i don't have appropriate icons for vectoring bloodspray
So Mom & I had a day out to do a movie double feature of Sweeney Todd and Juno, maybe not as strange a combination as the day a couple years ago when we went to Syriana and Narnia, but still pretty mind-bogglingly different.
Juno -- just as funny as the trailers made it seem. Script was pure genius, Diablo Cody goes on my 'watch' list; Ellen Page was brilliant and it's hard to believe that this was her film debut (never trust the internet); I adore Allison Janney to the ends of the earth anyway, mostly because of CJ on West Wing, so I loved her character. I don't have much to say other than that it's pretty rare to find a non-depressing movie that never hits a sour note, never pulls a punch, and is absolutely true all the way through.
Sweeney Todd -- Okay. I knew Sondheim was a big deal, but I'd never really looked at musicals much beyond saying "Hey, that sounds cool and it's about cats, I like it" to CATS when I was five. I hit musicals all at once; Chorus Line and Chicago went on my favorites list within a couple months of each other, then I was in a production of Joseph, and then I went to London and saw Spamalot. Then I took a Theatre Appreciation class and was required to attend review some plays. I ended up going to a Sondheim musical, the first I'd ever seen or heard. It was Company, and I hated it with a fiery passion. Whiny rich white middle-class yuppies complaining about how much it sucks to be married, and the one dude complaining about not being married while having more commitment issues than the Rum Tum Tugger. I hated it, but the sole reason I hated it was because I felt no sympathy whatsoever for the characters. Thinking back on it afterwards, I realized that the music, choreography, singing, acting and just the overall production had been exceptionally good -- and that it takes a damn good production to keep a viewer focused on the play despite the fact that they'd rather be looking at anything besides the eyeball-gouging insipid tripe being pandered around in song and dance on stage.
So I knew Sondheim was a big deal, I knew I'd seen one play and hated the material but loved the production, and I figured what the hell, there can't be any material more different from whiny married people than a mad barber who cuts people's throats and makes them into pies.
I was still wary, though, because I'm pretty picky about musicals for some reason -- I can't stand to listen to them before I see them, because I'm a storyteller at heart and it bugs the crap out of me that I can't tell what's happening just from the songs. But at the same time, I can't stand seeing the movie "before I've read the book," or in this case before I heard the music, because it also bugs the crap out of me when I can't get the image of the actor out of my head (or the voice of the actor, as it were here). So I picked the lesser of two evils and downloaded the 2005 Broadway revival version with Patti LuPone and Michael Cerveris to get a good idea of the music as it would be in the theatre. And I'm really glad I did that, in retropect. Because it gave me a great baseline from which to judge the adaptation.
It's just like adapting from a book -- different media have different requirements and there's just no way to make a perfect carbon copy from one to another. Film can get very close to theater, closer than it can to a book's pages, but it is an inherently different experience. I was wary of Depp and Carter as Sweeney & Mrs. Lovett for the same reasons as everyone else -- Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are slowly falling into the same typecast mold and Helena Bonham Carter is Burton's wife, and can any of these actors actually sing? But I have to agree with most of the other reviews I've read: casting actors was the right choice. It allowed for more close-ups, for the atmosphere to be more personal, for forced perspective to force the audience to really try to sympathize with two utterly mad characters who are very hard to sympathize with. All the ensemble songs were cut from the movie, the prologue/epilogue ballad and the parts with customers singing about how good the pies are, etc, which all just pushes the viewer back into the idea that only the main characters matter. No "synchronized dancing from the room service chaps," as Giles once put it on Buffy. And only actors could hold the audience that close without losing their trust. Stage acting would not have worked.
But I am also firmly of the opinion that none of the actors in this movie could play the same part on stage. Maybe Johnny Depp and Alan Rickman; NOT Helena Bonham Carter, whose Mrs. Lovett was much, much more subdued than any of the Broadway ones I've heard, because Carter could hit the notes but she had no real lung power. She needed the sound equipment and ADR and editing to save her. (Still, it sounded great in the movie. Just saying she couldn't take it off-camera.) The only person I was really surprised by as far as singing went was the kid playing Toby. Holy CRAP. His acting was a little off, but only insofar as most child acting is a little too much, but his voice was phenomenal! Mom & I both had to sort of blink and stare during "Not While I'm Around." Kid's got range! He might lose it when his voice breaks, but hey, at least this movie is a testament to his voice as it is now. As for the people playing Johanna and Antony... eh. Not much character. Her voice was painfully high; he always seemed too conscious of being a prettyboi. Reminded me strongly and not too favorably of Charles and Lucy Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities.
