Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Re the writing by John August, Tim Burton‘s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) is not much of a movie version of Roald Dahl’s humanity-scolding book.  The final few minutes go nowhere, and Charlie (Freddie Highmore) is a somewhat hollow character.  Burton’s imagination exceeds his intelligence, yet . . . we love him anyway, right?  His Charlie is spellbinding, with perfect razzle dazzle and effective humor.  And Johnny Depp playing Willie Wonka as a solitary, sadly neurotic freak.  His acting is more curious than strong, but it is curious, even enticing.

A bratty girl is carried to a garbage chute by industrious squirrels, a candy bar techno-magically replaces the monolith in a shown copy of 2001, an Indian palace made of naught but chocolate melts in the sun—Burton presents it all with expert direction.  My enthusiasm is limited—the film lacks the moral import of the weaker Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, from 1971—but Charlie is boyish poetry.

Cover of The Lemon Drop Kid

A talented Bob Hope stars in The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), and although much of it is funny, I don’t consider it a successful movie.

Hope’s character is a chiseling skunk who is only a little less than a chiseling skunk at the flick’s end.  Naturally he has a girlfriend but the actress who plays her, Marilyn Maxwell, is charmless. . . The movie lacks what marked a lot of American screen farces of the Thirties and early Forties: likable characters and, whether the narratives were any good or not, likable scripts.  The script for It’s a Gift is indifferently plotted but still likable, still palatable.  Those words don’t describe the script for The Lemon Drop Kid.

A Coast Guard boat attempts to rescue the men on a ruined oil tanker in Craig Gillespie‘s based-on-fact Disney film, The Finest Hours (2015), and when nature isn’t unpleasant in one way (a sea storm) it’s unpleasant in another (a blizzard).

Re the blizzard, it’s no holiday for Holliday—Holliday Grainger—when she’s out driving in it, worrying about her man, Joe Coast Guard (Chris Pine), out on the waves.  Here, the movie owes a trifle too much to The Perfect Storm (remember Diane Lane and Mark Wahlberg?), a lesser work, but at any rate there is a dab of visual poetry when the small boat shining a searchlight on the dark tanker is followed by a shot of Grainger’s car as the snowflakes fall.  Mostly, though, there is entertainment to be had.

George Templeton‘s The Sundowners (1950) leaves the sense that there are blanks in the film needing to be filled, but it is also very involving.  Written by Alan Le May, the flick is a Western in which a man accepts the help of his criminal brother (Robert Preston) to fight the cattle rustling of a rival rancher.   Alas, the brother is a murderer; he represents an immorality greater than what is evident elsewhere.

Filmed in color in Texas, the movie is unremittingly outdoorsy, a properly Big Country Western, as they should all be.  Too, it avoids the soft artificiality of so many Hollywood Westerns before it (e.g. Dodge City), but is not as good as multiple oaters, such as Shane, that followed it into the Fifties and Sixties.  It’s a rather unambitious affair, but no matter.

Cover via Amazon

In the 1977 Luis Bunuel picture, That Obscure Object of Desire, fifty-something Mathieu (Fernando Rey) is crazy about, and forever frustrated by, a much younger woman, Conchita (alternately played by two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina).

It has been declared, and might be widely believed, that this film concerns the uselessness of logic in our lives.  I rather doubt it, for if that is the meaning, Object is a poor film for demonstrating such a thing.  Consider the scene where Mathieu sees a woman holding in a baby’s blanket not an infant but a piglet!  To my mind, what Bunuel is giving us is faulty absurdism and no-account surrealism.

The film’s action is punctuated by deadly terrorist acts, and here there could be a grave “message” about how people inescapably want sex and get death, especially in our absurd and agitated times.  It is less digestible, though, that women in That Obscure Object of Desire are flat-out weird—Conchita is, and so is her mother—even psychotically so.

Refusing to sleep with Mathieu, Conchita nevertheless strips for him, the result being that both Bouquet and Molina expose their beautiful breasts.  They do so rather excessively, but then Bunuel is a creep in this film.

(In French with English subtitles)