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Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?- Page 2

Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?

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GavestonPS
#25Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/1/14 at 8:47pm

I don't think it was Helen's fault. As I said before I think she could have done it justice. I'm just speculating but I think there was a call made for her to underplay the role for fear it being too over the top for the medium.

Well, there's a world of difference between being "over the top" and taking quaaludes before every scene!

That being said, your point is well taken: when I criticize HBM I do understand she may have been doing what Tim Burton asked her to do. But why either of them wanted Mrs. Lovett played as Sweeney's emotional twin is beyond me!

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GavestonPS
#26Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/1/14 at 8:50pm

Jeffrey, I understand perfectly well that different media have different strengths and weaknesses. But it is fair to expect a movie version to find at least as strong an equivalent for whatever it drops from the stage version.

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binau
#27Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/2/14 at 5:02am

I love the Sweeney Todd movie. I didn't even really like musicals at all before I saw it - but I was absolutely floored about how well the music could tell a story and explore the characters. I remember my heart was racing so much during the scene when Depp stabbed Turpin. Incredibly thrilling - who knew a musical could ever be this? It was also incredibly beautiful. Its Academy Award was well deserved. I like Sondheim's endorsement that it was genuinely a good 'film' on its own IIRC (rather than a straight adaptation). We have more than enough audio and video recordings out there if you want to hear or watch performance more aligned to the quality and style of singing in musical theatre.

I have also been able to find similar satisfaction in so many other Sondheim shows and productions since. For me, I feel it is external validation that Sondheim is such a great composer and it isn't just 'indoctrination' from theatre people who hold him in high esteem - I didn't know anything about him or his shows when I was finding out about him and his shows. This is probably a different experience to many other young people these days (particularly if you grew up/participate in theatre circles), where I imagine your introduction to Sondheim could be from people telling you that he is a great and to listen to his shows.

Anyway, I'm sick of Sweeney Todd and pretty much the only thing that could revive the franchise for me would be Bernadette Peters playing Mrs Lovett. Add my vote to a FOLLIES film or A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC. Particularly the latter because I think it would be easier to pull off.


"You can't overrate Bernadette Peters. She is such a genius. There's a moment in "Too Many Mornings" and Bernadette doing 'I wore green the last time' - It's a voice that is just already given up - it is so sorrowful. Tragic. You can see from that moment the show is going to be headed into such dark territory and it hinges on this tiny throwaway moment of the voice." - Ben Brantley (2022) "Bernadette's whole, stunning performance [as Rose in Gypsy] galvanized the actors capable of letting loose with her. Bernadette's Rose did take its rightful place, but too late, and unseen by too many who should have seen it" Arthur Laurents (2009) "Sondheim's own favorite star performances? [Bernadette] Peters in ''Sunday in the Park,'' Lansbury in ''Sweeney Todd'' and ''obviously, Ethel was thrilling in 'Gypsy.'' Nytimes, 2000
Updated On: 7/2/14 at 05:02 AM

WiCkEDrOcKS Profile Photo
WiCkEDrOcKS
#28Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/2/14 at 8:40am

I'm not a big Tim Burton fan by any means, and I throughly enjoyed his film version of SWEENEY. I didn't think it was a masterpiece, but I'd venture to say it was probably the best film version of the musical we could hope for. I'm not sure the material ever screamed out to be put on film to begin with and I thought they did a stellar job of adapting it for a new medium.

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Pippin
#29Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/2/14 at 12:18pm

I'm a fairweather Burton fan. Loved his work in the 80's and 90's, but by the 2000's I feel he either lost his way, got bored, or became a cog in the Hollywood machine and helped churn out more crap than watchable fare, with a few exceptions, Sweeney Todd, I think being one. Yes, of course the entire score is not preserved in the film, or the chorus singing, but I can get over that because, as said many times, there are countless concert versions and other recording where you can satisfy your inner Sondheim nerd and listen to "the letter" in it's full dissonant glory.

On it's own terms, I like Burton's treatment of Sondheim's masterpiece, with one exception, and it's a big exception, but not big enough to turn me off to the film, for the reason that I've just stated. Burton took all the comedy out of the musical, and comedy is a huge part of Sweeney Todd. You need it to balance out all the dark stuff that is happening. Burton's biggest mistake was taking "a Little priest" - one of Sondheim's funniest and deliciously funny (pun intended) songs, and draining all of the potential laughs out of it. Huge miscalculation, and it's weird to me that a man known for an "off" sense of humour (beetlejuice, frankenweenie, Pee Wee) would take this song ripe for laughter and get rid of any trace of comedy is beyond me. That's my biggest regret of the film.

