OT: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Yeah - apparently it's cool to hate on remakes/reboots and CGI.

I love the dorks and fanboys out there that hold a movie so close to their heart - that they're in an absolute rage that movie is being remade and there might be some CGI.

Used to be some fun times on the old IMDB Horror board regarding this.

Honestly, I think it's the other way around.  It's fine to hate on shitty things but people seem compelled, by some mystical force, to defend anything and everything, no matter how objectively bad it is.  On the old horror board, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake was often hailed as a triumph and it was pretty good.  Brutal and mean-spirited, everything you want in a horror movie.  And it had Jessica Biel bounding around in a tank top.  In the rain.  Like, even when she was indoors.  Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead (1986), The Thing, Max Max Fury Road...all remakes/reboots, all widely regarded as successes. 

Then there's trash like the Nightmare on Elm Street remake and when people criticize it, other people would inexplicably jump to its defense.  Nowadays, you see this more with the comic book movies where you have people in two camps.  Horror doesn't get as much vitriol one way or another these days, at least not that I can see from where I'm sitting.  

Of course.  I just don't remember it that way if I'm being honest (I could be wrong).  There are always going to be those people, swearing up and down as to the sanctity of a particular thing or movie, what have you so I don't disagree with you that those people exist.    

Come to think of it, the one that stands out in my memory is the countless threads defending the objectively awful and toothless Poltergeist remake.  People who twisting themselves into pretzels trying to justify it as being good.  You want to like it? Go for it, but it had nothing but a few jump scares and zero characters.  It's basically just a shitty haunted house movie that called itself Poltergeist and tried to win over fans with Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt and the great Jared Harris.  The original is a testament to what you can do with some well written characters, a few camera tricks and a killer score.  It's not even fair to compare the two.  

Point being, I just recall the more outspoken group being those defending Poltergeist as being a staple of modern cinema whereas people like me hated the remake because it sucked, not because of anything to do with "insulting the original" or whatever.    

I'd say 'not as magical' is probably fair. It's intended as a cartoon come to life, and the cartoon logic and odd tone are off putting to some degree. There are great things about it, but some that don't quite hit. But it's got a better aesthetic in the costumes/cinematography/set designs (if not all the digital effects), and a much better cast over all than the original (the kids in the first film, especially Charlie, are all pretty weak).

I always thought if Depp wore a different wig that audiences, in general, would have liked the movie a lot more. The Oompas Loompas all being played by one actor doesn't work as well though, as much as I like that guy, and the closer adherence to the book of them being this ethnically ambiguous pigmy type of people.

Planet of the Apes is indeed bad, but it has quite possibly the best special effects makeup ever put on screen. It's a shame that the move was bad and failed so badly because I think it really marked an end of relying on practical effects in big movies. It was used as an excuse for why audiences don't want to see that and now that level of extensive practical makeup has hardly been done since. As much as people like the most recent 'apes' movies, and as effective as those effects can be for a lot of people, I'm much more drawn to the Rick Baker latex mask stuff.

That production is a sort of unknown classic of a complete cluster fuck of an unsalvageable disaster. I saw an interview where Burton said he was brought on to the project as it was already in motion and with a firm release date. In a studio exec meeting he was presented the poster they'd mocked up and it said 'This Film is not Yet Rated' and he said it should have said 'this film is not yet shot or even written.' They went into production without really having a script and on an impossible schedule.

None of that excuses the terrible movie, but I just kinda love those sorts of Hollywood stories.

But I'm also a Burton mega-fan and, these days perhaps, apologist.

You know what I think is a great use of CGI beyond the obvious Jurassic Park movies? In the Deadpool movies they use CGI on his eyes while he’s wearing the mask, making it appear as facial expressions as they would in the actual comic books. THAT was a well done subtle use of CGI, otherwise it would have just been this expressionless mask.