And as far as my opinion of Sondheim goes -- it is much improved. First, the content: loved it, even the love story aspects, and you don't know how rare that is for me to say. Personally I thought that it would be hard NOT to sympathize with Sweeney, and although Mrs. Lovett is harder to understand, even she is sympathetic in her own miserable, pathetic way. And I loved the look of it, the cinematography and the whole concept. The slanting window in the Sweeney's parlor was one of my favorite images because it's such a versatile metaphor -- for the lower-class economic glass ceiling, the world outside leaning in to crush Sweeney, the wall he's constructed between himself and real life (clear for his stray touch of voyeurism, always talking about wanting to see Johanna but not particularly about wanting to be reunited). I love theatre in general because I overanalyze like hell as a rule, and in theatre it's acceptable to have a field day with visual metaphors -- musical theatre even more so, because every last note of music has its own meaning.
And with the content finally not being an obstacle to my enjoyment of the production, I finally realized how difficult Sondheim music is. I sing a lot, and all they slightly off-key harmonies and crazy jumping around with notes and timing in the off-beats really got me. For a bunch of actors who had never sung Broadway-type stuff before tackling that particular set of music, the whole cast did amazingly well. Kudos to all of them and to Tim Burton for taking on this musical, which is practically unmarketable. (The marketing campaign is so confused about this film -- it ranges from "thriller bloodbath" to "black comedy," but while the story has aspects of both, it's not really either of those things, and I get the impression that it's a lot slower than many people expected. No throat-cutting until near the end, in fact. And the blood is such an obvious metaphor and so choreographed -- and so CG combined with high fructose corn syrup and red food coloring -- that the whole sequence of scenes doesn't run like a murder-horror-thriller at all. It's not meant to be realistic, or the characters wouldn't be singing about it.)
Anyway. It's late and now I'm rambling. But I was thoroughly impressed with Sweeney Todd and although I still prefer to listen to Patti LuPone's Mrs. Lovett, I actually think everyone else may have tied with the 2005 Broadway version as my favorite.
Most ironic and heartbreaking line in any song in Sweeney Todd: Sweeney singing in his mind to his daughter, "I'm fine, Johanna, I'm fine..." Except that I have a nihilistic streak a mile wide and I kill people and am a cannibal, but whatever
-rave
Juno -- just as funny as the trailers made it seem. Script was pure genius, Diablo Cody goes on my 'watch' list; Ellen Page was brilliant and it's hard to believe that this was her film debut (never trust the internet); I adore Allison Janney to the ends of the earth anyway, mostly because of CJ on West Wing, so I loved her character. I don't have much to say other than that it's pretty rare to find a non-depressing movie that never hits a sour note, never pulls a punch, and is absolutely true all the way through.
Sweeney Todd -- Okay. I knew Sondheim was a big deal, but I'd never really looked at musicals much beyond saying "Hey, that sounds cool and it's about cats, I like it" to CATS when I was five. I hit musicals all at once; Chorus Line and Chicago went on my favorites list within a couple months of each other, then I was in a production of Joseph, and then I went to London and saw Spamalot. Then I took a Theatre Appreciation class and was required to attend review some plays. I ended up going to a Sondheim musical, the first I'd ever seen or heard. It was Company, and I hated it with a fiery passion. Whiny rich white middle-class yuppies complaining about how much it sucks to be married, and the one dude complaining about not being married while having more commitment issues than the Rum Tum Tugger. I hated it, but the sole reason I hated it was because I felt no sympathy whatsoever for the characters. Thinking back on it afterwards, I realized that the music, choreography, singing, acting and just the overall production had been exceptionally good -- and that it takes a damn good production to keep a viewer focused on the play despite the fact that they'd rather be looking at anything besides the eyeball-gouging insipid tripe being pandered around in song and dance on stage.
So I knew Sondheim was a big deal, I knew I'd seen one play and hated the material but loved the production, and I figured what the hell, there can't be any material more different from whiny married people than a mad barber who cuts people's throats and makes them into pies.
I was still wary, though, because I'm pretty picky about musicals for some reason -- I can't stand to listen to them before I see them, because I'm a storyteller at heart and it bugs the crap out of me that I can't tell what's happening just from the songs. But at the same time, I can't stand seeing the movie "before I've read the book," or in this case before I heard the music, because it also bugs the crap out of me when I can't get the image of the actor out of my head (or the voice of the actor, as it were here). So I picked the lesser of two evils and downloaded the 2005 Broadway revival version with Patti LuPone and Michael Cerveris to get a good idea of the music as it would be in the theatre. And I'm really glad I did that, in retropect. Because it gave me a great baseline from which to judge the adaptation.
