Although the fiftieth anniversary of this landmark children's film was in June of this year, I bring up Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory today mainly because it's associated with the holidays, seeing as it has to do with candy and all that. Also, I remember when it was on TV every Thanksgiving weekend.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory should not have worked. Its differences from Roald Dahl's 1964 children's novel "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" go beyond just the title. In the movie, several characters from the book are either eliminated or diminished. The hero of the story, Charlie Bucket, joins four rotten children to tour Mr. Wonka's factory and disobeys one of Mr. Wonka's orders in the movie, just as the other kids do, though he does not do so in the book. The fifth of five Golden Tickets hidden in Wonka chocolate bars - the pass needed for the factory tour - is claimed to be found in Paraguay only to turn out to be a fake, another change from the book. And there are other changes that would take too long to document, not the least of which is the fact that the movie is a musical, chock full of Anthony Newley songs (including "The Candy Man," which Sammy Davis, Jr. would have a surprise hit with in 1972). Roald Dahl himself disavowed the movie after it came out. So why does the movie work?
The answer is simple: Gene Wilder.
Wilder played Willy Wonka with a sense of whimsy and silliness that took a character in Dahl's 1964 book that always seemed a bit creepy and nonchalant despite being well-meaning and made him likeable and enjoyable. Wonka was still standoffish and smug, but Wilder brought a method to Wonka's madness, as - we all know this by now, so I'm not spoiling the ending for you - the purpose of the Golden Tickets is to find the ideal child he can give his factory to when he retires. Wonka constantly tests the five children in his care as they tour the factory, exposing them to tempting situations where the kids can either do the right thing or overindulge and get themselves into irrevocable trouble. (He also gets someone to pretend to be his competitor in the candy business to bribe them to give him Wonka's latest candy innovation, an everlasting gobstopper, though that was not a plotline in the book.) Wilder's Wonka strikes the right balance between being a daffy old creep and kindly old gent. As anyone who had seen Wilder as Leo Bloom in The Producers will tell you, he knew how to play a character at both ends of the spectrum for comedic effect.
The sets were pure early-seventies kitsch, from the Chocolate Room with its chocolate river to its Wonkavision TV studio, which provides a form of nostalgia for those of us who grew up with the Carpenters on the radio and the Banana Splits on TV. (Wonka's outfit even screams 1971.) The scenes of adults doing anything to get a Golden Ticket, including using a computer that can locate the Golden Tickets ("It says, 'I won't tell, that would be cheating!'") are also enjoyable, showing how the promise of getting something for nothing (the Golden Tickets also include a lifetime's supply of chocolate) brings out the greed in even the most mature and sensible grownups. The whole movie is full of such colorful scenes and clever ideas, so much that you almost forget the inconsistencies - an American family (the Buckets) living in the ghetto of a German city (it was filmed in Munich) where Charlie's schoolteacher is English (though the cluelessness of Charlie's teacher teaching science and percentages seems almost French New Wave). Almost. The movie is only okay until Wilder steps in. Then it becomes magnificent.
I also have to give credit to Jack Albertson for his sprightly and warm portrayal as Charlie's' Grandpa Joe, as well as Roy Kinnear as spoiled-brat Veruca Salt's hapless father. I can't forget the Oompa-Loompas either, singing about the nasty children just as they did in the book. But of course, the movie is called Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory for a reason. Though the film was not initially a success, its constant annual holiday airings throughout the 1970s on NBC (a network that, perhaps coincidentally, aired "Chico and the Man," starring Jack Albertson) made it a perennial favorite among Generation Xers like myself, despite the deviations from the book (which I read as a kid). Because the movie looks great, the story is still great, the moral is timeless (be a good boy or girl and you'll be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams; misbehave you'll get your just deserts), and Gene Wilder is Willy Wonka. Yes, I saw the 2005 movie version of the story, correctly titled after the book, and Johnny Depp makes a great Willy Wonka too. And, that movie is superb in its own right because it's more true to Dahl's original story. But for my generation, Gene Wilder will always be Willy Wonka.
