Gene Wilder Has Died
bbc.com
bbc.com
> In 1970, when originally offered the lead role in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory by director Mel Stuart, the great Gene Wilder accepted on one condition. "When I make my first entrance,” he explained, “I'd like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk toward the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk toward them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I'm walking on and stands straight up, by itself; but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause." Asked why, Wilder said, "Because from that time on, no one will know if I'm lying or telling the truth."
Quote from: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/06/part-of-this-world-part...
If it's been a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgVS1OhucbI
The irony is of course that Charlie never had the resources to develop the bad habits the other children had.
Still, I've had way more nightmares rooted in real life situations than anything else. When I was 3-4 we had a bulldozer and steam shovel out to replace our septic tank. For YEARS, maybe even into early adulthood, but with less and less frequency I had the dream where the bulldozer was chasing me to the deck and it felt like I was running through quicksand.
I also really like both of the films but I don't see how either is more or less faithful to the book.
My other issue is that Depp is insufferable, irritating and took the "child-like" description to an extreme. I dislike the Burton version more than I dislike the Hitchhikers film... which is to say, a lot. Both took a well trodden and loved story and changed it in a way that seems to add nothing to the narrative. The Hitchhikers film[1] fell back on the "but Douglas Adams never told the story the same twice in any medium" as an excuse. I don't believe Burton had that one to fall back on. Especially as Dahl felt Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory didn't capture his vision for the movie[2].
[1] http://www.therobotsvoice.com/2011/05/the_15_worst_things_ab... [2] https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/why-roald-dahl-hated-willy-wonka...
As the caretaker of a pair of younger folk (twins, age 7), I can share that they find it very slow compared to today's children's movies.
I think many young people today would be horrified at how 'ableist' it was for him to use that gag.
- Somebody ca. 1050 AD
He's one of the best writers on pop culture, and tends to dive into the sort of arguments that would be home in a kitchen at a house party that's winding down. I don't say that to diminish them, they're incredibly fun.
(p.s. fare)
OTOH compare a modern popular track to a modern jazz track, or certain complicated rock tracks (see Dream Theater for example), and you'll likely conclude that it's popularity of simple things, not simplicity of modern things, at work.
(Edited: spelling.)
Roald Dahl didn't write the screenplay, he wrote the book the movie is based on.
edit: Correction, he did write it for the 1971 movie. Oops.
(I agree, and it's making me sad to see all the memorials on Twitter with stills from that film... Wilder did vastly better work)
"I've just received the costume sketches. I'll tell you everything I think, without censoring, and you take from my opinion what you like.
I assume that the designer took his impressions from the book and didn't know, naturally, who would be playing Willy. And I think, for a character in general, they're lovely sketches. ...
What I don't like is the precise pin pointing in place and time as this costume does..."
Nearly all of Mr Wilder's suggestions made it into the movie, except the hat-band color.
There's just so much possibility in that song.
> If you want to view paradise? Simply look around and view it
> Want to change the world? There's nothing to it
Seriously words to live by.
Confirmed true here -
Some kind of bad research I guess.
Content is identical and very NSFW.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072431/
It just has the right mix situational and sarcastic humor. I usually re-watch it every couple of years. Gene Wilder is just so good in that role.
He'll always be the Waco Kid to me.
No, it's Fredrick Frankensteen. And you must be Igor?
No, it's Eyegore.
I just wish they hadn't opened with a coffin jump scare. It sets the tone of the movie as horror and it took 14-year-old me a while to realize it was a comedy. Fast forward many years and I couldn't get my young daughter to watch it because that first scene scared her.
I genuinely think those are the three funniest syllables I've ever heard. The breathless incredulity at Igor's suggestion has always made me smile.
And I can never meet a girl named Abby (including my niece) without murmuring to myself "Abby...Normal..."
The first few times I had missed that, and then kept finding little things like that or bits of dialog I missed (English is not my first language it took a while to catch some phrases in it).
I can't recommend it enough. It's called "EXPO - Magic of the White City" and is as about the 1893 Chicago Exposition. It takes about 10 minutes to really get started and it's got some cheesy stuff but it was fascinating. I've shown it to several people and they all got sucked in.
Not sure if this is a legit upload but it's on YouTube https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cpOQE5KJJds Or Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Expo-Magic-White-Gene-Wilder/dp/B004S...
If it weren't for Gene I'd never had known about such an amazing topic. Thanks Gene!
It's non-fiction, but written in a novelistic style. I absolutely loved it, I can't recommend it enough.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_White_City
Alternatively...
Do you know what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he ever wanted? He lived happily ever after.