It's just like adapting from a book -- different media have different requirements and there's just no way to make a perfect carbon copy from one to another. Film can get very close to theater, closer than it can to a book's pages, but it is an inherently different experience. I was wary of Depp and Carter as Sweeney & Mrs. Lovett for the same reasons as everyone else -- Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are slowly falling into the same typecast mold and Helena Bonham Carter is Burton's wife, and can any of these actors actually sing? But I have to agree with most of the other reviews I've read: casting actors was the right choice. It allowed for more close-ups, for the atmosphere to be more personal, for forced perspective to force the audience to really try to sympathize with two utterly mad characters who are very hard to sympathize with. All the ensemble songs were cut from the movie, the prologue/epilogue ballad and the parts with customers singing about how good the pies are, etc, which all just pushes the viewer back into the idea that only the main characters matter. No "synchronized dancing from the room service chaps," as Giles once put it on Buffy. And only actors could hold the audience that close without losing their trust. Stage acting would not have worked.
But I am also firmly of the opinion that none of the actors in this movie could play the same part on stage. Maybe Johnny Depp and Alan Rickman; NOT Helena Bonham Carter, whose Mrs. Lovett was much, much more subdued than any of the Broadway ones I've heard, because Carter could hit the notes but she had no real lung power. She needed the sound equipment and ADR and editing to save her. (Still, it sounded great in the movie. Just saying she couldn't take it off-camera.) The only person I was really surprised by as far as singing went was the kid playing Toby. Holy CRAP. His acting was a little off, but only insofar as most child acting is a little too much, but his voice was phenomenal! Mom & I both had to sort of blink and stare during "Not While I'm Around." Kid's got range! He might lose it when his voice breaks, but hey, at least this movie is a testament to his voice as it is now. As for the people playing Johanna and Antony... eh. Not much character. Her voice was painfully high; he always seemed too conscious of being a prettyboi. Reminded me strongly and not too favorably of Charles and Lucy Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities.
And as far as my opinion of Sondheim goes -- it is much improved. First, the content: loved it, even the love story aspects, and you don't know how rare that is for me to say. Personally I thought that it would be hard NOT to sympathize with Sweeney, and although Mrs. Lovett is harder to understand, even she is sympathetic in her own miserable, pathetic way. And I loved the look of it, the cinematography and the whole concept. The slanting window in the Sweeney's parlor was one of my favorite images because it's such a versatile metaphor -- for the lower-class economic glass ceiling, the world outside leaning in to crush Sweeney, the wall he's constructed between himself and real life (clear for his stray touch of voyeurism, always talking about wanting to see Johanna but not particularly about wanting to be reunited). I love theatre in general because I overanalyze like hell as a rule, and in theatre it's acceptable to have a field day with visual metaphors -- musical theatre even more so, because every last note of music has its own meaning.
And with the content finally not being an obstacle to my enjoyment of the production, I finally realized how difficult Sondheim music is. I sing a lot, and all they slightly off-key harmonies and crazy jumping around with notes and timing in the off-beats really got me. For a bunch of actors who had never sung Broadway-type stuff before tackling that particular set of music, the whole cast did amazingly well. Kudos to all of them and to Tim Burton for taking on this musical, which is practically unmarketable. (The marketing campaign is so confused about this film -- it ranges from "thriller bloodbath" to "black comedy," but while the story has aspects of both, it's not really either of those things, and I get the impression that it's a lot slower than many people expected. No throat-cutting until near the end, in fact. And the blood is such an obvious metaphor and so choreographed -- and so CG combined with high fructose corn syrup and red food coloring -- that the whole sequence of scenes doesn't run like a murder-horror-thriller at all. It's not meant to be realistic, or the characters wouldn't be singing about it.)
Anyway. It's late and now I'm rambling. But I was thoroughly impressed with Sweeney Todd and although I still prefer to listen to Patti LuPone's Mrs. Lovett, I actually think everyone else may have tied with the 2005 Broadway version as my favorite.
Most ironic and heartbreaking line in any song in Sweeney Todd: Sweeney singing in his mind to his daughter, "I'm fine, Johanna, I'm fine..." Except that I have a nihilistic streak a mile wide and I kill people and am a cannibal, but whatever
-rave