Sweeney Todd

[Some spoilers. If they're spoilers for you, that's too bad. You should see the musical, or the movie.]

Sweeney Todd has always been my favorite musical. Now it's a movie. The people in the movie might not be able to sing as well as the people in the musical. I can deal with that. They made the "beggar" less crazy and not a prostitute, which is sort of sad. They took out the main theme. Disappointing for someone who has certain expectations for the music. But! Seeing the movie did
remind me how awesome the thing is... and they definitely didn't cut out the majority of the gruesome stuff.

Things that are awesome:

1. They short-circuit capitalism by selling people the flesh of other people baked into pies. "It's man devouring man out there; who are we to deny it in here?" Lust appears to drive this whole process; it's how Sweeney attracts people to his barbershop and it's manifested in the "Pretty Women" sung both times Sweeney is shaving Judge Turpin. (The movie does these scenes quite well, by the way...)

2. Massively perverted Oedipal drama: Tobias gets concerned and wants to protect his adoptive mother Ms. Lovett from scary Sweeney Todd, whom he begins to suspect of doing something potentially bad. She appears to be touched by his song and sinks into his harms. She then offers to take him to the bakeroom, where it seems for a moment like she might be initiating him into the family secret. But here, the scene of the family's secret production isn't sex in the bedroom (they don't have a bedroom) but a machine room where bodies fall from the ceiling and get extruded from the meat grinder. He is forced into the sewer with the blood and shit--waste products of the whole operation... only to rise at the end and finish wiping out the older generation.

Not to mention the "children" in bedlam being turned on the ward (probably eating him?)

3. The "By The Sea" sequence is very good in the film... maybe the best part, relative to the musical, because of all the stuff it can do. The continual joke is that the the obsessed Sweeney can't enjoy the vacation, but the sub-joke is that the whole thing is ridiculous and awful...

Mm, cannibalism.