Movie Review – Sweeney Todd

Sweeney Todd – The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

12/23/2007

Starring:	Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall
Directed by:	Tim Burton
Rating:	Slender Tampon (Minus)

Plot Summary: Barber Sweeney Todd returns to London to seek revenge on the corrupt judge who stole his wife and child, he joins forces with the macabre Mrs. Lovell and many meat pies are made.

For some reason I thought this wasn’t even coming out until Christmas day, so when I was perusing the web this afternoon and saw it was at the Moolah I jumped up and ran to the next showing. Burton, Depp, Carter, Rickman – gotta love that, right? Well, not necessarily – if you remember the Corpse Bride. Blech. But anyway, I was not overly disappointed here. The costuming was lush and scary and filthy and somehow lurid. (One more crotch-shot of Sascha Baron Cohen or Alan Rickman in their bulging manpris was going to make me embarrassed, seriously)

The sets were perfect. Both the costumes and the sets had that whimsical touch o’ Burton that one expects, but not so much that you got turned off from the story. JDepp, well yeah – he was perfect. Helena BC was also wonderful, the quality of her voice amazed me. (So did her boobs actually. I heard that she was pregnant during the filming, and it showed in the rack. I say – rock that rack, HBC!) Alan Rickman is the sexiest old lecher in modern film making, and there was this beautiful, dirty-looking little Calvin Klein model of a boy in that movie from whom I am sure we will be seeing much more. Those are the good things.

Bad things: the sound! OMG the sound, the score, the acoustics where I was, whatever – but I could only understand about 50% of most of the songs. Since you needed to understand those to get vital plot points, this was a bit difficult. JDepp and HBC both mumbled their respective ways through a lot of the songs, especially in the first 1/3rd of the film – if I’d been listening to a foreign language rather than just Ye Olde Britishe Englishe I would have thought they’d done beautifully. But it was just one of those situations where the score was way too loud and the singers not great enunciaters (?) and it was frustrating.

Also, there was a group of fuckwits standing in front of, and blocking, the ticket counter in a way which would take a diagram to fully explain. Note to Fuckwits: When someone repeatedly hollers “Excuse me!” over and over, and you have to get out of the way so they can get where they’re trying to get, since there’s no other way to get there; DON’T go right back to wherever you were standing like an amorphous mass of liquid gelatin grimly intent upon seeping into every empty particle of space in a given area, K? And when the same person turns and finds her path away from the ticket counter blocked yet again by you and your wrinkly group o’crones, the second round of “EXCUSE ME!” is not accidentally over-loud. K? No need to grimace and make your visage yet even more creased and cragged. Oh, and get the fuck out of the way, too.

I’ve heard people crab about the amount of blood. Well, there was enough blood to make it over-the-top and mildly silly. To make it theater – and it’s supposed to be theater, so I think it worked. And yeah, it’s a violent story and it had a lot of violence and that much violence makes people laugh, somehow. Anyway, it was not that bad. There was an equal amount of blood as there was raging bad teeth. Burton seems to glorify in these extreeeeeeeeeme closeups of crooked yellowed teeth, because somehow crooked, rabbitty teeth = Teh Evilnuss. And it works. Also Depp builds a clockwork machine, because there’s no way there could be a Burton movie without a clockwork machine, but I won’t spoil that part.

Overall, see it, yeah, but I am going to look forward to getting it on DVD so I can adjust the sound manually.

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