> In 1970, when originally offered the lead role in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory by director Mel Stuart, the great Gene Wilder accepted on one condition. "When I make my first entrance,” he explained, “I'd like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk toward the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk toward them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I'm walking on and stands straight up, by itself; but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause." Asked why, Wilder said, "Because from that time on, no one will know if I'm lying or telling the truth."
I wonder if younger folk today watch that and think how quaint, old and dated it seems... or if they see it and wonder if their current modern cinema fair is really missing something these strange films had.
It's a great sadness to me that many children have grown, and will grow, up with the perception that the vastly inferior Tim Burton remake is the definitive version. The film starring Wilder should be included on future releases of the former as a public service.
I never understood this. The Tim Burton version of the film isn't a remake of this one. It's a direct adaptation of the book and is vastly more faithful to the source material than the GW version of the movie. Why people continue to compare them as if they're the same thing is weird to me. I enjoyed both almost equally but for entirely different reasons. Why others can't is beyond me...
But in the Burton film, ultimately, it's a story about Wonka reconnecting with his estranged father, explaining all of his weirdness and childlike behaviour as being somehow related to this event. Charlie is a second runner in that respect from the moment Wonka enters the screen.
My other issue is that Depp is insufferable, irritating and took the "child-like" description to an extreme. I dislike the Burton version more than I dislike the Hitchhikers film... which is to say, a lot. Both took a well trodden and loved story and changed it in a way that seems to add nothing to the narrative. The Hitchhikers film[1] fell back on the "but Douglas Adams never told the story the same twice in any medium" as an excuse. I don't believe Burton had that one to fall back on. Especially as Dahl felt Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory didn't capture his vision for the movie[2].
Regarding your footnote [1], it wasn't entirely an excuse. Most of the new things people hated in the movie were from Douglas Adams himself (he did almost all of the film's many, many drafts), because he never could tell the story the same way twice. You can almost tell there was a telephone effect in Douglas Adams writing, revising, rewriting his own drafts so many times for the whims of Hollywood executives. The interesting bit of final irony being that when Douglas Adams passed Hollywood passed it off to British directors that didn't meddle much further with the final draft beyond what happens naturally when you cast it and storyboard it.
We love it but TBH with a young 'un we skip to the GW scene described and I try to skip the boat ride. Seriously, beheading a chicken in a children's film is a dark dark choice...
Never had nightmares from this. Now, Tremors and Terminator were another story :)
Still, I've had way more nightmares rooted in real life situations than anything else. When I was 3-4 we had a bulldozer and steam shovel out to replace our septic tank. For YEARS, maybe even into early adulthood, but with less and less frequency I had the dream where the bulldozer was chasing me to the deck and it felt like I was running through quicksand.
I wonder if younger folk today listen to Gregorian chant and think how quaint, old and dated it seems... or if they see it and wonder if their current modern music is really missing something these strange sounds had.
Klosterman's guesses about how rock will be perceived in 500 years might interest you. It's in his latest, "But What if We're Wrong?"
He's one of the best writers on pop culture, and tends to dive into the sort of arguments that would be home in a kitchen at a house party that's winding down. I don't say that to diminish them, they're incredibly fun.
There will be a number of younger folks who won't be able to relate to the humanity in older films, much as many younger folks aren't able to relate to melodically complex music. Some of them will get older, then change, however.
Compare a modern popular track to an almost arbitrary Baroque piece, and you'll easily come to this conclusion.
OTOH compare a modern popular track to a modern jazz track, or certain complicated rock tracks (see Dream Theater for example), and you'll likely conclude that it's popularity of simple things, not simplicity of modern things, at work.
On the whole, no. However, there are recent genres that concentrate on things other than melody, with fan bases that aren't used to following involved melodies.
I grew up poor. I think part of the reason I've always been a fan of that film was because Charlie was the first poor kid I had seen in a movie. I'm not an emotional man but the end still makes me tear up a bit, made me ball my eyes out with happiness when I was 10. "So shines a good deed in a weary world", thanks for that Gene.
It got growing up poor better than many others. To see all the other kids stuffing themselves with candy and to be left out of that society just because of a lack of money - that was such a great visceral scene to watch growing up.
But it managed that without sentiment. Dahl had such a deft touch. the book is, of course, a top level masterpiece of children's fiction. It was unashamedly pointed about moral issues in a way no other children's books I've read are.
The irony is of course that Charlie never had the resources to develop the bad habits the other children had.
Came here to post this link as well. I remembered loving the opening scene as a kid. After reading this on Letters of Note a few years back it gave me a whole new appreciation for the genius of Gene's portrayal.
The letter from My Wilder is so beautiful. The man had genuine class and artistic wisdom:
"I've just received the costume sketches. I'll tell you everything I think, without censoring, and you take from my opinion what you like.
