Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Dreamworks)
Tim Burton may not seem like the ideal adapter of a Stephen
Sondheim musical, but when you consider the wry ghoulishness of this
throat-slashing tragedy, the aptness of
dark flamboyance is clear. With input from Sondheim himself, Sweeney Todd has been smartly and ruthlessly condensed
to fit a two-hour template — some songs cut entirely, several more liberally
pruned — without completely gutting the original musical.
where the bigger changes have taken place. The casting of Johnny Depp, performing
a brooding character study that shaves the comic surface from his famous pirate
Jack Sparrow, is a stroke (turns out he can sing, too!), but Helena Bonham
Carter, in strung-out goth mode, is never quite able to nail down her character (or maybe it’s just difficult to imagine such an anti-Angela Lansbury in the role). Alan Rickman and the rubber-faced Timothy
Spall can play comic adversaries in their sleep, and the anatomically enhanced Sacha Baron Cohen steals
each scene he appears in as the barber Pirelli. The bloodletting is copious and
graphic, but executed with a theatrical flair that softens the
grisliness. Finally,
vision of the aspirationally romantic “By the Sea” is a riot — a perfect
mini-movie with a stone-faced Depp channeling Buster Keaton. It’s a terrific musical in
an uncommonly good year for movie musicals. (A version of this review originally appeared in the White Plains Times.)
Buy it from Amazon.com: Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
or Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Two-Disc Special Collector’s Edition)
The Night of the Shooting Stars (Koch Lorber)
I was going to make a comment about how, when this was released, the arrival of the Taviani Brothers on the international-film scene was being treated like the long-awaited Second Coming of Italian neo-realist cinema, but the two contemporary reviews I could dig up without getting out of my chair were, as the kids say today, pretty meh. Ebert sounds disappointed: “Nostalgia alone is supposed to carry us along, and since everything
happened so long ago, it hardly seems to matter. The Tavianis make an
additional mistake, which is to make everything so beautiful that it
cannot be intensely felt.” Canby is downright dismissive: “The Night of the Shooting Stars is one of those life-affirming films
made to order for urban neurotics who behave badly over the breakfast
table, on the subway or in the office. They can attend this Italian
film and, by agreeing with its decent sentiments, feel cleansed in some
small, vicarious way. Then they can go out and be rotten all over
again. It’s not a work that makes one think a lot.” These notices made me think maybe I misremembered the esteem in which this was held, but Ebert also mentions that it won the National Society of Film Critics award for best film, so there you go. Also, The New York Times revisited it in 2001, when Terrence Rafferty called it “an almost inconceivably full movie experience.” When I saw it, I thought it was pretty meh — but I was in high school, so what the fuck did I know? Maybe worth another look.
Buy it from Amazon.com: The Night of the Shooting Stars
Alvin and the Chipmunks (Fox)
I got a kick out of the guy on the IMDb message board complaining that this thing is “Not appropriate for small children.” Not appropriate for anybody, amirite?
Buy it from Amazon.com: Alvin and the Chipmunks or Alvin and the Chipmunks [Blu-ray]