OT: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

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.

Well thanks, much appreciated. Surprised and glad that someone cared to read my rambling digressions.

I missed it in the theater back when going to a theater was a thing that you could do, but Gilliam did finally make and release his Don Quixote film last year. As I understand it he totally reinvented the concept and it's entirely different than the movie he started to make in the documentary.

That doc is great though. It's a perfect document of how hectic and random a film production can be, and just how many things can conspire against a filmmaker in the midst of that.

I'd highly recommend the Dr. Moreau one. You definitely will not come away liking Val Kilmer any more than before... or John Frankenheimer. There are insane stories all over that one, and from everything I've read there are way more that didn't make the doc. I never knew that two actors refusing to come out of their trailers until the other one came out first was a real thing, but they apparently lost full shooting days to that nonsense. And this was Brando in his full insanity. Crazy stuff. Richard Stanley is a really interesting and bizarre figure, and he may have been able to wrangle all of this madness had he been allowed to do so. I'm glad that he has finally gotten a chance to direct again nearly 25 years later.

The Burton Superman doc is also worth a look. You may come awya with more questions than answers about what that movie would have been, but the personalities and the process of figuring the stuff out are highly entertaining.

Anyway, thanks for giving me the impotence to check out the backstory of Alien 3. I don't know that I ever actually saw the whole thing, and all I really knew about it was that Fincher had a terrible experience and has disowned it.

I'll be learning more about that in the near future now.