Sweeney Todd: The demon barber of Fleet Street - 2007

Good, I liked it. I didn’t know the story before this film, so it was all new to me and can’t make comparisons, I can only say that I liked this one. Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham-Carter and Johnny Depp, they were all good, both acting and singing. I also loved the lights, meaning how it was all ‘dark’ as in giving the right atmosphere. The scene was so full of light and yellow when he was happy with his family, but now throughout the film everything is dark, grey, giving the impression of being dirty even if it’s not.

It’s a musical, most of the story is in songs. 

I was never a big fan of SBC who plays Pirelli here, but it’s ok. I was just relieved when it turned out that his character was only pretending to be Italian, so that terrible accent becomes perfectly ok, because of course someone not Italian would think that simply putting an ‘a’ at the end of most words is the right way to fake Italian…but it would not be ok if he were supposed to really be Italian. 

The story is a cruel one, honestly, and I’m a bit miffed that Rickman plays such a disgusting character.

Details now:

This is the story of Benjamin Barker, who once lived happily in London, working as a barber. He had a wife and a baby girl. A beautiful wife, Lucy, so beautiful that one day Judge Turpin saw her and dcided he had to have her, so he took Benjamin out of the picture by sending him away, imprisonedon false charges for 15 years (I think it should have been more, he thanks young sailor Anthony for saving him when he found him at sea, so I guess he escaped? Because surely Turpin had no desire to see him back…)

Once alone, Lucy did not yield, so the judge faked contrition so she’d go to him, and there was a big masquerade party, and he took her against her will and nobody helped her.

Now Barker is back in London, under the name Sweeney Todd. He goes to Fleet Street and Mrs Lovett recognizes him because she never forgot him. She’s always been in love with him, and now she tells him that Lucy poisoned herself and Turpin took the baby in and raised her as his ward. Mrs Lovett gives him his old room where he used to work, and also his old silver razors that he was so skilled with. Quite valuable, and yet she never sold them and kept them for him. 

Anthony sees young Johanna at her window and falls for her, and is right away threatened by the judge and beaten by his thug. 

A public challenge to Pirelli makes him known, but a short while later Pirelli goes to him. Pirelli once worked for him for a while, enough to recognize his silver razors and realize who he is, so he wants to blackmail him. Todd kills him. As soon as he explains about the blackmail, Mrs Lovett is okay with it, but she refuses to let him kill the kid that worked for the man. The poor kid had been taken from the orphanage from Pirelli who used to make him work and beat him and treat him cruelly. Mrs Lovett feels for the kid and takes him in, to work with her at her shop. She seels meat pies, but she was failing because good meat is too expensive, but now that they need to get rid of Pirelli’s body, she thinks that it’s a waste to bury him somewhere, when there’s such a demand for meat… so she makes meat pies out of him. 

Turpin kept Johanna locked in the house, probably in her room, at all times, and used to spy on her. Now that she’s grown enough, he wants to marry her, so he goes to Todd to improve his looks… and Todd would have had his revenge right then but Anthony chose that moment to barge in with his plan to run away with Johanna. Turpin hears of course, and storms out in a rage. He orders to lock her up in an asylum because of it, as punishment.

Todd is furious that he was denied his revenge, possibly forever since Turpin said he’ll never come back there. He’s thirsty for blood, so from then on he kills the lonely men who come for a shave (but not the one with a wife and child waiting for him). Mrs Lovett’s business thrives with all the meat he provides. The kid Toby now works for her, is never beaten and can eat whenever he wants. His life is good now, a huge improvement on how it was with that demon Pirelli, but Toby suspects Todd and wants to protect her, because she’s important to him, she saved him and gave him this new, great life. So he sings that ‘nothing’s gonna harm you, not while I’m around’, but Mrs Lovett knows of course, and in turn she wishes she could protect him but knows that she can’t now that he’s learned everything. He saw her taking money from Pirelli’s coin purse, so she takes him downstairs where she bakes her pies. There’s nothing to see at the moment, but she locks him inside, and will later go there with Todd, but without finding him. Toby discovered by himself the truth, seeing what the meat is made of, and hid from them.

