(The title of this post? I swore to myself, as I rededicated myself to this blog, that I would try to studiously avoid the brief and snarky or simple "Today I ate a banana" entries of my previous attempts - in retrospect, I sort of view them as marking time, a prankster's cheat to easily repurpose content as if you were doing some actual work.

Hence, it is with a certain amount of red-faced shame that I present a movie review as my second entry in Strenturgent Mk 3. Or 4 or 5 or whatever.)

Friday night, the grandparents are in to soak up some grandparenting time and Lynn and I are free to step out on the town like we used to, before kids (BK)! Except we didn't really do that too much back when we were DINKS. We decided to brave the opening night throngs and go see a movie in the theatre!

Caveat lector: I saw - and assimilated, in the way that others in my generation did with Star Wars - the original movie.

As such, I was sort of dreading the seemingly inevitable remake. I feared that much of the homegrown, low-budget and wonderful creepy charm of the original would be replaced with the exploding dolphins and, yes, that IS a 'Bloom County' reference) of modern big budget studio crap.

So I was pleasantly surprised. More than that, I left happy. I won't rush to take my family - at two-plus years and one month respectively, they're probably a little young to sit through something this long without getting bored (Whit) or hungry (Celia) - but I was happy to see, that with this one thing at least, things don't always change for the worse.

The psychedelic feel of the movie is astounding, and the computer whizbangery subtle (well, as subtle as a roomful of anthropomorphic squirrels and an army of cloned Oompa Loompas played hilariously by Deep Roy - he's over there to the left) can be. The Greek Chorus of the OLs have been masterfully musically updated by Danny Elfman (the words are still Roald Dahl's) and hilariously visually updated by director Tim Burton and untold masses of computers.

This one gets a 97 on the Shermometer.

Some linky goodness:

Salon reviews (if you're not a subscriber, you'll have to watch a commercial to see the review):

There are problems here and there with Tim Burton's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," problems that seemed extremely significant to me as I watched the movie but now, two days later, have melted into a syrupy puddle of abstraction.

Slate is a little more charitable:

This is a dazzling movie, yet some people (not kids, but maybe their parents) will be put off by its Grand Guignol ghoulishness. And Depp does take some getting used to. He has conceived Wonka as a smiling passive-aggressive, a Mr. Freeze weighed down by emotional baggage, and he doesn't have much variety.

Finally, two of my favorite movies are melded in this oft-linked web comic: Chocolypse Now.

All I can say is "Apocalypse Wow!"