Simply put, the weekend was hot. Very hot. Our house is exhibiting its excellent insulating ability, which was wonderful in winter but in summer tends to keep all the heat inside, even after the sun has gone down and temperatures outside have begun to decline. Despite the conditions, V and i did some more gardening on Friday evening. In fact, we got very ambitious and ended up using a handsaw to cut down some very large branches from a few trees in our front yard. V did some more pruning the next morning, and then decided to rearrange our bedroom, nudging the bed over and shifting the computer desk from its right side to its left. Unfortunately that meant disassembling the mess of cables behind it (hey, this kind of technological performance doesn't just happen by magic). It took me the better part of two hours to completely disentangle the cables, move the desk, and reconnect everything in its new location. And as this entailed lots of time on my hands and knees under a desk in a newly-dusted room, by the end i was sneezing left and right. My sinuses were one big stagnant ball by the end of the night, precluding a trip to Sacramento to hang with N and G as well as a jaunt to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

I'd partially recovered by Sunday, so my twice-delayed viewing of Tim Burton's latest effort was conducted that afternoon in Santa Clara. As a faithful devotee of the 1971 film Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, i can't really claim to give an unbiased opinion of the current version. But here are my thoughts anyway:

• If anything, the titles of the two film versions of the book are reversed. Tim Burton's flick is almost exclusively about Wonka. Charlie is essentially a background character through much of the trip through the factory.
• No surprise here ... Johnny Depp is nowhere near the Willie Wonka that Gene Wilder was. Depp depicts the chocolatier as a scatterbrained child, and gives him a particularly creepy smirk when he watches the bad children meet their end. Wilder's sardonic wit is nowhere to be found, as is his humanity. Depp just seems to be torturing five kids until one is left (whoever it may be), and then woohoo, he wins!
• The children are not nearly as memorable as those in the 1971 version. I think part of the reason for this is that Burton has made them embodiments of their own particularly vice (gluttony, greed, violence), and by that reasoning they don't need any "character development" persay. One of my favorite elements of the original movie is that you catch glimpses of innocent children beneath the nasty facades of Veruca, Augustus, Violet, and Mike, for example when they finally enter the utopian main room of the factory. And this makes their character flaws all the more vivid.
• The one thing i really missed in the new film is the sentiment of the original. I bawl during the introductory scenes of the 1971 film ("Cheer up, Charlie ..."), because i really believe that Charlie wants a golden ticket more than anything and is heartbroken to see other spoiled children finding them. Freddie Highmore is not a bad Charlie Bucket, but it seems to me that he could care less whether he gets into the factory. Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Bucket was the only one who made me feel a tinge of sadness.
• Okay, the Oompa Loompa songs were never my favorite part of the 1971 movie, but here they are downright annoying. All credit to Deep Roy's performance as a host of individual Loompas, but did we really need the Oompa Loompa heavy metal video?
• I need to go back and read the book again, but as i recall Wonka never gave an ultimatum to Charlie at the end, and that whole development really ruined any sense i had of Willie Wonka as a benevolent man. It takes me right back to my second point, Depp plays Wonka as a nincompoop who happens to make good candy. Yet, again, Tim Burton wants to place all the spotlight on the outcast oddball and have everyone fall in love with his unique charms. To me, that's not what Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is all about.

V and i made plans for our year-late European honeymoon last night, hitting London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Cologne in late August/early September. At work i've been toiling away on a new grant, this one on for submission to the American Cancer Society to develop PET agents to image hypoxia-regulated proteins You'll notice a few more design modifications on fac13, i've been tinkering. RSS still hasn't been fixed, but i'll have a go at it soon.

it's hard for you to understand the things it takes to make us feel alright and it's hard for me to comprehend when every little favor is too much we could win this, she said go, go go go we could lose it, i said no, no no no we could have whatever we need we could call it ours so you take the blame and save it up, inside your mind so easily you take a stand, the opposite of everything i say you claim you always understand the books and sense and do what i expect we could win this, she said go, go go go we could lose it, i said no, no no no we could have whatever we need we could call it ours so you take the blame and save it up, inside your mind