Willie Wonka and The Chocolate Factory
film — USA — 1971

5.0
Now I can finally call myself an expert in the field of Willie Wonka. I`ve seen both films, I`ve read the book, and finally I`ve read a comparison of the three of Wikipedia. So how do they compare?
One probably won`t be too surprised that the original film (it came out in 1971) looks pretty pale in comparison with the new one. They had no computers, you see! Therefore the special effects are funny. Therefore some of the things from the book were too complicated to be made into the movie. Squirrels, for example, are replaced by geese that lay gold eggs. Then there`s one thing that makes everything much worse - there`s too much singing in this film, it almost qualifies for a musical. If I thought that were was too much singing in the Burton version, this one was much worse. Charlie sings, his mother sings, one of the other kids sings, and they sing like shit. Oh, and the songs seem to be composed in the following way - while some people were tuning their instruments, another one of them was singing whatever would go together with that sort of "music". The story is changed quite significantly - for instance, Charlie doesn`t have a father and his mother is a butt-ugly laundress. Willie Wonka (played by Gene Wilder) is almost ok, but not really - the character is much weirder in the Tim Burton film, and much more interesting. In the original there`s nothing outstading at all. No wonder Roald Dahl didn`t like the film and no wonder that his family likes the new one - for Mel Stuart (the director of this film) didn`t get the creepy essence of Roald Dahl`s work - this film may also have quite a lot of "serious" references but it doesn`t save the film for being a silly thing for children.
2005-10-13
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