That said, I really like HBC, much more than Depp in the film, and the rest of the cast (especially Tim Spall and Alan Rickman), and I think the cinematography is fantastic. The last shot is still one of the most beautiful screen pictures I've ever seen.

I'm a fan.


"I'm an American, Damnit!!! And if it's three things I don't believe in, it's quitting and math."

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lovebwy
#30Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/4/14 at 1:58am

I don't think Burton's Sweeney works mostly because he drained all the fun out of it. When done correctly on stage it's such a delicate balance of drama, dark humor and fun. Helena Bonham Carter made Mrs. Lovett too dour and cynical. The fun of it should be that she's this kooky, flighty, batty old lady doing these evil things. Carter was just boring. Ugh, I hated her in it.

And there was way too much blood.

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afrye
#31Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/4/14 at 2:23am

HBC was vocal in one roundtable interview about how Tim treated her during the filming of the film. Apparently they did not get along at all. It was right after they had married and he apparently was trying too hard to show that it was not favouritism that got her the role and would come down on her in between takes, get frustrated easily, etc. She says at one point it almost cost them their relationship. This could be one of the many reasons why her performance is a bit all over the place.

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g.d.e.l.g.i.
#32Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/4/14 at 10:09am

This could have been avoided by, y'know, not casting her. But hey...


Formerly gvendo2005
Broadway Legend
joined: 5/1/05

Blocked: After Eight, suestorm, david_fick, emlodik, lovebwy, Dave28282, joevitus

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ray-andallthatjazz86
#33Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/4/14 at 12:57pm

I go back and forth with this movie. I saw it last week after a couple years without seeing it, and I have to say, it didn't strike me as particularly interesting or good this time around. There are moments of greatness ("My Friends" is stunning, Sasha Baron Cohen is perfectly cast as Pirelli, and Carter is great during "Not While I'm Around"), but overall, the movie doesn't come together, and that's a shame since the brilliance of the musical is how Shakespearean it is in the way all the pieces fall into place at the end.
Yes, Helena Bonham Carter has singled out this film as one of her worst filming experiences. She was pregnant and Burton was being very mean to her throughout. It's also known that he's responsible for toning down her performance to the point that she whispers every line. It doesn't work at all. I'm all for a new take on Mrs. Lovett, I don't think she should be played as a kooky, old lady for the role to work (see Patti LuPone in the Doyle revival), but I want to see moments of passion, humor and maliciousness from her. Depp is also doing more or less his typical eccentric, Burton performance, and I'd even say that Rickman and Spall are too obvious for their roles.
Also, I roll my eyes every time the action switches to the Johanna/Anthony storyline. Burton seems to resent that plotline, he even cast the most boring actors imaginable for those roles. It brings the movie way down.


"Some people can thrive and bloom living life in a living room, that's perfect for some people of one hundred and five. But I at least gotta try, when I think of all the sights that I gotta see, all the places I gotta play, all the things that I gotta be at"

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henrikegerman
#34Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/4/14 at 1:17pm

I liked it. Bonham Carter, for whose ever fault it was, was disappointing (and I"m a fan and think she could have done it justice), the loss of the quintet hurt a lot, but the cast was good and Burton showed that he understood the rhythm and flow of a musical.

Far better movie than Les Mis. Sorry.

Updated On: 7/4/14 at 01:17 PM

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icecreambenjamin
#35Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/4/14 at 1:27pm


Why do some people have something against the Les Mis movie? Updated On: 7/4/14 at 01:27 PM

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Charley Kringas Inc
#36Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/4/14 at 3:39pm

It felt like a bit of a slog to me, which is too bad because the live singing idea was great, and was pulled off really well, but Tom Hooper is a terrible, indulgent director.

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trentsketch
#37Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/4/14 at 4:24pm

I also liked the Tim Burton adaptation. With the way they cast the films, the ballads that were cut would have crashed and burned onscreen. The cut songs are also my least favorite in the score, so I didn't exactly miss them.

Roscoe
#38Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/6/14 at 9:29am

We've got a GREAT film of SWEENEY TODD.

I wrote this when the film was released. I stand by every f*cking word.

