Life's like a bar of Wonka choc (sometimes enclosed with a Golden Ticket)

"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" was one of my rare movie-going moments (ya, I am not a big movie fan, unlike the rest of the 99% of Singaporeans!). Dahl is one reason, Depp is the other. I grew up reading Roald Dahl's "BFG", "The Witches", etc, alongwith the Enid Blyton's works, Three Investigators', Nancy Drew's, Hardy Boys... despite the pathetic no of movies I watch, Johnny Depp is one of my favourite stars (I'm totally NOT into the Tom Cruises, Brad Pitts, etc), because he has a quirky yet charismatic face.

Anyway, I watched the Gene Wilder classic before and the story actually deviated quite a fair bit from the book, eg. Charlie & grandpa got up to a little mischief in a "bubble" room and incurred Wonka's wrath, Wonka did a little test on Charlie at the end of the tour etc. Maybe I'm biased, but I prefer this newer version which was a near-replica of the book except for the newly-woven bit of Wonka's "sweet-less" childhood and updated versions of the bratpack. It is a childhood fantasy come true for us who had loved reading the book since young.

It's movies/stories like this which gives us some hope that amidst all the gore and bore in real life, we may someday be able to get our very own Golden Ticket in life if we keep looking for it...