1. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2008), dir. Tim Burton

[strange_complex]

Seen with glitzfrau and biascut at the Cottage Road cinema, Headingley.

See, I like opera. I really do. So I don't have a fundamental problem with the idea of characters in a drama expressing themselves through the medium of song. But the modern genre of the stage musical? I hate it. To my ear, the music is banal, and the lyrics usually are too. Doesn't matter how great the stories are, or the singers, or the production - fundamentally, I just don't like the music.

And then here's this film - with Johnny Depp! And Alan Rickman! And macabre Gothic darkness, Tim Burton-stylee! So what's a girl to do? She goes along to see it, hoping against hope that perhaps there won't be all that many songs. Or that maybe somehow this one'll be different, and someone will have written some decent music for it for once.

By half-way through, the main thing that was keeping me cheery was the fact that at least Alan Rickman's character didn't seem like he was going to sing. And then he started.

To be fair, there were some quite good sequences in it. Mr. Todd and Mrs. Lovett's duet about all the different types of people they were going to put into their pies did have quite witty lyrics. Sacha Baron Cohen's character was just ten thousand shades of ace. Mrs. Lovett's dream sequence was also super-groovy. Johnny Depp and Alan Rickman were deliciously evil and brooding, just as they should be. Well, except when they were singing, of course - 'cos it's kinda hard to really pull off evil and brooding while you're also singing even the most evil and brooding of Broadway musical numbers.¹ And the young gentleman who played the noble and heroic love-interest was really rather pretty, and I hope a lot more young gentleman will seek to emulate his aesthetic from now on.

Also, there were all sorts of lovely nods to any number of icons from Gothic culture. Like Dave Vanian's hair. And old Hammer Dracula films. Including, astonishingly enough, the really quite pitiful The Scars of Dracula. It was quite distinct, though. Not just the general resemblence of Todd's daughter to its female heroine, Sarah, or the correspondence between Mrs. Lovett's cleaver and the one which Dracula's servant, Klove, uses to dismember his latest victim - and indeed the matter-of-fact way they both go about their work. Because those are things which come up elsewhere too, and needn't be anything to do with Scars. No, the specific Scars moment was when Sweeney Todd gazed lovingly at an old photograph of his lost wife and daughter, and then reached out to stroke their faces, smudging blood across the glass as he did so - just like Klove does with a picture of Sarah in Scars. It was unmistakeable. Good old Tim Burton.

ETA: Oh, and just realised this morning that I forgot to note - Alan Rickman's character had pictures of the initiation scene from the Villa of the Mysteries on the walls of his porn library! Always good to see a bit of Classical receptions about the place.

Heigh-ho - I guess my memories of the songs will fade (well, except for the Evil Brooding Song, of course, which I am still singing right now), and I'll be glad I saw the rest of it. And I couldn't not have gone. But once is enough.

---

1. Apply to one Dr. biascut for free sample thereof. The lyrics go like this:

"I'm eeevil, and I'm broooding,
With my evil, brooding song."

Comments

[purple-peril.livejournal.com]

I love musicals.
I was disappointed as a child that people don't really dance down the street singing a la Oliver! So I do it anyway. But then I am a bit bonkers ;)

[dakegra.livejournal.com]

I must be tired. I read
or the correspondence between Mrs. Lovett's cleaver and the one which Dracula's servant, Klove, uses to dismember his latest victim.

as Mrs Lovett's cleavage

which then lead me to wonder how on *earth* do you dismember someone with a cleavage?

Pass the coffee, please?

We're off to see it tomorrow night. Depp! Rickman! Yum.

[big-daz.livejournal.com]

I understand that its quite gorey, so not a film for kiddies.

By contrast the earler British version from 1936 with Tod Slaughter (which I have on DVD), couldn't show Sweeney slitting anyone's throat otherwise it would have been banned. Instead, the chair tipped the victims into the cellar where the fall knocked them out, then Sweeney would walk down the stairs brandishing his razor and going "Mwuhahah", with the implication being there of what he was going to do.

Same with the pies- it never says that the victims end up in the pies, but it implies it that much that the viewer is left in no doubt.