Let me be clear. Tim Burton's film of SWEENEY TODD is magnificent. Funny, terrifying, deeply moving and deeply disgusting. I felt the way I felt when I saw RAN or TITUS or THE GODFATHER PART II or PSYCHO. I felt purged. I felt pity and terror. It is not everybody's cup of tea. It is the absolute cinematic embodiment of My Cup Of Tea. I love every single f*cking frame of it.

I'd been dreading this film. I didn't know if Tim Burton had the real chops to make this film what it needs to be: a rip-snorting blood-gushing tear-wrenching High Musical Tragedy Slaughterhouse. Could Burton handle SWEENEY TODD, getting the right balance between Blood and Tears? His films tend to either really really work (EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, ED WOOD) or really really not work (BATMAN, MARS ATTACKS, PLANET OF THE APES) and sometimes both (BATMAN RETURNS, CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, SLEEPY HOLLOW). SWEENEY TODD is his least compromised, most assured film to date. And it is also the single finest live action musical film made in, well, at least as long as I can remember.

Burton does what no other filmmaker of the current alleged Musical Renaissance has done: he has put the focus back on the characters, the story, and the songs. When Sweeney Todd sings the heart-rending ballad "My Friends" to his razors, Burton actually allows me to see Johnny Depp sing. And then he does something even more astonishing. He allows me to continue seeing Johnny Depp sing. And then, to cap it all off, he lets me see Johnny Depp sing with Helena Bonham Carter. Two people sing. At the same time. And you can see them both! Singing! Burton keeps the camera in tight, creating an intimacy that is quite simply lacking in the other recent musicals that have gotten so much attention. This is a film, after all, that is set in a series of small, cramped rooms: a barber shop, a pie shop, a basement bakehouse, an insane asylum rather than the series of showbiz stages, imaginary or otherwise, in CHICAGO, DREAMGIRLS, HAIRSPRAY, or PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.

Tim Burton is reminding the world of how to make a musical. There's none of the hyper-caffeinated gonzo MTVwannabe editing and incompetent framing that demolishes the sense and feeling of the songs in CHICAGO (really now, didn't that film look like the work of a blindfolded babboon?), or the fear of singing on display in DREAMGIRLS (where someone beginning to sing is a cue for a cut to a shot of the back of the singer's head) or PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (where the drapes get as much screen time as the actors), or the appalling miscasting that finally sinks HAIRSPRAY. Where these other films make the mistake of laying on the "cinematic" trappings of Attention Deficit Editing and Over-Ornate Camerawork, Burton strips it all down, creating a lean mean musical machine.

That isn't to say that the film is cinematically inert, though. There are plenty of fluorishes, including a wonderful opening credit sequence, a marvelous journey through nocturnal London, spectacularly gory throat slashings, etc. I mean, really, this is Tim Burton after all. Burton, however, knows when to go for broke, and when to back off and let me watch these people do their stuff. There are plenty of small spine-tingling pleasures, among them Sweeney's lovingly careful shaving of the area on Judge Turpin's throat that he is hoping to slash open. Just imagining what Rob Marshall would have done with a song like "Pretty Women" makes me nauseous.

Johnny Depp makes a splendid Sweeney Todd, the only actor I've seen apart from Len Cariou (the Broadway original) to capture the pain behind the rage. Helena Bonham Carter's Mrs. Lovett is a marvel, showing me a woman who grinds corpses into pie filling in one moment and whose eyes fill with tears over the fate of a young boy the very next. Alan Rickman's surprisingly dashing Judge Turpin and Timothy Spall's repellent Beadle Bamford work beautifully. Not the least of the performances comes from the young boy playing Toby, who delivers possibly the most moving "Not While I'm Around" I've ever heard. I hope this film banishes once and for all the complaint that Burton doesn't deal effectively with actors.

I could go on and on and on. I loved it. I'll leave it to you to discover the joys of the color scheme, the art direction and costume design, and all of the other elements I haven't got space to mention, because just when I get something down here a thousand other delights come flooding back to me. I can't wait to see it again. And again. And again.


"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." Thomas Pynchon, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick My blog: http://www.roscoewrites.blogspot.com/

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icecreambenjamin
#39Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/6/14 at 11:23am

I found it dull, dreary, and depressing. Sweeney Todd is practically an opera and I expect there to be rich beautiful voices with some wonderful acting. Instead we got whisper the musical. I also thought that the overall look was wrong as well. It was almost too dark and the cgi sequences were terrible. Sweeney Todd is a musical where if filmed correctly should win oscars.

