The Demon Barber of Fleet Street...
Jan. 7th, 2008 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rabidsamfanWent and saw Sweeney Todd today, and it was bloody brilliant.
Okay, first of all, if you don't know the story, read up a little before you go. There is humor, but it's very dark, and we're not heading for happy ending country. Second of all, if you like horror movies but you think "yick, musical" do yourself a favor and get to a theater anyway. Third of all, if you like musicals but think "yick, blood"... well, if you got through the Broadway production you can probably manage this, although you may want to peek through your fingers for a few of the splattery scenes. If you like musicals because they make you think of Rodgers and Hammerstein this is not the film for you...
Visually, they've toned down most of the colors for most of the film (except the red, which I swear they enhanced.) But the textures are luscious, and the set designs/models/mattes are all absolutely amazing. There are a couple of sequences -- flashbacks and dreams -- that almost make your eyes ache because they've got so much color in them, but the "present day" is dark and flat.
Musically, some of the songs are gone, some are changed, but the only one I really missed was the Ballad of Sweeney Todd sung by the chorus, which got cut, I hear, because Johnny Depp's daughter got sick when they were going to film it. I think I am going to actually end up preferring a couple of the film versions though, and everything got done well.
Casting... Johnny Depp sinks himself into Sweeney's World and never takes more than a glimpse out of it. Helena Bonham Carter took longer to convince me to stop comparing her to Angela Lansbury, but I got there. I think I'm just getting tired of seeing her in pale makeup with a frightwig. Anyway, she nailed "Not While I'm Around" so thoroughly that I was completely sold.
Alan Rickman as Judge Turpin reminds us just why he does villainy so very very well. They pulled some neat CGI to let him do the flashbacks, and that worked very well. Quite the slimeball. And Timothy Spall is making a career out of being disgusting, I think, but his Beadle is a much more powerful character than Peter Pettigrew in every sense of the word.
Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli. Wow. He can sing! And in THAT pair of pants, too! His demise is one of the "peek through your fingers" moments.
Anthony and Johanna were both played by real teenagers -- which I think really helped the parts -- and I swear Anthony's the prettiest. Toby is played by thirteen-year-old Ed Sanders, and if there's any justice in the world we're going to be seeing a lot of him. Absolutely brilliant in the role, and again, he can sing.
The role of the Beggar Woman got toned down a bit -- again, there was an element of 'the whore' to her in the play which I missed in the film. It made her seem more broken. But the actress, who was the only one who did her singing on set and not in a sound studio, did very well.
The gore.
Well, yes, there was a lot of blood. A lot of spurting blood. And there were live cockroaches (well, temporarily live cockroaches anyway). And Mrs. Lovett's finale is another "peek through the fingers" moment, because they sure as heck couldn't do THAT on stage. But because the other colors are flattened and the blood is so very very red, I saw it as stage blood. Something out of Penn and Teller, or Monty Python almost, in places. I was almost expecting something worse, but that's because I've watched a fair number of horror movies. None of it seemed to me to be unnecessary gore, if that means anything to you. Occasionally the clean up was amazingly fast too, but that's the plot. The worst of it is the Judge and the very end, but that's not surprising.
I think if I hadn't been forwarned that Toby is played by a kid, it would have bothered me more, but knowing the music from the stage as well as I do, the rest didn't really upset me or anything. Didn't even kill my appetite!
All in all, a thoroughly amazing film, deserving of many many awards and a much bigger audience than it's getting right now!
Okay, first of all, if you don't know the story, read up a little before you go. There is humor, but it's very dark, and we're not heading for happy ending country. Second of all, if you like horror movies but you think "yick, musical" do yourself a favor and get to a theater anyway. Third of all, if you like musicals but think "yick, blood"... well, if you got through the Broadway production you can probably manage this, although you may want to peek through your fingers for a few of the splattery scenes. If you like musicals because they make you think of Rodgers and Hammerstein this is not the film for you...
Visually, they've toned down most of the colors for most of the film (except the red, which I swear they enhanced.) But the textures are luscious, and the set designs/models/mattes are all absolutely amazing. There are a couple of sequences -- flashbacks and dreams -- that almost make your eyes ache because they've got so much color in them, but the "present day" is dark and flat.
Musically, some of the songs are gone, some are changed, but the only one I really missed was the Ballad of Sweeney Todd sung by the chorus, which got cut, I hear, because Johnny Depp's daughter got sick when they were going to film it. I think I am going to actually end up preferring a couple of the film versions though, and everything got done well.
Casting... Johnny Depp sinks himself into Sweeney's World and never takes more than a glimpse out of it. Helena Bonham Carter took longer to convince me to stop comparing her to Angela Lansbury, but I got there. I think I'm just getting tired of seeing her in pale makeup with a frightwig. Anyway, she nailed "Not While I'm Around" so thoroughly that I was completely sold.
Alan Rickman as Judge Turpin reminds us just why he does villainy so very very well. They pulled some neat CGI to let him do the flashbacks, and that worked very well. Quite the slimeball. And Timothy Spall is making a career out of being disgusting, I think, but his Beadle is a much more powerful character than Peter Pettigrew in every sense of the word.
Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli. Wow. He can sing! And in THAT pair of pants, too! His demise is one of the "peek through your fingers" moments.
Anthony and Johanna were both played by real teenagers -- which I think really helped the parts -- and I swear Anthony's the prettiest. Toby is played by thirteen-year-old Ed Sanders, and if there's any justice in the world we're going to be seeing a lot of him. Absolutely brilliant in the role, and again, he can sing.
The role of the Beggar Woman got toned down a bit -- again, there was an element of 'the whore' to her in the play which I missed in the film. It made her seem more broken. But the actress, who was the only one who did her singing on set and not in a sound studio, did very well.
The gore.
Well, yes, there was a lot of blood. A lot of spurting blood. And there were live cockroaches (well, temporarily live cockroaches anyway). And Mrs. Lovett's finale is another "peek through the fingers" moment, because they sure as heck couldn't do THAT on stage. But because the other colors are flattened and the blood is so very very red, I saw it as stage blood. Something out of Penn and Teller, or Monty Python almost, in places. I was almost expecting something worse, but that's because I've watched a fair number of horror movies. None of it seemed to me to be unnecessary gore, if that means anything to you. Occasionally the clean up was amazingly fast too, but that's the plot. The worst of it is the Judge and the very end, but that's not surprising.
I think if I hadn't been forwarned that Toby is played by a kid, it would have bothered me more, but knowing the music from the stage as well as I do, the rest didn't really upset me or anything. Didn't even kill my appetite!
All in all, a thoroughly amazing film, deserving of many many awards and a much bigger audience than it's getting right now!
