Chocolate Dramacool

[Owoeye Heatley]

Twoyears ago, Noda Tetsuya worked as a doctor. He was a medical intern trained by cardiac surgeon Terashima Koichi. One day, Koichi and his wife were murdered. At that time, Tetsuya lost his right hand. Koichi and his wife left behind their 8-year-old daughter Terashima Yui.Now, Noda teams up with Yui to lead an illegal secret surgery team, whose ultimate purpose is to find the truth behind the death of her parents. The team consists of 7 members. Noda is called Teacher and Yui is called Dr. Chocolate. She is only 10 years old, but she is a genius in the medical field. She was strongly influenced by her father and acquired advanced medical techniques through her interest in her father's work. To hire the black market surgery team, a fee of 100 million yen in cash is required as well as an NDA requirement and chocolate. The team are able to save the lives of patients no matter the circumstances, but a newspaper reporter begins to chase after them.

Now this is strange. "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" succeeds in spite of Johnny Depp's performance, which should have been the high point of the movie. Depp, an actor of considerable gifts, has never been afraid to take a chance, but this time he takes the wrong one. His Willy Wonka is an enigma in an otherwise mostly delightful movie from Tim Burton, where the visual invention is a wonderment.

The movie is correctly titled. Unlike "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" (1971), which depends on Gene Wilder's twinkling air of mystery, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" is mostly about -- Charlie. Young Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore) is so plucky and likable, and comes from such an eccentric and marvelous household, that the wonders inside the chocolate factory are no more amusing than everyday life at the Bucket residence.

The Buckets live in a house that leans crazily in all directions, and seems to have been designed by Dr. Caligari along the lines of his cabinet. The family is very poor. Charlie sleeps in a garret that is open to the weather, and his four grandparents all sleep (and live, apparently) in the same bed, two at one end, two at the other. His mother (Helena Bonham Carter) maintains the serenity of the home, while his father (Noah Taylor) seeks employment. Grandpa Joe (David Kelly) remembers the happy decades when he and everyone else in the neighborhood worked in the chocolate factory.

Alas, 15 years before the story begins, Willy Wonka dismissed his employees and locked his factory gates. Yet the world still enjoys Wonka products; how does Willy produce them? One day, astonishingly, Wonka announces a contest: For the five lucky children who find golden tickets in their Wonka Bars, the long-locked factory gates will open, and Willy will personally escort them through the factory. A special surprise is promised for one of them. Of course Charlie wins one of the tickets, not without suspense.

This stretch of the film has a charm not unlike "Babe" or the undervalued "Babe: Pig in the City." A metropolis is remade to the requirements of fantasy. Tim Burton is cheerfully inventive in imagining the city and the factory, and the film's production design, by Alex McDowell, is a wonder. David Kelly, as Grandpa Joe, is a lovable geezer who agrees to accompany Charlie to the factory; you may remember him racing off naked on a motorcycle in "Waking Ned Devine" (1998). And young Freddie Highmore, who was so good opposite Depp in "Finding Neverland," is hopeful and brave and always convincing as Charlie.

The problem is that this time, he finds Neverland. Johnny Depp may deny that he had Michael Jackson in mind when he created the look and feel of Willy Wonka, but moviegoers trust their eyes, and when they see Willy opening the doors of the factory to welcome the five little winners, they will be relieved that the kids brought along adult guardians. Depp's Wonka -- his dandy's clothes, his unnaturally pale face, his makeup and lipstick, his hat, his manner -- reminds me inescapably of Jackson (and, oddly, in a certain use of the teeth, chin and bobbed hairstyle, of Carol Burnett).

The problem is not simply that Willy Wonka looks like Michael Jackson; it's that in a creepy way we're not sure of his motives. The story of Willy and his factory has had disturbing undertones ever since it first appeared in Roald Dahl's 1964 book (also named after Charlie, not Willy). Nasty and frightening things happen to the children inside the factory in the book and both movies; perhaps Willy is using the tour to punish the behavior of little brats, while rewarding the good, poor and decent Charlie. (How does it happen that each of the other four winners illustrates a naughty childhood trait? Just Willy's good luck, I guess.)