Additionally, the comic talent those films drew from comes from a very different lineage. Folks like Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor and Mel Brooks have a very different frame of reference for how to do comedy, how to pace it, how to deliver it. I find that modern comedians, having come up with the increasing HBOfication and Comedy-Central-style shows, tend towards very similar schticks: generally progressive-leaning (though the non-progressive stuff is awful redneck pandering as well!) inclusionistic near nihilist little screeds on stage. These tend not to lend themselves to being cast as anything other than a reflection of their own brand in a movie.
I won't really make the "Movies are all PC" argument, because that's silly and overused, but I will say that from a pure marketing standpoint it's difficult to sell a movie as thoroughly dirty as say Sleeper or cleverly offensive as Blazing Saddles: audiences are not interested in that sort of comedy anymore in a world of Soul Plane and Larry the Cable Guy and so forth.
RIP Mr Wilder
Or maybe I should ask how many people here have even seen that movie with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway?
See No Evil, Hear No Evil
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091178/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_11
...with Dom DeLuise in drag.
Good day!
It's nearly criminal that he wouldn't make any more movies after Gilda died, but I admire the gesture.
https://reddit.com/r/DSPR/comments/1m4zrl/when_heinrich_met_...
So this is the first I'd heard the news, some 13 hours after posting as I write.
One thought that occurs is that HN has something rather good going on, in its incentives, audience, financing (HN isn't a revenue center, but does feed awareness of YC), and resulting informational production. Developing it further might be of interest, or finding a way to tap into it to produce a higher-quality "what's happening of significance in the world" product (feeds and filters off of HN already exist, e.g., the HN subreddit, basRSS).
And a substantial part of that is the culture that's been specifically cultivated. Researching the issue of trolling online, I happened across a post from nearly two weeks ago (which I'd missed in first appearance) on Time magazine's "how trolls are ruining the Internet" article. HN admin and mod dang offered a rebuke to an uncharitably rude comment, in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12322114
The context for that was my experiences in the past week in a new community which turns out to be quite centrally founded on the principle of pervasive anonymity. An interesting premise, but difficult to get right. My venture there didn't go well: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/500ysb/the_imz...
There's also the premise that news itself is often simply unproductive and unhealthy, and its different formats, particularly television/video, but also radio and print, have some fairly deep psychological influences, despite the fact that individual stories often have little personal impact -- we can neither do much about them, nor they to us. This isn't always the case, but the factors that do make news matter, relevance, context, background, and an exposing of the powers and reasons behind events, is rarely part of the modern product, which emphasises shock, reaction, outrage, and distraction. Not only mainstream commercial television, but the "better" sources -- BBC, CBC, NPR, PBS, The New York Times, Telegraph, and Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
I receive a local paper. I'll listen briefly to headlines. I occasionally read news sites directly online. But whether it's me or the media, something seems changed, and relevance is largely missing.
Just to give an example, the local paper where I'm visiting carried a story this morning about an "artificial leaf" development by a university research team. The story ran a half page, from a news service billing itself as ecological news -- one of the many wire-service pieces that fills what's left of the business section of the paper on Mondays. Hoping for an explanation of the design, mechansim, or product, in that half page, there was one sentence revealing anyof this, and I quote:
Here’s how it works: The energy of the sun rearranges the chemical bonds of the carbon dioxide.
Read it for yourself: http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/originals/ct-uic-artif...
Literally the entire remainder of the article was noninformational filler. A paragraph or two of which on why synfuels-based energy storage is useful, I can understand. But ... this isn't even pretending to inform.
(There's a Science article which reveals slightly more: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6298/467)
The remainder of the paper is similarly loaded with anti-information. A brief news roundup buried in the back of the first section contains what little actual news is present, again largely wire articles. There's perhaps a well-written article every week or two. Op-eds are occasionally, though rarely, considered. A friend characterises the columnists as largely writing about themselves or to each other. And yes, this is the same Tronc product John Oliver lampooned, with absolute justification, consummate skill, and delightful effect, on HBO a few weeks back.
Oliver's right: the media business environment stinks. But Tronc have stopped even trying.
So: HN, an intelligent audience, a diversity of views, a fostering of civility, even in disagreement, principled readership, and quite frankly a really boring design asthetic, are all soft-power influences shaping a quite useful information stream.
Thoughts kicked up by seeing this headline in the story list.
And yes, beyond that, I'll miss Wilder, a gentle but brave comic genius of our age.
I'll add, you've spanked me at least once for an off-flavour comment (on the Slashdot aquisition story). Interesting thing there was that your guidance prompted me to go beyond my first impressions (I was, and remain suspicious of the company which bought Slashdot), and turned up a fairly messy past. Might still not excuse the tone, but that ended up strengthening the basis for the sentiment considerably.
And, let you think it is merely dropit_sphere, that unwashed ragamuffin of the internet, that says so: "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups." ~ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Shall I mention that Wilder's stellar performance in Chocolate Factory endeared him to those who enjoyed a bit of whimsy? And whimsy is most definitely a hacker trait.