And don't forget what happened the man who suddenly got everything he wanted . . . he lived happily ever after. 😊
I finally got to see Richard Jewell, having rented it from my local library (which is now open after a long COVID lockdown), and I was astonished. I figured I'd like it, but I didn't think I'd like it as much as I did.
Director Clint Eastwood did a masterful job in his depiction of Richard Jewell himself, capturing the character of the man brilliantly. Jewell is presented as a modest, respectful man who seeks no attention and seeks only to do his job the best that he can. The movie opens with him in 1986, working as a mailroom clerk in a public law firm getting Snickers candy bars for lawyer Watson Bryant (the man who would defend Jewell against accusations of planting the bomb to "discover" it and be a hero) without being asked to and developing a special rapport with Bryant early on. As the film progresses, Jewell strives to excel in a budding law enforcement career and gets in trouble for being "overzealous" in his work as a security officer, eventually getting the temporary job that would change his life forever. Eastwood's depiction of the night that Eric Rudolph planted the bomb at Centennial Olympic Park is filled with dramatic tension that shows Jewell at his finest hour - moving around like a madman trying to get everyone to safety.
The turn of events that makes Jewell's life a living hell illustrates how his best qualities - politeness, deference to authority - almost prove to be his undoing, as he is all too happy to cooperate with the FBI to the point where Bryant has to save Jewell from itself. Jewell grows to be less trusting of his tormentors in the government (and the media) as they harass him and his mother, but the never loses his idealism and in the belief in law and order. Richard Jewell does nothing short of getting to the heart of a decent, selfless individual.
There are many things to love about Richard Jewell. Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray bring out Jewell's character in subtle ways, such as giving bottle of water to a pregnant woman at the park, or joining his mom at a Kenny Rogers concert there. Also of note are how Jewell and Bryant respond to each other with mutual respect throughout the ordeal and the ambivalence Jewell shows toward the media when they, at first, hail him as a hero. In recreating the events that led up the bombing of Centennial Olympic Park on July 27, 1996 (twenty-five years ago yesterday), Eastwood brings the viewer back to 1996 with his accurate portrayal of the times, with a documentary-like feel. He even uses archival footage of the Olympic opening ceremony, showing the moment Janet Evans passed the torch to Muhammad Ali, and - nice touch - alternating track star Michael Johnson's record-setting 200m victory with a time of 19.32 seconds with Bryant and his Russian-born legal assistant timing the walking distance between the public phone where the bomber called 911 to report the bomb in the park and the park itself.
Richard Jewell isn't perfect, though. I have to address the elephant in the room here, Eastwood's and Ray's depiction of the late Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs (she died in 2001) as an ethically dubious newswoman willing to trade sex for inside information from an FBI agent. ( Let me be clear: There is no evidence that Scruggs ever did such a thing, and Eastwood's misogynistic swipe at her was wrong. Apart from the depiction of Bryant as Jewell's only lawyer, it's the only historical inaccuracy in the entire movie. To be fair, though, Eastwood does not include a sex scene, and Scruggs comes to see the error of her reporting. (How does that happen? See the movie.)
The real villain, though, is FBI agent Tom Shaw, a composite of the actual FBI agents who investigated Jewell. Shaw represents an FBI as overzealous in its duties as Jewell was made out to be, violating Jewell's privacy (a long-common practice of the FBI, as Jewell's fellow Georgian Martin Luther King, Jr., would have pointed out) and doubting his innocence despite the lack of hard evidence against him. Eastwood pulls no punches toward the media, showing a sensationalizing press corps hounding Jewell as he tries to deal with the investigation into his alleged role in the bombing. But the indiscretions of the media pale in comparison to those of the FBI - still operating in 1996 as if J. Edgar Hoover were still in charge.