I assume that the designer took his impressions from the book and didn't know, naturally, who would be playing Willy. And I think, for a character in general, they're lovely sketches.
...
What I don't like is the precise pin pointing in place and time as this costume does..."
Nearly all of Mr Wilder's suggestions made it into the movie, except the hat-band color.
My favorite scene, and it's an absolute masterclass in comedic technique, is from Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. The moment his Greek patient confesses: "Doctor, I'm in love with a sheep!" Without saying a single word, Wilder's expression goes from jesting to confusion to amusement to fright to intrigue and back again through the entire gamut of possible human response. He sputters and strains. It's all right there on his face! We feel the tortured struggle occurring within his mind, grasping for any semblance of assessing the situation and formulating the appropriate thing to say. It's truth is it's genius!
Reminds my of Robert Benigni's scene in Jarmusch's Night on Earth. Another amazing comedic actor. Notice how few cuts there are. As a fluent Italian speaker, the subtitles do not do it justice.
What did you expect? "Welcome, sonny?" "Make yourself at home?" "Marry my daughter?" You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons.
Very sad. Young Frankenstein was probably my favorite movie as a kid - the Frau Blucher scene[1] always made me laugh. He'll be remembered (and watched) for a very long time, which I suppose is the greatest honor an actor can receive.
Young Frankenstein is filled with so many wonderful moments. "Igor, help me with the bags." "SED-A-GIVE?!"
I just wish they hadn't opened with a coffin jump scare. It sets the tone of the movie as horror and it took 14-year-old me a while to realize it was a comedy. Fast forward many years and I couldn't get my young daughter to watch it because that first scene scared her.
Just the setup and the props are hilarious, like the slot in the door with the label "Brain Depository / After 5:00pm slip brains through slot in door"
The first few times I had missed that, and then kept finding little things like that or bits of dialog I missed (English is not my first language it took a while to catch some phrases in it).
As a Gene Wilder fan I was once digging for things to watch on Amazon and stumbled on a documentary narrated by Gene Wilder. I wouldn't have even noticed it but when I saw his name He'd been out of the limelight for so long I thought "wow, what could have made him agree to do this?" So I watched it.
I can't recommend it enough. It's called "EXPO - Magic of the White City" and is as about the 1893 Chicago Exposition. It takes about 10 minutes to really get started and it's got some cheesy stuff but it was fascinating. I've shown it to several people and they all got sucked in.
Last Spring I read Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. It's about the same 1893 World's Fair in Chicago.
It's non-fiction, but written in a novelistic style. I absolutely loved it, I can't recommend it enough.
Put simply, films like Blazing Saddles made fun of racism without necessarily making fun of racists. They showed the institution as silly and absurd without having to look down and mock the people beyond an initial "Well, yeah, they're bumpkins". A modern film would likely lampoon them mercilessly and dehumanize them.
Additionally, the comic talent those films drew from comes from a very different lineage. Folks like Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor and Mel Brooks have a very different frame of reference for how to do comedy, how to pace it, how to deliver it. I find that modern comedians, having come up with the increasing HBOfication and Comedy-Central-style shows, tend towards very similar schticks: generally progressive-leaning (though the non-progressive stuff is awful redneck pandering as well!) inclusionistic near nihilist little screeds on stage. These tend not to lend themselves to being cast as anything other than a reflection of their own brand in a movie.
I won't really make the "Movies are all PC" argument, because that's silly and overused, but I will say that from a pure marketing standpoint it's difficult to sell a movie as thoroughly dirty as say Sleeper or cleverly offensive as Blazing Saddles: audiences are not interested in that sort of comedy anymore in a world of Soul Plane and Larry the Cable Guy and so forth.
"From that fateful day when stinking bits of slime first crawled from the sea and shouted to the cold stars, "I am man.", our greatest dread has always been the knowledge of our mortality. But tonight, we shall hurl the gauntlet of science into the frightful face of death itself. Tonight, we shall ascend into the heavens. We shall mock the earthquake. We shall command the thunders, and penetrate into the very womb of impervious nature herself." -Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein.
huge fan of him and especially Young Frankenstein. so much so that I created a character in a comedy story named Heinrich von Hexenhammer as a homage to Gene's definitive mad scientist:
Metacomment: As I've gradually shifted from reading, listening, or watching news, which I increasingly find almost wholly irrelevant, if not downright insulting, to expose myself to, I'm relying on curated sources, and HN in particular, to a larger degree.
So this is the first I'd heard the news, some 13 hours after posting as I write.
One thought that occurs is that HN has something rather good going on, in its incentives, audience, financing (HN isn't a revenue center, but does feed awareness of YC), and resulting informational production. Developing it further might be of interest, or finding a way to tap into it to produce a higher-quality "what's happening of significance in the world" product (feeds and filters off of HN already exist, e.g., the HN subreddit, basRSS).
