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rmdso, i saw the 00:01 showing of sweeney todd this morning.
overall, good stuff. i'm glad i saw it. i'd see it again on the big screen.
i really liked the way they took "a little priest" out into the world in a way that took advantage of the medium. also, "by the sea" was BRILLIANT. the costume party flashback was another great use of movie media for lush spectacle.
the singing technique of some of the leads was less than stellar, but i think the acting skill made up for it. rickman and depp sold me on their performance of "pretty women". depp's "epiphany" was not fabulously sung but excellently acted and so i was carried along with it. there were a few spots where depp was a bit too edward scissorhands, what with the bladed implements in both hands and the wild black hair and pale skin -- i think he recycled some of the body language or maybe burton recycled some of the cinematography. HBC was what excactly i hoped for in her mrs lovett, and her expressive eyes alone justified the casting. SBC was frackin brilliant as a flatteringly costumed pirelli. they changed the way the judge was skeevey to one that i thought was flatter and less compelling than in the staged version.
things that made me grumpy: no chorus singing the actual ballad of sweeney todd. cutting more of the beggar woman's role than i thought was wise, and thus removing much of the impact of that plot thread. strange pointless dialogue and lyrics changes. i disagree with some of their song cut decisions -- i really wanted to see rickman do the judge's big "mea culpa" scenery chomping (see also above comment about how they changed his skeeviness). also, cutting the "all about hair color and being a wigmaker" removes exposition. cutting one of my favorite bits in "a little priest" (the "tinker" "somethign pinker" ... "locksmith" "..." sequence). they cut the bit about "now and then you could do the guest in" from "by the sea". some important bits of the plot around the judge and johanna seem to be happening offscreen, here, since they cut "kiss me". swapping the timing of "god that's good" and "johanna (quartet)" was ... weird. also, why was the word "god" removed from all songs, as JB pointed out?
something in the specificness and realistic scenery of the film vs a stage show drove home for me that when lucy wanders into the room singing "beedle deedle deedle" and being all freaky, she's not just off her rocker. she's off her rocker and back in the house she used to live in before everything went terribly wrong. which doesn't quite make up for them having gutted some of the impact of him seeing and ignoring her several times over the course of the show. it's not just that he kills a stranger who turns out to be his wife. he comes back to look for his wife, SEES HER ALMOST AS SOON AS HE MAKES LANDFALL, and then eventually kills her. it makes the tragedy more tragic, dammit.
so, yeah, most of my complaints boil down to the screenwriter(s) made some choices i disagree with in terms of deciding what parts of the story to focus on and what parts to gloss over. in spite of that, it was pretty solid.
also, i think whatever recipe they used for blood was lifted from some classic horror movie studio. (hammer films, please call your office.) it didn't look much like actual blood in color or texture/viscosity, but it was wonderfully cinematic and very old-school-horror.
overall, good stuff. i'm glad i saw it. i'd see it again on the big screen.
i really liked the way they took "a little priest" out into the world in a way that took advantage of the medium. also, "by the sea" was BRILLIANT. the costume party flashback was another great use of movie media for lush spectacle.
the singing technique of some of the leads was less than stellar, but i think the acting skill made up for it. rickman and depp sold me on their performance of "pretty women". depp's "epiphany" was not fabulously sung but excellently acted and so i was carried along with it. there were a few spots where depp was a bit too edward scissorhands, what with the bladed implements in both hands and the wild black hair and pale skin -- i think he recycled some of the body language or maybe burton recycled some of the cinematography. HBC was what excactly i hoped for in her mrs lovett, and her expressive eyes alone justified the casting. SBC was frackin brilliant as a flatteringly costumed pirelli. they changed the way the judge was skeevey to one that i thought was flatter and less compelling than in the staged version.
things that made me grumpy: no chorus singing the actual ballad of sweeney todd. cutting more of the beggar woman's role than i thought was wise, and thus removing much of the impact of that plot thread. strange pointless dialogue and lyrics changes. i disagree with some of their song cut decisions -- i really wanted to see rickman do the judge's big "mea culpa" scenery chomping (see also above comment about how they changed his skeeviness). also, cutting the "all about hair color and being a wigmaker" removes exposition. cutting one of my favorite bits in "a little priest" (the "tinker" "somethign pinker" ... "locksmith" "..." sequence). they cut the bit about "now and then you could do the guest in" from "by the sea". some important bits of the plot around the judge and johanna seem to be happening offscreen, here, since they cut "kiss me". swapping the timing of "god that's good" and "johanna (quartet)" was ... weird. also, why was the word "god" removed from all songs, as JB pointed out?
something in the specificness and realistic scenery of the film vs a stage show drove home for me that when lucy wanders into the room singing "beedle deedle deedle" and being all freaky, she's not just off her rocker. she's off her rocker and back in the house she used to live in before everything went terribly wrong. which doesn't quite make up for them having gutted some of the impact of him seeing and ignoring her several times over the course of the show. it's not just that he kills a stranger who turns out to be his wife. he comes back to look for his wife, SEES HER ALMOST AS SOON AS HE MAKES LANDFALL, and then eventually kills her. it makes the tragedy more tragic, dammit.
so, yeah, most of my complaints boil down to the screenwriter(s) made some choices i disagree with in terms of deciding what parts of the story to focus on and what parts to gloss over. in spite of that, it was pretty solid.
also, i think whatever recipe they used for blood was lifted from some classic horror movie studio. (hammer films, please call your office.) it didn't look much like actual blood in color or texture/viscosity, but it was wonderfully cinematic and very old-school-horror.
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no subject
Date: 2007-12-22 12:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-22 02:11 am (UTC)I didn't have quite as many quibbles with the changes as you did - I think the reordering of the songs worked rather well.
Most of the lyric cuts didn't bother me - songs on film need to be shorter than those on stage (unless there's a really compelling cinematic vision)... the "do the guest in" line doesn't give any information that's not already in the song (the "bring your chopper" line is still there, so it's implied). I missed locksmith too, but since that's really a music hall moment in the show, it would have felt out of place in the film. Depp's Sweeney Todd doesn't have the levity to fuck around with a rhyming game, even at that moment in the film...
(Sweeney's Johanna needs to come before "God That's Good" because there's no intermission, so without it there'd be an odd time jump from "I'm going to make people into pies" to "yummy people pies!" without seeing the folks getting killed...)
I think I need to see it again to figure out how I feel about the handling of the beggar. In this version, Todd doesn't see her as soon as he makes landfall. Someone on one of the boards I read said that without a singing chorus, they had to cut back on the beggar woman's lines or risk giving her identity away (why is she the only unnamed character who sings?). I sort of buy that.
But overall, wow, loved the film. And that comes after a month of obsessively listening to all the other recordings, watching the two previous video versions of the musical, watching every bit of film that had been leaked onto the internet, and pouring over the soundtrack for the couple of days I had it before the film came out.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-22 02:50 am (UTC)fair enough.
and missing both "do the guest in" and "locksmith" don't actually hurt the story. they are mostly just moments where i love and adore the wordplay and thus miss them.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-22 03:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-23 05:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-25 07:47 am (UTC)Oh, that's a good phrasing of it. I was thinking about how part of the price for bringing that moment into the 'real' world (with them looking through the windows and imagining victims) is that it loses it cerebrality -- it's no longer a word game, a wicked funny chance to show off who's wittier, but an actual evaluation of the rest of the world as legitimate prey.
(I may have been reading too much Jan Kott recently, though.)