Coolidge will ever again play a character much different from the MILF of American Pie movies. Once you are typecast as some particular character, it seems difficult to get out of it.

Another movie that I finally got around to watch yesterday since it was shown free and uncut and without commercial breaks, "Hustle and Flow", showcased us another kind of "chocolate factory". Everybody has heard the song "It's hard out here for a pimp" that the movie rides on, and I have to admit that despite my immediate dislike to it, the "hook" of this rap "song" was surprisingly catchy, the way that it was played in this movie. Maybe in a few years we get to hear a feelgood poppified version of this song used in commercials, with Red Lobster telling us that "It's hot out here for a shrimp!"

But I do have a couple of minor points to make about the movie itself. First of all, I didn't quite understand why those two decent and God-fearing boys who were the music experts who appeared to help our pimpin' hero to follow his dreams were so enthusiastic to listen to his curse-laden and grunting rap "music", especially since a bit earlier in the story, the Christian black guy had been shown recording beautiful church music. So I guess the audience was just tacitly asked to suspend the disbelief and accept their motivation, so that the actual story could proceed.

I have to say I did like the way that the plot and the story came together nicely when it came to the "hos" in the stable of this pimp. Following the laws of the economy of drama, the stable only had three female characters, that is, precisely the ones who were necessary for the plot: the white ho who provided the drama, the lovable black ho who the pimp gradually falls in love with (in the movie, this character is visibly pregnant so that she remains "pure" because the pimp doesn't send her to do any ho-work) and the nasty bitch ho who does nothing but cause trouble and discord. After this tightly-knit inner-city "family" gets rid of the nasty bitch, the lovely black woman, by an amazing coincidence, quite conveniently turns out to have a beautiful singing voice. Later, the white ho gets to grow from an insecure drugged-out dreamer who is adrift in the sea of life into an active and confident businesswoman. This way, the pimp brings out the best in everybody as a fortunate side effect of his quest to make rap music. Yay pimp! Perhaps just like with Tim Burton movies, we narrowminded middle-class normos should learn that petty criminals are noble and strong characters who we could learn a lot from, and movies like this one perform a valuable tasks in showcasing us the inner strength and beauty of the lumpenproleratiat.

Despite these rather standard and conventional plot developments, the plot also took throughout the film several little turns that I didn't quite expect, which is always nice. Keeps the viewer on your toes. When the heroes finally finished the demo tape and the hopeful pimp took it out to give to his idol, a famous black rapper who comes from the same "hood" but who has apparently "sold out" and forgotten his real roots and what rap is really about, I immediately assumed that this famous rapper would try to steal the song for himself. But I was wondering how these events and their necessary aftermath could possibly work dramatically, assuming the usual rules of Hollywood storylines, since at that point there was less than half an hour left in the movie. Well, we do get the crisis and betrayal, but in a somewhat different way, and after only ten minutes remain, issues get resolved in a quite straightforward manner so the movie can come in to the happy end. When we remember that marriage is currently all but vanished in the American inner cities, heck, the ending is practically as close to Gilbert and Sullivan as one could hope for.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Saturday, July 29, 2006 at 3:12 PM