The performances are all first rate, from Kathy Bates as Jewell's suffering mother and Sam Rockwell as Watson Bryant to Jon Hamm's nefarious portrayal of Shaw and Olivia Wilde as Scruggs. But the big surprise is Paul Walter Hauser in the title role. He just didn't play Richard Jewell; he became Richard Jewell in an incredibly stellar performance that brings out Jewell's humanity.
Despite the flaws of the film in its depiction of Kathy Scruggs, Richard Jewell is a solid piece of filmmaking that settles once and for all the decency and the heroism of a man who should never have been demonized or caricatured the way he was. It is required viewing for anyone who believes in truth and fairness. The movie also gets the recommendation of Canadian sprinter Donovan Bailey, who won the 100m race in Atlanta the same day Rudolph's bomb went off. And few sports-related movies come with a recommendation as strong as that.
I finally saw The Front Runner, the movie about Gary Hart's disastrous 1988 presidential campaign starring Hugh Jackman as Hart (below), and while the movie wasn't bad, it wasn't great either. The critics found it unpersuasive as an argument for Hart's candidacy, and I found it unpersuasive in terms of reality.
The Front Runner gets a few things right about the boiler-room atmosphere of political campaigns, and J.K. Simmons' performance as Hart campaign manager Bill Dixon is right on the money, as it shows how Dixon lost his idealism over the Bimini affair (Dixon never ran a political campaign again). Also, you feel for Vera Farmiga's Lee Hart, who, as the candidate's wife, was humiliated by the scandal. However, the whole film plays and feels like a cable-TV movie, and not necessarily one made for a premium channel. The Front Runner, in that respect, feels rather thin and underdone. It also relies on a composite character - not one of my favorite cinematic devices - in the form of a black actor playing a hybrid of E.J. Dionne and Paul Taylor, the two reporters who, respectively, interviewed Hart for the New York Times' Sunday magazine and asked Hart if he'd ever committed adultery. Though based on Matt Bai's book about the Hart scandal, "All The Truth Is Out" (the title of which was taken from a line in Hart's favorite poem, William Butler Yeats' "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing"), and though Bai co-wrote the script, the book concentrates on only a few characters and almost entirely on the immediate period of the scandal, in May 1987. Cutting out the introductory scenes set in 1984, when Hart first ran for President, and delving into his attempted comeback in early 1988 would have made for a more well-rounded character study.
Director Jason Reitman pretty much took the Hart scandal and made it less compelling than it was in real life. And oh yes, the movie is indeed clearly in Hart's corner, playing up his public virtues while shrugging off his aloofness, his arrogance, and his inability to handle damage control - three deficiencies you don't want in a President. Though, if you want an actor to play a charismatic politician with what Daryl Hall once called in one of his songs "movie star eyes," you can't go wrong with Hugh Jackman.
I only wish Reitman hadn't gone wrong in his filmmaking.
Michael Moore has decided that we Americans need a new foreign policy. Rather than invade a country with our military and try to influence the people there only to lose the war, he's advocating that we invade countries with our open minds and take over their ideas. Hence Where To Invade Next, Moore's most pointed documentary ever. He "invades" various countries and takes back with him ideas for social programs, policies, and amenities that America is infamous for not having. And if we do invade this way, as Moore demonstrates, this time we can win.
Moore travels to different nations to observe how they handles education, workers' rights, criminal justice, and other issues. Although he admits that other countries have other problems like we do, he's not concerned with any of that; he prefers to pick the flowers rather than the weeds (his own phrase). After watching Where To Invade Next, though, I was enraged to see how much of a field of crabgrass America is - and why we're not doing something about it by considering these better ideas that Moore found elsewhere. Moore travels to Italy to find nationally mandated paid vacations and shows Italians more productive at their jobs and less stressed. He goes to Finland and France to show how school students are respected; in Finland they're encouraged to learn through curiosity rather than through rote instruction, and in France they're served real food during lunch break - and in France's poorest communities as well. From worker's rights in Germany, where a middle class still thrives, to free higher education in Slovenia, a country the size of New Jersey with one-fourth as many people, Moore shows more humane ways in which countries treat their citizens and how they can't imagine anyone being left to fend for themselves . . . as in the United States.
