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March 18, 2024:

WONKY WONKA

Bruce Kimmel Photograph bk's notes

Well, dear readers, I am sitting here like so much fish, listening to Mr. Ormandy have his way with that old warhorse The Four Seasons by Vivaldi. It’s my favorite performance of it probably because it was my first and probably because those Philadelphia strings and the Columbia recording team cannot be beat. Prior to that it was Ormandy’s orchestrations of Bach, which are splendidly splendid. And prior to that I watched the first forty minutes of a motion picture entitled Wonka, starring Timothee Chalamet. If you loved/love the film, feel free to skip to the next paragraph. I’m so bored of this trend, the origin story. Who asked for the origin story of Willy Wonka? The first forty minutes seemed like two hours and there’s still an hour and sixteen minutes to go. It’s a “musical” in the sense that there are some songs with a kind of kindergarten mentality and banal lyrics, which is mostly what you get when pop songwriters from bands think it’s easy to write songs for a musical. In the first forty minutes of this film, we meet Wonka as a young man – fresh-faced, idealistic, a dreamer of dreams, and who can’t read. This was written and directed by the man who made the two Paddington movies, which I haven’t seen – but Willy Wonka is not Paddington, at least not the Willy Wonka created by Roald Dahl, who’d be spinning in his grave if he saw what they’d turned his character into. No, there are some characters in fiction whose backstory is best left to the imagination. So, we have dialogue and songs about following your dreams, we get a plucky orphan, we get not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, but SEVEN villains – it’s like Oliver meets The Thenardiers from Les Miserables. The CGI is pervasive and it’s all so contrived, over-the-top, and silly. I didn’t love the first movie of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but it moved right along and it had a great performance by Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. In the first forty minutes of Wonka, we get not even a hint of the dark side of Dahl’s and Wilder’s Wonka. The only time there’s a hint of magic is when Newley and Bricusse’s Pure Imagination shows up in the underscore and I’m sure it’s sung later. Pure Imagination is what is sorely lacking in the first forty minutes of this by committee, by-the-numbers thing. It got many rave reviews and also some terrible reviews. I’ll attempt to finish it. I just find that throwing seven villains rather than one great villain at someone is ridiculous.

You are now safe if you loved Wonka. My delivery of Diet Coke was supposed to happen between seven and eight. I set the alarm for eight and got up – five hours of sleep. Guess what wasn’t there? Yep. I had texts saying it would be here by seven-thirty, but an e-mail saying there’d been a delay and I’d be notified. Tracking it, I could see the delivery person hadn’t even gotten to the store at eight. Anyway, to make a long story long, he finally showed up at eight-forty. I brought the four twelve-packs into the home environment and went back to bed and slept until almost three. So, all told, about ten and a half hours of sleep. Once up, I just needed to have a ME day, so even though I took some writing notes, I didn’t actually write. I spent an hour on DoorDash trying to figure out food – I did not want to make pasta again – and I could not decide so I just took the easy route and got Jack in the Box, a bad mistake as everything I usually order was terrible – that’s it for a long while, while I put Jack in the Box on snooze. I’ve been nauseous ever since. So nauseous, in fact, that I went back to bed and slept for an hour and a half. Just finished listening to Ormandy’s way with Grieg’s marvelous Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 – I love the music for Peer Gynt, which I discovered via the Van Johnson TV film of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, which features lyrics put to the Grieg Peer Gynt tunes a la Wright and Forrest. I loved the movie as a kid, watching it in black-and-white on TV. It’s a color film and you can see it thusly on the Tube of You – there’s only one decent print out of the many that have been posted, and even it isn’t so good.

Today, I’ll try to be up by eleven at the latest, I’ll do whatever needs doing, I’ll definitely finish writing the sequence I’m in, I’ll make an eye doctor appointment, I’ll eat (already ordered – trying a new jernt with a 50% off coupon), and then at some point I’ll watch, listen, and relax.

The rest of the week is more writing, hopefully getting the galley and covers for the new book, so I can approve, hopefully sooner than later, meetings and meals, loading the rest of the Ormandy box CDs, and doing whatever else needs doing.

Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, try to be up by eleven at the latest, do whatever needs doing, finish writing the sequence I’m in, make an eye doctor appointment, eat, and then watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: What are your favorite motion pictures adapted from children’s books? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, hoping that the wonky Wonka gets better in its last hour and sixteen minutes.

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