For now, upon learning where Johanna is, Todd suggests to Anthony how he can free her and take her away, and then he writes a letter to Turpin, explaining the couple’s plans and inviting him to his shop to wait for them. Once Turpin arrives, Todd finally kills him, while they sing Pretty Women together.

A beggar woman who keeps telling everyone that evil things are happening here, enters Todd’s shop moments before Turpin, so he has no time to waste on her when his chance at revenge is so close. He kills her without a thought.

After killing Turpin, Todd notices that Johanna is in there, hidden, and therefore she probably witnessed everything. She’s there because Anthony took her there to hide while he arranges for their escape, and she decided to hide when he heard someone coming.

At first he plans to kill her - he does not know who she is, since she was just a baby the last time he saw her, and she is now disguised as a boy quite effectively. She’s no more than 16, so she looks like just a kid, so it’s normal that there’s no evidence of beard whatsoever. 

Still, when he hears Mrs Lovett’s scream, he simply lets her go after telling her to forget everything. It’s not clear to me why he didn’t kill her, but maybe now that his revenge has been accomplished, his thirst for blood is not as it was…

Mrs Lovett screamed because Turpin grabbed her, but when Todd joins her in the basement he’s dead, not moving anymore. Todd sees the body of the beggar woman, looks at her and finally discovers that it’s Lucy: he thought she was dead, but Mrs Lovett never said that, she only wanted him to think that so he’d forget his wife and start a new life with her. Lucy did poison herself, but did not die. It made her a bit crazy though. Now that he knows the truth, he throws Mrs Lovett into the huge bake oven to burn to death. 

Toby was hidden , bu now he comes out to sneak behind Todd and kill him for what he did. 

I guess we’re supposed to think that Anthony will come for Johanna and they will escape together… but why should they? She knows that Turpin is dead, and it wouldn’t take long to discover that the Beadle is dead as well… so why should they run away? She wanted to escape Turpin, but now what reason does she have? She could stay here, nobody is looking for her… and the man at the asylum who kept her prisoner and saw Anthony’s face is probably dead too, since he locked him inside the room with all the other prisoners who launched at him…

I’d say she should stay around and get to know Anthony before doing anything… 

Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd

Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs Lovett

Alan Richman as Judge Turpin

Timothy Spall as Beadle

Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli

Edward Sanders as Toby

Laura Michelle Kelly as Lucy/beggar woman

Jayne Wisener as Johanna

ITA Sweeney Todd - il diabolico barbiere di Fleet Street

Wikipedia lists Anthony Head as ‘gentleman in street’ but he’s not in the ending credits… I also thought I saw him there, and find it strange that his name was not in the credits…

In English they say slasher film, not splatter.

Grease 2 - 1982

 The only nice thing here was Michelle Pfeiffer, the epitome of beauty. Other than that, it was terrible, boring and useless and slow and even annoying.

It wanted to recall the previous one, of course, so we have Frenchy again, and the usual Pink Ladies and T-Birds, and of course songs and dancing… only that here the songs are only acceptable, the dancing is boring, often way too long and not really well done (when there are way too many people) because nothing in a movie should ever feel fake, and if it does that it’s not well done.

The story is simple: Michael is a new student at Rydell High School, all the way from England, and he falls in love at first sight with Stephanie, one of the Pink Ladies. She already broke up with T-Birds frontman Johnny, but she says no when Michael asks her out because she wants someone with a bike… easy right, so he loses the jacket, starts making school essays for others in exchange for money, then he puts together a bike (really, studying a book and actually putting it together with his own hands) then he starts learning to ride it, of course, and in no time he can jump any length, out-speed anyone, you get the idea. He wears big goggles with the helmet, so nobody can recognise him, and when he appears she immediately falls for him, but he can’t talk to her face to face at school so he goes to take her away from work on his bike and they spend a day together, and she’s crazy about him. Just like that, because he has a motorbike, even though she has never seen his face… yeah, right.