As for Poltergeist, the original (and just the original) is my favorite horror movie second only to The Exorcist. It’s the characters. Craig T. Nelson and Jo Beth Williams were fantastic. The story was great and the effects at the time didn’t take you out of the movie. I either didn’t know or completely forgot there was a remake. Looking it up on IMDb and it’s still not familiar to me.

Yeah the studio issues with that movie aren't often talked about, quite possibly because nobody cares about or talks about the movie to begin with. I still find that interesting though. Sometimes those movies that nobody cares about have great back stories. I saw an interview with Tim Roth semi recently (he is fantastic in the movie, by the way) and he said that he ran into Burton in an airport and they reminisced about how cool and trasgressive the movie they wanted to but didn't get to make could have been.

But understandably most of these troubled production stories that people care about are the mega disasters, the ones that actually still turned out well, or those that are part of a franchise.

I do like the sort of trend of recent docs about unmade movies like Jodorowsky's Dune, the Terry Gilliam Don Quixote one, and the Lost Soul Richard Stanley Dr.. Moreau one. Some many crazy stories about awful production difficulties in that one.

But there is also The Death of Superman Lives which all about Burton developing his cancelles Superman movie. Whatever anyone thinks about what that movie might have been, I think that doc is clearly a pretty good insight into how working with a crazy producer and a within the big budget studio system can ruin a project that might be based on ideas that can work. It's amazing how they sabotage themselves and just thow money away and waste everyone's time. It's not the best made documentary, but there are some wild stories, and you get to see first hand how Jon Peters is a fucking lunatic but was one of the most successful producers at the time. Interesting stuff.

Very true about John Wick and Mad Max. Those movies do great things with action and 'realism,' but I was specifically talking about how special effects makeup has suffered recently due to CGI. Those new Apes movies have a different approach to the ape characters, but even if they were doing the same kind of thing you just know they'd CGI all the ape faces now, but Rick Baker's ape makeup effects in the movie are absolutely amazing, and as of yet I’ve never been convinced that a CGI face is really there. It's just not the same.

Rick Baker did a bunch of interviews like a year ago or so when he was releasing a coffee table book of his work (I really wanna get my hands on that) and he detailed his experience on the Benicio Del Toro remake of The Wolfman. He had to justify to the producer why he would order so much hair, and was not allowed to do the transformation scene because the producers wanted it to be done with CGI. And that sucks. This is the guy that created the American Werewolf in London transformation and he would have presumably had more budget, more time, and decades' more experience.

CGI is not the problem, of course. The issue is how it's used by the filmmakers. Frank's example above with Deadpool is a great example of combining the media of practical and CGI to prop up one another. The guy who directed the first Deadpool was a long time animator and all around CGI guy and knew how incorporate those efrects well. As much as I didn't care much for the newest terminator movie that he did, he did a breakdown on YouTube of all of the effects in one of the action sequences. Some of the main, flashy effects didn't look all that great, but there were a lot of small things that I never would have known were done with CGI. That kind of thing really can enhance the experience.

With make-up effects working in concert with CGI, I think filmmakers can take a cue from Guillermo Del Toro. If you look at the way he integrated CGI with the practical effects in Pan's Labyrinth or The Shape of Water you'd hardly know that CGI was used at all. It just enhanced the physical effects that were already there and both techniques made the other better.

Well... I don't expect that anybody would actually read all of the rambling nonsense thar I just wrote, but there it is anyway.

This is an awesome post, nicely done.  I fancy myself as being learned when it comes to these things, but you clearly know more about it than I do.  I'm with you 100% on the use of subtle CGI.  The effects you don't notice are the ones that truly stand out.  

I really want to watch the doc about Terry Gilliam's Don Quixote.  I love Gilliam and I was always anxiously awaiting that movie when they kept saying it was in pre-production for years and years.  I've read things about the Island of Dr. Moreau and what a mess it was but I haven't seen that doc either, maybe I'll check that out.  From my understanding, it won't make me like Val Kilmer.  When you have Brando on set and he isn't the (figuratively) biggest problem, your production is fairly doomed.  

Good stuff dude.