From the reader mailbag:
Dear Tom,
I’m looking for horror. Pure horror. So i watched 28 Weeks Later. Not so bad the horror. But the screaming was loud enough to wake my husband up. Lots of blood and screaming but not enough to whet my appetite yet. Can you help?
Love,
xxxxxxxxx
Gentle Reader,
I believe I have just what you’re looking for. Go to your local theater and catch “Sweeney Todd.” Tim Burton’s new movie of Sondheim’s “musical” is the most alarming bit of high-art ultraviolence since “A Clockwork Orange.” Maybe more so.
Maybe you already know the story. A barber is unjustly convicted of a crime and sent away for 15 years, in the process losing his wife and daughter. He comes back and seeks revenge against the judge that put him there. In a rage, he slits the throat of customer after customer. In order to help dispose of the bodies, his downstairs neighbor bakes them into meat pies and sells them — a hugely successful business. Much mayhem ensues.
This was a big hit on Broadway in the late ’70s and early ’80s. It’s even been staged by opera companies. Now finally it’s a movie and Tim Burton is definitely the right guy to have done it.
You’ve no doubt seen the previews. The visual style is of mid-19th-century London in its coal-blackened sunless bleakness. The palette is shades of black, white and dark blue, with occasional splashes of crimson. Splashes, rivulets, fountains, torrents. Johnny Depp plays Todd with a heart as black as coal, and Helena Bonham Carter is fetching in her pale almost ghoulish way as his overly eager partner. Alan Rickman is fine as the villain who had set the whole process in motion years earlier. His voice is like a dark cloud passing across the moon.
Sondheim’s music presages the visual cues, with typical Broadway melodic structures that are cast into modernistic harmonic frameworks. Like the splashes of crimson, he works “wrong” notes into the harmony to turn something that might have almost been pretty into something deeply unsettling. Case in point, the way the word “London” is harmonized in the opening number:
“I too have sailed the world and seen its wonders,
for the cruelty of men is as wonderous as Peru
but there’s no place like London!”
The bit of smile across Depp’s face conveys a mix of horror and admiration.
And that last scene. I’d never seen the show, so I had no idea. Dear Lord. It’s just about the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen. It’s not pure horror, but the music enhances the effect to make it even more than it would have been.
So dear reader, combine rivers of blood, mass murder, cannibalism and revenge together with a great script, score, acting and design and your appetite, so to speak, ought to be more than sated.
Tastefully yours, so to speak,
Tom
Tom, funny you should mention this movie. Jewelle’s coming in from NY for Christmas today and wants us to go see it. She said that she heard it was “different” and “wierd”. But this seems waaaayy behond that description. Of course, she dropped the right name :”Johnny Depp” and the others that are in it. How could one decline? Love Helena Bonham Carter. Wasn’t she amazing in Fight Club?
Anyway, Sweeny Todd sounds perfect for your gentle reader there too. aaaachchchchchchchch. Suddenly i’ve got this craving for some fava beans and a nice chianti.
It’s gonna be a joy (i know, not an appropriate word) to see Tim Burton with Johnny Depp again. I wonder how they’re going to do this. Now Jewelle’s comment about this movie being “different” is beginning to make sense. Those two can be very wierd by themselves, but as a team, whoo! I wonder if they’ll find a way to slip some humor into this story. I bet they do. Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me.
Was Helena Bonham Carter in a Tim Burton movie before? Something tells me she was? Or maybe i’m just thinking that because she’s perfect for his movies. She’s like the female version of Johnny Depp (acting wise). It seems like when a director works with her once, she’s in like Flynn. Take Kenneth Branaugh for instance.
Why does Meryl Streep get all the love? Helena Bonham Carter is better. She’s so subtle yet she gets her point across. Just like Johnny Depp. Those eyes of his speak volumes. With her, i cannot pinpoint what it is, but there is something she’s got that is greatness.
I vaguely remember what Big Fish was about. So just imdb’d it to jog the memory. I liked it. It was really REALLY wierd.
Didn’t know she was married to Tim Burton, but that sounds like a good match.
I really like Carter, too. She’s got this acting jiu jitsu where she conveys a feeling by trying to suppress it. And those eyes, yes…
But she’s actually married to Tim Burton so I’m gonna have to wait.
She was in the Burton movie “Big Fish,” as the witch/piano teacher. If you haven’t seen it, you should. It’s warm, human, compassionate — pretty much the polar opposite of Sweeney Todd.