{"id":3933,"date":"2005-08-13T00:03:04","date_gmt":"2005-08-13T00:03:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/08\/tarnished-ticket.html"},"modified":"2005-08-13T00:03:04","modified_gmt":"2005-08-13T00:03:04","slug":"tarnished-ticket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/08\/tarnished-ticket.html","title":{"rendered":"Tarnished Ticket"},"content":{"rendered":"

Finally caught Charlie and the Chocolate Factory<\/em> today. Katie had seen it  a month ago, but this was our first chance to take Joseph, who has been talking about this movie for..a month.<\/p>\n

Here’s what I thought: Echoing the opinions of some reviewers I’ve read – the first half hour was lovely and almost perfect. That is – the part of the movie that takes place before they go to the chocolate factory. The sense of iron-strong family ties, respect, good cheer in rough circumstances was well done and charming. Even moving. But then…<\/p>\n

Well, the rest of it was just passably okay. I thought the decision to give Willie Wonka a sad family backstory was awful and rather contrary to the Dahl ethos. The Oompa-Loompa songs, while lyrically faithful to Dahl, were musical wreckage. The whole thing had a rather rushed, "We all know what happens, so let’s get through it" feeling. Depp was odd, but then he was supposed to be, and I must say that he didn’t remind me, as some have commented, of Michael Jackson. The best thing about that last 2\/3 was Deep Roy, <\/a>who, thanks to digital miracles, played all of the Ooompa-Loompas, and with great aplomb and visual wit.<\/p>\n

Although he couldn’t quite capture the nuances of our own favorite Oompa-Loompa, Miss Catherine, who took the role in a 2000 (I think) production at the Pied Piper Theater in Lakeland, Fl. Boy, was that an experience. Thanks to that, I have all of the Oompa-Loompa songs still stuck in my head: Augustus Gloop! Augustus Gloop! That great big greedy nincompoop<\/em>…even after all these years. She had to to sing them over and over and over, and at the top of her lungs. She remarked today that she didn’t remember the tune. I said it didn’t matter. The director had them basically screaming them to the point that they were tuneless, anyway. <\/p>\n

But you know what? The theater was like a 90-second drive from my house, in this fantastic neighborhood<\/a>, and she had a great time. Ritual, bi-monthly, nostalgic-for-Florida sigh.<\/p>\n

I also couldn’t get that damn DirectTV NFL package commercial out of my head during the first part of the movie, with Jeff Garlin (of Curb Your Enthusiasm)<\/em>, Peyton Manning, Dick Butkus and others marching around a neighborhood singing, "I’ve got a golden ticket!" (to the tune of the song in the first movie), which in this case, isn’t for a chocolate factory, but for 5 months of solid football coverage. Yay.<\/p>\n

Oh, and Joseph?<\/p>\n

He sat motionless through the whole darn movie (which is more than I can say for his baby brother), but then responded to my query as to whether he liked it with a firm, "No."<\/p>\n

I have no idea why. Maybe he didn’t like the arc of the second and third acts either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finally caught Charlie and the Chocolate Factory today. Katie had seen it  a month ago, but this was our first chance to take Joseph, who has been talking about this movie for..a month. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}