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

You couldn't dismember someone with a cleavage, but I once saw someone very nearly suffocated with one. I had two friends, both Catholic: one was about 5'4" and male (and, incidentally, gay), the other about 6'2", female, and extremely well endowed. The following exchange took place between the two of them:

She: [enthusiastically] The peace of the Lord be with you! *hug*
He: Pmmmmmffff...

[dakegra.livejournal.com]

yes, but he'd have died happy.

:-)

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Yes, they were definitely going for realism with the throat-slitting scenes - spurting blood, spasming victims, gurgling death-croaks, etc. glitzfrau had to hold biascut's hand quite a lot.

Subtle implications can be just as scary, though. In one of the Hammer Frankenstein films, Peter Cushing has to saw off the top of a victim's head to get at the brain. You don't see the sawing at all - just his arm going backwards and forwards accompanied by the rasping sound of the saw. But it is quite enough!

[kantti.livejournal.com]

I want to see it but am put off as I am afraid I'll be afraid. Or revulsed.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

It's not really scary as such, because the film very much draws your sympathies to the Johnny Depp character, so you don't particularly empathise with his victims - the main emotional impact lies in the empty despair that's making him do all this in the first place. Also, as referenced above, he's singing a Broadway musical number as he does it all, which does rather dispel the tension.

It is pretty gory, though, so you might well be repulsed. And there's a few places where you expect him to kill someone and he doesn't, or vice versa, so there's a bit of apprehension in there sometimes.

[sovay]

Or that maybe somehow this one'll be different, and someone will have written some decent music for it for once.

I recognize it won't help if you just don't like musicals, but I find Burton's Sweeney Todd to be such a poor adaptation of Sondheim's original musical as to border on travesty, including the casting of non-singers, the deletion or abridgement of significant stretches of music (the 1979 musical is so nearly sung-through as to be performed not infrequently by opera companies), and an overall wrench of the aesthetic toward Burton's usual Gothic as opposed to the industrial Victorian horror of the stage production. I was taken to the film with a group of friends and enjoyed several aspects of it, particularly Sacha Baron Cohen and Alan Rickman, but otherwise I just don't think about it except when I'm annoyed.

There is not, unfortunately, a competing recorded performance I can perfectly recommend. I grew up on the original cast recording, which will give you a good idea of the music but nothing of the stage design and does not in any case showcase the original Sweeney, Len Cariou, because it ended up getting recorded while he was sick—I thought for years the hoarseness of his voice was a stylistic decision, but it was just laryngitis. The 1982 PBS Great Performances features the original, inimitable Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett and George Hearn as Cariou's replacement and they are both fantastic, as are as many of the original cast that transferred with them, but the young lovers are replacements and I just don't like them. (Victor Garber or bust, and they too need to be real.) There is a bootleg video recording of the original Broadway cast from 1980 and I recommend it highly, especially since it does showcase Cariou in good voice, but by nature it works best if you're familiar enough with the show that you don't care about the characters being floating blurs against black.

They're all much better than the film, though.

[edit] The film has one real point in its favor: the casting of Toby as a boy soprano rather than a childish tenor. It's something I hope other productions have been able to pick up on. But otherwise, even with Alan Rickman, it's no contest for me.

[strange_complex]

I'm certainly prepared to believe that this was a poor take on a stronger original score / production, but I'm afraid it's still overwhelmingly likely I wouldn't like the original much either. I think my view on modern musicals generally has softened slightly since I wrote this post, probably partly under the influence of Glee, to something more like "I basically don't like the genre, but do recognise that some individual songs from some musicals can be quite good." But that's about as far as I've got in ten years!

[sovay]

I think my view on modern musicals generally has softened slightly since I wrote this post, probably partly under the influence of Glee, to something more like "I basically don't like the genre, but do recognise that some individual songs from some musicals can be quite good."

I don't expect to be able to change your opinion: if the buy-in of the form doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. Sweeney Todd just happens to be a case where I feel that the film handles its source material so badly that it's actively unfair to treat it as a representation of either the original play or American musical theater. I tend not to be a fan of movie musicals in general, but Sweeney Todd was unusually teeth-gritting in this arena.

(I grew up on musicals—attending, listening to, performing in—and I bounced off Glee with such extreme prejudice that I wouldn't have imagined it could change anyone's feelings toward the genre for the better. I suspect this means we want and/or get very different things out of it.)