Roscoe
#40Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/6/14 at 11:33am

It did win an Oscar for Art Direction. It was filmed very well indeed, I think, eschewing BIG BROADWAY OPERATIC BELTING for smaller more intimate performances, which for me only made the drama more profound, the emotions more intense.


"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." Thomas Pynchon, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick My blog: http://www.roscoewrites.blogspot.com/

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icecreambenjamin
#41Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/6/14 at 12:06pm

There was no emotion
it was totally emotionless

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wickedfan
#42Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/6/14 at 4:38pm

Why don't you just go start another thread under stupid false pretenses?
I'll give you a jump start "Has anyone done Fiddler on the Roof set in an Old Navy? I'm asking because...school project...? Yeah, school project. By my racist teacher who wants to stick it to Old Navy."


"Sing the words, Patti!!!!" Stephen Sondheim to Patti LuPone.
Updated On: 7/6/14 at 04:38 PM

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icecreambenjamin
#43Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/6/14 at 5:10pm

I go to an arts school with a lot of arts related projects and yes my teacher is borderline racist and likes to reset practically every show he does

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Borstalboy
#44Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/6/14 at 9:05pm

I thought it was lovely. I'm not getting the cries of "emotionless" when the source material isn't exactly THE SOUND OF MUSIC.


"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.” ~ Muhammad Ali

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best12bars
#45Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/6/14 at 9:35pm

Cutting all of the choral singing out of the film is as bad a decision as I have ever seen in a musical. It ranks up there with the worst creative ideas ever for an adaptation of a stage work.

It's unforgivable and unjustifiable.

The rest of the film is fairly good. It could have been great, but it isn't---even though it has some moments of greatness.

Helena Bonham Carter is well cast and could have played it so much better had she been given free rein. Instead her stupid director told her to "whisper" everything to help pull the audience in. If they're leaning forward to hear better, it doesn't necessarily mean they're more involved in the story, nor does that mean they're on the "edge of their seats" for the right reason.

The cast is good, the art direction is great.

That's about it. It doesn't suck, but it's far from a great movie.


"Jaws is the Citizen Kane of movies."
blocked: logan2, Diamonds3, Hamilton22

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icecreambenjamin
#46Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/6/14 at 9:38pm

^perfect

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Mr. Nowack
#47Can we please get a GOOD Sweeney Todd movie?
Posted: 7/6/14 at 10:07pm

I don't really get the comments about it being unfunny. The humor is still there, just in a less conspicuous way. And i think the "whisper" thing works for the movie. They did a lot better with it than the much more haphazard and misguided whisper singing some places in the Les Miz movie.


Keeping BroadwayWorld Illustrated

Roscoe
#48We've already got a GREAT Sweeney Todd Movie.
Posted: 7/7/14 at 11:13am

I was concerned about the lack of the Ballad when I read about it, but I find that I don't miss it when I'm watching the film -- the movie moves along very swiftly without the Chorus popping up to remind us that Sweeney Todd Is EVIL while scenery gets moved around. As for the choral singing, well, it all seems part and parcel of the project to streamline the project and make it a lean mean mass-murder movie musical, and I've never missed it for a minute, not a second. As for the alleged whispering, I only notice whispering once, during Lovett's scene with Toby including "Nothing's Gonna Harm You" and well, I don't see what the problem is. It's a quiet and rather tender scene, she's trying to keep the kid quiet so that Mr. Todd doesn't hear, do you expect her to SHOUT EVERY LINE as if each song were "And I Am Telling You"?

From what I remember reading at the time, Sondheim was fine with the changes made, and gave the film his full endorsement -- even advising folks to “just forget what they know and enjoy the movie or not. But if they go in counting the things that are missing, they’re going to be very distracted.” Even Sondheim's being fair by saying "Enjoy it or not."

Of course, he also seems to be fine with the changes being made to INTO THE WOODS as well, and as directed by that artistically bankrupt Rob Marshall idiot, etc. etc. etc.


"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." Thomas Pynchon, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick My blog: http://www.roscoewrites.blogspot.com/
Updated On: 7/7/14 at 11:13 AM

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henrikegerman
#49We've already got a GREAT Sweeney Todd Movie.
Posted: 7/7/14 at 2:05pm

"Why do some people have something against the Les Mis movie?"

I can't speak for everybody. I found far too much of the pacing and editing inept, desultory - at times random - and unmusical. There were other reasons I found the movie oppressive, including Sasha Baron Cohen's - so good in Sweeney! - idiotic accent, but that was my major gripe.