Some of Moore's discoveries are astonishing. Norway's maximum-security prisons are laid out like country clubs with rehabilitation programs for even of its most dangerous murderers (who work freely with knives in the prison kitchen), and women's rights are constitutionally guaranteed in, of all places, Tunisia. By the time he gets around to talking about how Iceland got out of the great financial crisis of 2008 by punishing errant bankers instead of bailing them out, you're left asking again and again and again: "Why can't we do this here??"
The joke in Where To Invade Next is that many of these ideas actually did originate here. Europeans may boast about having eliminated the death penalty while the U.S. government has not, but Moore notes that his home state of Michigan was the first English-speaking political entity to abolish capital punishment in the world - in 1846. Workers' vacations, prison reform, some of the ideas the Finns used to make their children the best educated children in the world - all of those ideas were thought up in the United States but were either not implemented correctly (paid vacations are a privilege, not a right, in These States) or never implemented at all. Moore makes no more than a passing reference to high-speed rail, but he could have also mentioned that magnetic levitation rail - the next big advancement in passenger trains - was invented in the United States but was never pursued here beyond some basic experiments. (Why not? Because the government apparently didn't want to fund any program that might produce a transportation system that would cut into the profits of auto companies or airlines.) The biggest and best reason to watch this entertaining and enlightening movie is to see that Moore isn't invading anyone at all for their ingenuity; like Bob Dylan with rock and roll in Great Britain, Moore's taking a stand and bringing it all back home.
(Tellingly, Moore doesn't "invade" Great Britain for any ideas. Perhaps that's appropriate; after nearly two decades of Conservative and centrist Labour rule, the British haven't given the world any new ideas, and, ironically, they're too busy trying to implement our bad ideas these days.)
This movie made me want to do something, and I hope more people see it and decide that they want to do something - anything - to, well, make America great again. But not through the two-party system. Donald Trump may be correct in saying that America is no longer great, but he doesn't notice the real reasons for that and offers no real solutions; Hillary Clinton says that America never stopped being great, but she doesn't notice the low literacy rates and substandard infrastructure (among other things) that contradict her rebuttal to Trump's slogan. Moore ends Where To Invade Next with a hopeful message that explains how Americans habituated to expecting no change have it in them to change something almost literally overnight (how? well, I don't want to spoil it for you), and if enough people do see this documentary, hope and change can be more than just a mantra.
Let's do more than just occupy a street in Lower Manhattan.
My mother has exhibited the weirdest behavior lately. She can't stop watching the movie version of the Abba Broadway musical "Mamma Mia!" whenever it comes on cable television, and it's been on cable TV a lot. She loves the storyline, but she also likes the songs and the music.
But get this - she doesn't remember Abba from the seventies!
My mother was in her mid-thirties when ABBA were together, and they were always on the Top Forty AM radio station we used to listen to then, since they had so many hits. And Mom doesn't remember the Swedish quartet? Hmmm, maybe the songs simply sank in to her psyche through osmosis.
Abba have long been criticized for their lightweight, airy, plastic pop songs, but their records have turned out to be durable plastic. How else can you explain the fact that "Mamma Mia!" will have been on Broadway for eight years this October, and shows no signs of slowing down despite the movie version being so obviously available on demand. Abba have remained popular since their breakup in 1982 and have resisted efforts to regroup far more successfully than the Beatles, who of course reunited as a threesome and concocted new Beatles songs with unfinished John Lennon recordings for the Anthology project. Abba had even been rumored to be the substitutes for the fifty dates Michael Jackson was to perform in London.
Abba had a unique start when they, as Sweden's choice to contribute an entry in the 1974 Eurovision song contest, chose "Waterloo," a song referring to Napoleon's last defeat. They won the Eurovision song contest, and it was their first international hit. Now that's irony for you.
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