Word: sweeneys
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...final word for those of you who just don't care for musicals: The movie's true lyricism is less in its score than in its visual and emotional palette, and in watching Depp rise to the majesty of madness. So give Sweeney Todd a try. Even Victor, when he finally saw it, agreed: it's bloody great...
...Sweeney Todd might have been written for Burton. It's a festival of his obsessions, set to dissonant music. Batman: a mysterious crusader prowls through the night, administering justice as he sees it. Beetlejuice, the dead (Sweeney and his victims) dwell just above the living (Mrs. Lovett and her customers). Sweeney is a figure of pathos with a sure tonsorial touch: Edward Scissorhands, meet Edward Razorhands. As in so many of his films, and all the ones starring Depp, Burton celebrates oddball outsiders who create their own rules, and often perish by them. The new movie also gives a darker...
...Burton film that is closest visually to Sweeney Todd is Sleepy Hollow, the 1999 fable about innocence trapped inside malevolence. The desaturated color scheme of that film, set in 18th century New York City, is here applied to the streets of London a few decades later. But whereas Burton bent an old legend to comic-horror ends, this time he's not kidding. The shadows aren't faux-ominous, they are expressions of the city's pestilence of selfishness and cruelty, where the motives of virtually everyone - both lowlife and high-born - are venal and verminous...
...Sacha Baron Cohen. (All those real people Baron Cohen has fooled and mocked in his Ali G. and Borat incarnations may flock to see Pirelli get outsmarted and sliced up.) There is one decent young couple, a mirror of the barber and his wife in their early bliss: Sweeney's daughter Joanna (Jayne Wisener) and her beau Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower, who looks, somewhat disconcertingly, like Scarlett Johansson, and sings with a robust tenderness). Do they escape the carnage? We won't say; and at the end, the film doesn't show, so intent is Burton on following Sweeney...
...bodies pile up - and land with a sickening squishiness when they slide down the chute from Sweeney's parlor to the basement -the more sensitive may avert their eyes and turn from the movie. But this is gore with an agenda. Having seen where Sweeney came from, and the artistry Burton and Depp bring to his tale, we must keep watching. Horror has its own panache, its internal, infernal beauty. And nothing we see is as terrifying as the scar's on Benjamin Barker's soul when he devolved into Sweeney Todd...