We see the wondrous workings of the factory in the opening titles, a CGI assembly-line sequence that swoops like a roller-coaster. When the five kids and their adult guardians finally get inside, their first sight is a marvel of imagination: A sugary landscape of chocolate rivers, gumdrop trees and (no doubt) rock candy mountains. Behind his locked doors, Willy has created this fantastical playground for -- himself, apparently. As the tour continues, we learn the secret of his work force: He uses Oompa Loompas, earnest and dedicated workers all looking exactly the same and all played, through a digital miracle, by the vaguely ominous Deep Roy. We're reminded of Santa's identical helpers in "The Polar Express."

It is essential to the story that the bad children be punished. Their sins are various; Veruca Salt (Julia Winter) is a spoiled brat; Violet Beauregarde (Annasophia Robb) is a competitive perfectionist; Mike Teavee (Jordan Fry) approaches the world with the skills and tastes he has learned through video games, and Augustus Gloop (Philip Wiegratz) likes to make a little pig out of himself.

All of these children meet fates appropriate to their misdemeanors. I might be tempted to wonder if smaller children will find the movie too scary, but I know from long experience with the first film that kids for some reason instinctively know this is a cautionary tale, and that even when a character is suctioned up by a chocolate conduit, all is not lost.

Charlie and his grandfather join wide-eyed in the tour, and there are subplots, especially involving Violet Beauregarde, before the happy ending. What is especially delightful are the musical numbers involving the Oompa Loompas, who seem to have spent a lot of time studying Hollywood musicals. The kids, their adventures and the song and dance numbers are so entertaining that Depp's strange Willy Wonka is not fatal to the movie, although it's at right angles to it.

What was he thinking of? In "Pirates of the Caribbean" Depp was famously channeling Keith Richards, which may have primed us to look for possible inspirations for this performance. But leaving "Pirates" aside, can anyone look at Willy Wonka and not think of Michael Jackson? Consider the reclusive lifestyle, the fetishes of wardrobe and accessories, the elaborate playground built by an adult for the child inside. What's going on here? Bad luck that the movie comes out just as the Jackson trial has finally struggled to a conclusion.

A chef with a traumatic event in her past works in a rural hospice where she uses her home-cooked food to comfort the patients in their final days. While working there, she meets the doctor she's secretly loved for many years and the two get to know each other.

Curious about why Kang decided to give up chocolate after his mother died, she asks about her accident. After a few seconds, Kang tells Cha-young that his mother was hit by a car on the way home from buying him chocolates.

After passing a simulator test at a driving school, Hee-na begs Tae-hyun to take her to see her dream car, which she hopes to buy as soon as she gets her license. They visit a dealership and as they sit inside of a sporty coupe, Tae-hyun is unusually quiet.

Hee-na admits that like Tae-hyun, she lived as if she had all the time in the world until she got sick. Hee-na shares another of her goals, after she buys her car she wants to drive to the sea with Tae-hyun.

When Seon-ae expresses her happiness, Director Kwon finally realizes that while he worked long hours, she was painfully lonely. Seon-ae gets Director Kwon to agree to spend a day with her in the spring and in the fall and then drags him into the water where they splash around happily.

Before Kang can leave the hospital, Hye-mi calls and they meet in a quiet hallway. Hye-mi angrily reminds Kang that Geosung became successful because of the sacrifices that she and Grandma made. Hye-mi blames the many all-nighters that she put in for her two miscarriages and her inability to be a proper mother to Joon.

On the hospice grounds, Dae-shik sits on a bench in a daze while Young-shil cries her eyes out in a bathroom. After composing herself, Young-shil returns to Dae-shik but he jumps up to avoid her. When pain forces him to sit down, Young-shil orders Dae-hik to look at her and when he does, he blocks his face with a bowl.

It was a love story between two people who were saved by kindness, linked by kindness and attracted to each other by their own kindness. It was also a story about how love, trickled down through time and rippled out through space, is the true meaning of human life.

They let one influence each other. Kang let a compassionate CY change him back to the warm hearted person he was before his Mum passed away and hence chose his path to give up the Geosung Foundation to protect the hospice. CY learnt the courage from Kang to reinvent herself after losing her senses of taste and smell. They both possess stoic attitudes that help them to evolve through crisis and tragedies.

I think she is also conditioned to present a strong front. She was pretty much orphaned at age 12 and still managed to work her way to having a pretty amazing career and life. And though not detailed in the drama, Cha Young alluded to additional struggles that were worse than the building collapse. She's had 25 years of handling things herself.

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