Sweeney Todd

[owlectomy]

* What an artfully constructed little plot! It's like something out of Moliere; very much built on the classical model of comedy, with the young couple and the overbearing guardian who stands in the way, the interleaving of the A plot and B plot, and the way that everything fits together.

* This is a movie with all of its technique right on the surface. Like, one might recommend it to a freshman film student who wasn't quite grasping the concepts. I don't intend that as a negative thing, actually; there are so many movies that have almost nothing symbolic or thematic going on, and then on the other hand are the movies where I don't get it until I've seen them a couple of times. Here, the symbolic structure of the movie is obvious and clear and visible; Sweeney is already dead, at least in a figurative sense (of course, Todd=death), and the fact that he seems alive but is actually dead disrupts the order of the story--causing lots of people to die--until he does eventually die (note that this mirrors Lucy, who seems dead but is actually alive!) Johnny Depp's robotic and affectless performance is just right in that context.

* Nevertheless, I might like to see the play performed by people who can sing.

* The bloodshed made me more squeamish than I expected; I don't really watch horror movies at all, but Kill Bill didn't bother me... I'm still debating whether they really needed all that exsanguination.