Charlie & Harry... I'm so tired...

Meant to post this when I got back home, but seeing as how that wasn't until three o'clock in the effing a.m., I decided to just take a pass and go to bed...

Saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory yesterday.  Tim Burton has done a fantastic job bringing Roald Dahl's novel to life.  Johnny Depp is totally off-the-wall weird (one of my B&N co-workers described his characterization as a mix of Michael Jackson and Karen from Will and Grace).  Freddie Highmore, the kid they picked to play Charlie, is really good, as are Daniel Kelly (the veteran Irish character actor from Waking Ned Devine), who plays Grandpa Joe, Helena Bonham-Carter, and Christopher Lee, who plays Wonka's martinet dentist of a father.  And then there's the one guy they got to play all the Oompa-Loompas... a "little person" by the name of Deep Roy (sounds like a pornstar's name).  The production design is extraordinary and imaginative, and certainly blows the pants off anything they had in the Gene Wilder movie. Danny Elfman's score has totally restored my faith in him, after being less-than-impressed with his work on the first two Spider-Man movies.  His tunes for the Oompa-Loompa songs are especially good (no "Oompa-Loompa doop-a-dee-doo" crap here... these all use the lyrics Roald Dahl wrote in his novel 40-odd years ago).

And then there was Harry... had to work Harry Potter night at B&N, for the midnight launch of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  That was quite the exercise in controlled insanity... I don't know how many of the books we actually moved last night, but it was a lot.  We didn't even get the last customer out the door until 2:30.  Not as many costumes as we had for Order of the Phoenix (including myself; my Hagrid costume ended up in Ephrata with a huge Rubbermaid tub full of my crap from days gone by... school stuff, baby stuff.  Not sure how it got there, but such is life.), but I think we had more people overall, including more late-comers.  At one point, the line of people waiting to get in stretched out the door, and all the way over to the Petsmart next door (a distance of around 150+ feet).  The people inside were generally well behaved, though nobody wanted to listen to instructions... they all found out where the register line started, and all started heading for that.  Since the register line started in Kids, which is directly behind the Customer Service booth, I was practically trapped where I was... "the box" was a vertiable island in a river of humanity.  Too much humanity, IMO.  (You know it's too much humanity when there's so many people upstairs that the floor shakes whenever you take a step.)

And now I get to go back this morning at eleven and do it all over again, for the people who decided to be sane and stay home.

Oh, and in case anyone's wondering, I haven't even touched the book.  After all that crap last night, it'll probably be a week or two before I even want to start reading it.