Bloody (heh) Good Fun

Mrs. Lovett: You're barking mad! Killing a man what done no harm to ya!
Sweeney Todd: [polishing his razor] He recognized me from the old days. Tried to blackmail me. Half me earnings.
Mrs. Lovett: [relieved] Oh, well that's a different matter then. For a moment there I thought you lost your marbles.

—Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
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As a means of helping us to break out of our December funk, our neighbors insisted that GF and I join them on a grownups-only night out. So we asked (translation: "dragooned") GF's mother into watching all of the kids so that the four of us could see Sweeney Todd at the Charles Theater. 

For the uninitiated, the film is adapted from the Stephen Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler Broadway musical about a barber who is deported to Australia unfairly, then returns to London under an assumed name with revenge on his mind. It's a little on the graphic side, not unlike this:

And I get the feeling that it was material like this which tended to distance us from the material a little bit. Early on, Sweeney is a guy you might be rooting for. As you get inured to all the casual blood, you start to see the ending coming. But overall, I think Tim Burton has put together a darkly comic film which, while you won't necessarily take the kids to see, you'll probably enjoy. One more caveat: you may not like it if you saw it on stage, because there's definitely a different aesthetic involved.

After the movie, of course, we went to The Brewer's Art, where I had a nice rare cheeseburger and some of their Resurrection beer. Heh.

Comments

[yellojkt]

Sondheim and graphic violence is not a combo I can talk my wife into. Glad you enjoyed it. Maybe I'll see it on video some day.

[Alex]

We caught it tonight. Dark comedy yet light and cheery most of the time. I liked it, but it won't be on list of films to watch again.