{"id":59070,"date":"2023-12-18T14:12:17","date_gmt":"2023-12-18T19:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=59070"},"modified":"2023-12-18T14:12:38","modified_gmt":"2023-12-18T19:12:38","slug":"wonka-movie-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2023\/12\/wonka-movie-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Wonka \u2013 Movie Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Bob Garver<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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            A bit of autobiography here at the start: I grew up a stone\u2019s throw from Hershey, Pennsylvania and my current full-time employment comes from Hershey\u2019s Chocolate World in Times Square. Chocolate, its production, and its sales are all a major part of my identity. So I view media related to Roald Dahl\u2019s 1964 children\u2019s book \u201cCharlie and the Chocolate Factory\u201d through a different lens than most. For example, the first time I saw 1971\u2019s \u201cWilly Wonka and the Chocolate Factory\u201d at the age of six, I wondered why the whole world would lose its mind over a contest where the prize was a visit to a chocolate factory. I lived a mere ten minutes from a chocolate factory, and even at that young age, the tour had gotten boring for me. Eventually I learned that the factory of the movie was a gorgeous and twisted place, and then I was able to enjoy the ride (with the possible exception of the nightmarish actual \u201cride\u201d), but it took about half the movie for my disbelief to be suspended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            All of this is to say that I went into \u201cWonka\u201d with a high standard for how the chocolate would be portrayed. I wasn\u2019t looking for accuracy, heck, I was just coming off an unreasonably crowded Saturday-in-December shift and needed a break from real chocolate. But I did need the chocolate to look good, to come off well so that people would leave the theater wanting more of it. The chocolate of the 1971 film looked absolutely scrumdiddlyumptious (a word that surprisingly passes my computer\u2019s spell-check), but in the 2005 Tim Burton version, it looked distorted and inedible. Given those two extremes, it\u2019s not shocking that the chocolate in \u201cWonka\u201d falls somewhere in the middle, but given that it\u2019s surrounded by an underwhelming movie, I wasn\u2019t exactly in a hurry to return to work and use my employee discount.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The movie follows young Willy Wonka (Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet) as he seeks to open his first chocolate shop. Standing in his way are the \u201cChocolate Cartel\u201d of no-good rivals Slugworth (Paterson Jospeh); Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton); and Prodnose (Matt Lucas), an on-the-take police chief (Keegan-Michael Key), and his indentured servitude to a pair of laundromat owners (Tom Davis and Olivia Colman). But he has help from his fellow \u201cscrubbers\u201d (Jim Carter, Natasha Rothwell, Rakhee Thakhar, Rich Fulcher, and breakout Calah Lane) and the lasting wisdom of his late mother (Sally Hawkins). He\u2019s initially antagonized by a thieving Oompa-Loompa (Hugh Grant) but we know that the two will eventually end up allies and that Wonka will bring in all of Oompa-Loompaland to work in his factory in an arrangement that future adaptations will no doubt overcompensate to make clear is not slavery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wonka himself is both a spectacularly great and terrible businessman. He\u2019s pitifully na\u00efve and bad at managing a budget, yet effortlessly charming as a salesman and knows chocolate so well that he can manufacture it seemingly by magic. The only time he ever has to worry about finding an ingredient is a sequence where he has to break into a zoo to get giraffe\u2019s milk. And not only does the chocolate taste great, but it gives people superpowers like newfound self-confidence and the ability to fly. So yes, the chocolate comes off well, the movie has done its job there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can\u2019t say \u201cWonka\u201d does its job well in every department. I\u2019m still not sold on Chalamet as a leading man, especially compared to the brilliant Gene Wilder as the 1971 Wonka. This movie is so darn sweet that it lacks the naughtiness that made that version appealing. Grant is the only one who seems to be in the right spirit, and his performance is hampered by terrible CGI. And every one of the movie\u2019s musical numbers is overproduced dreck, even the classic \u201cPure Imagination\u201d is devoid of life. That said, it\u2019s impossible to get too mad at a movie like this, one that the family can all agree to see together during the holidays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grade: C<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWonka\u201d is rated PG for some violence, mild language and thematic elements. Its running time is 116 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver             A bit of autobiography here at the start: I grew up a stone\u2019s throw from Hershey, Pennsylvania and my current full-time employment comes from Hershey\u2019s Chocolate… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":59071,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[2621],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59070"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59070"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59072,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59070\/revisions\/59072"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}