It used to be the thing for a tinker to go around sharpening knives. You could make a modest living that way.

Or he just has a lot of things that need to be stabbed, chopped, and minced fine.

That is insanely fucked up. The weirdest part is that the rest of the poem is relatively benign.

I just don't understand WHY he felt it necessary to remake a perfect film. My only guess is that the Dahl family wanted some control over it, but if so, why did it deviate so much from the original book?

Surely, Burton is not THAT much of an egomaniac.

I assume it's the same idea in the movie, television, and video game industries, that we must remake EVERYTHING because it's almost guaranteed profit with very little required in the way of creativity. Nothing can be left as it is, we need to shine it up with new actors and resell it to a new generation!

Giving it that Hot Topic flair only adds to the profit margin, and no one is quite as good at adding said Hot Topic flair as Mr. Burton, my friends, as the live-action Alice in Wonderland proved a couple years ago, by becoming one of the highest grossing films of all time. Hell, now he's down to remaking his own films in the same fashion. (Frankenweenie anyone?)

I'm sure before we all kick the bucket we'll see The Wizard of Oz follow the same fate. You know Mr. Burton, Mr. Depp and Mrs. Carter are dying for it. You just know it.

Supposedly Roald Dahl thought this movie sucked and wasn't dark enough, but whatever....it worked really well and while, yes, not as dark as the book, it was still entertaining and funny and enduring. So...whatever Mr. Dahl. Tim Burton wanted to do the sequel, but the Dahl estate is very firm on never letting anyone ever make an adaption of the sequel because Dahl was apparently kind of a prick so he just remade the first one. I actually didn't have a problem with the Burton version per se, but it really wasn't a very good adaptation of the book if that's what they were aiming for.

It is possible to do good remakes. I mean, we have John Carpenter's "The Thing" and "Casino Royale" which kicked all kinds of ass.

I think the main problems are the studio turning it into a money grab and/or the director turning it into a big monument to their ego.

Joe Bob Briggs played this movie on MonsterVision and had complaints that it was a kids movie and not appropriate for the show. He replied by citing that scene and pointing out the fact that the bad children were most likely dead.

No, no they shouldn't.