And a substantial part of that is the culture that's been specifically cultivated. Researching the issue of trolling online, I happened across a post from nearly two weeks ago (which I'd missed in first appearance) on Time magazine's "how trolls are ruining the Internet" article. HN admin and mod dang offered a rebuke to an uncharitably rude comment, in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12322114
The context for that was my experiences in the past week in a new community which turns out to be quite centrally founded on the principle of pervasive anonymity. An interesting premise, but difficult to get right. My venture there didn't go well: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/500ysb/the_imz...
There's also the premise that news itself is often simply unproductive and unhealthy, and its different formats, particularly television/video, but also radio and print, have some fairly deep psychological influences, despite the fact that individual stories often have little personal impact -- we can neither do much about them, nor they to us. This isn't always the case, but the factors that do make news matter, relevance, context, background, and an exposing of the powers and reasons behind events, is rarely part of the modern product, which emphasises shock, reaction, outrage, and distraction. Not only mainstream commercial television, but the "better" sources -- BBC, CBC, NPR, PBS, The New York Times, Telegraph, and Guardian.
I receive a local paper. I'll listen briefly to headlines. I occasionally read news sites directly online. But whether it's me or the media, something seems changed, and relevance is largely missing.
Just to give an example, the local paper where I'm visiting carried a story this morning about an "artificial leaf" development by a university research team. The story ran a half page, from a news service billing itself as ecological news -- one of the many wire-service pieces that fills what's left of the business section of the paper on Mondays. Hoping for an explanation of the design, mechansim, or product, in that half page, there was one sentence revealing anyof this, and I quote:
Here’s how it works: The energy of the sun rearranges the chemical bonds of the carbon dioxide.
Literally the entire remainder of the article was noninformational filler. A paragraph or two of which on why synfuels-based energy storage is useful, I can understand. But ... this isn't even pretending to inform.
The remainder of the paper is similarly loaded with anti-information. A brief news roundup buried in the back of the first section contains what little actual news is present, again largely wire articles. There's perhaps a well-written article every week or two. Op-eds are occasionally, though rarely, considered. A friend characterises the columnists as largely writing about themselves or to each other. And yes, this is the same Tronc product John Oliver lampooned, with absolute justification, consummate skill, and delightful effect, on HBO a few weeks back.
Oliver's right: the media business environment stinks. But Tronc have stopped even trying.
So: HN, an intelligent audience, a diversity of views, a fostering of civility, even in disagreement, principled readership, and quite frankly a really boring design asthetic, are all soft-power influences shaping a quite useful information stream.
Thoughts kicked up by seeing this headline in the story list.
And yes, beyond that, I'll miss Wilder, a gentle but brave comic genius of our age.
I'll add, you've spanked me at least once for an off-flavour comment (on the Slashdot aquisition story). Interesting thing there was that your guidance prompted me to go beyond my first impressions (I was, and remain suspicious of the company which bought Slashdot), and turned up a fairly messy past. Might still not excuse the tone, but that ended up strengthening the basis for the sentiment considerably.
It's not. But HN is for things interesting to hackers, which may include technology.
And, let you think it is merely dropit_sphere, that unwashed ragamuffin of the internet, that says so:
"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups."
~ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Shall I mention that Wilder's stellar performance in Chocolate Factory endeared him to those who enjoyed a bit of whimsy? And whimsy is most definitely a hacker trait.
Certain people on HN might find themselves interested in various aspects of technology, business, or other things that frequent here - but we're all human, and I think Gene Wilder, in life and in death, is someone to note and celebrate, as a human.
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is
inappropriate for the site. If you think a story is spam or
off-topic, flag it by clicking on its 'flag' link. If you
think a comment is egregious, click on its timestamp to go to
its page, then click 'flag' at the top. (Not all users see
flag links; there's a small karma threshold.)
In short: Just flag it if you think it's OT.
For the rest of us, this is a community. We have conversations with other human beings. And, sometimes, human topics, like this one, are of interest to us. A place to share in our collective grief or joy or amazement or amusement. These posts are relatively rare, and they don't gum up the works.
And, there's this nice new feature that dang et al introduced a bit ago, you can hide articles. Do like I do when yet another article I don't care about (I'm not in a startup, I'm not starting a startup, I'm here for mostly the tech stuff, the business and VC and other stuffs have very little to interest me), hide it and see the article you do care about.
> In 1970, when originally offered the lead role in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory by director Mel Stuart, the great Gene Wilder accepted on one condition. "When I make my first entrance,” he explained, “I'd like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk toward the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk toward them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I'm walking on and stands straight up, by itself; but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause." Asked why, Wilder said, "Because from that time on, no one will know if I'm lying or telling the truth."
Quote from: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/06/part-of-this-world-part...