Then he tries to talk to her again in school, and since she failed an essay on Shakespeare, he offers to help, and she agrees and they meet for a burger and talk, and she tells him about ‘the guy’, and after he corrects a sentence of her essay, using big words like ‘incestouse’, she thinks he’s super smart and kinda likes him too, but not really because he’s no biker…

At the talent show night, where kids compete to win a prize in money based on their talent as singers, Michael leaves immediately because the gang goes after him, but at one point in the road he makes the big jump, while all the others stop, and Steph thinks he died. She’s very very sad but then he comes back, finally takes away the goggles and she kisses him anyway, quite happily actually, because she got the smart and the cool all in one handsome package.

All of a sudden Johnny gives him a T-birds jacket so he’s one of them and can date her without breaking the rules, and that’s it.

Boring, really. The musical number at the beginning (going back to school) and the one at the bowling were too long and with too many people, they looked fake, the ‘reproduction’ number in class and the one when she thinks he’s dead are boring and kind of embarrassing, not at all what they were going for, I imagine. They were probably supposed to be funny and touching :-/

 

The four idiots in black are annoying, Johnny is not a likeable character, nothing like Danny at all.

Michael is not a well developed character, he just looks at her with fish-eyes or sigh after her.

Actually, come to think of it, it’s the ‘male’ aspect of the movie that is all wrong (I mean in the casting, there’s lots of things wrong with the rest). The girls weren’t bad. Not their fault if their characters were shallow, they did their part. I even liked Ms Mason :-)  

The script is really boring and shallow, there are no Sandy and Danny here, no real love, no real story, no character-depth at all. There’s a moment when her friends tell Stephanie that according to the rules the Pink Ladies are the T-Birds’ chicks, so she should not pine after a mysterious and unknown biker, and she replies that maybe she doesn’t want to be ‘somebody’s chick’ anymore, but that’s just a line out there, nothing more on that, on the contrary they write things so that it’s exactly like that that things will keep going on. She falls for the biker in black and he will become one of the T-Birds, so she can keep being a Pink Lady and follow the rules, by dating a T-Bird.

:-/

Cats - 2019

First of all, I’ve never seen the musical before, which is probably very important because if someone already loves the musical is bound to be harsher in their judgement of this movie.

Still, they definitely went all out with this, and many times I could have happily done without the special effects. I liked the ‘cat costume’, let’s call it, they were quite cute cats :-)  but the rest of the effects were terrible, I mean the big house where the two scoundrel-cats live, and the railway, and oh my, the train wagon, what got into their minds I don’t know, it was terrible to watch, they should have stayed in one room, dance and sing, there was no need for the house or the train, and of course I would have gladly done without the mices singing or the cockroaches marching or   whatever they were doing, they tried too hard, really, and failed. It was not nice to watch and frankly quite annoying.

This being said, I have no trouble with the rest. When I looked on the internet for the songs titles (that for some reason are not included in the credits, I watched till the end and there is only one, Beautiful Ghosts, probably because they added Taylor Swift’s name as an author beside Andrew Lloyd Webber), I also saw that this movie got seven nominations to the Razzies, and really, why? There was nobody else who was bad that year? Because it wasn’t so bad, the acting, come on, it wasn’t worth a ‘best’ award, but it didn’t deserve a ‘worst’ award either.

The songs were all okay, although the only one that leaves a sign is Memory, and not just because it’s the most famous, but because it was really ‘performed’, the voice was broken while singing because it was crying, figuratively speaking, not for real, but it felt real, like any acting should, you know.

I liked the magical Mr Mistoffelees a lot :)

A bit of story, since it was new to me:

A kitten, Victoria, is abandoned and found by a group of cats that call themselves the Jellicle cats.  They sing to describe who they are, then more songs as she knows more cats (I didn’t like the puss in spats number), and they explain to her that it is the night of the ball when one cat is chosen to ascend to the Heaviside Layer to be reborn to a new life, a sort of cat-heaven to be reincarnated, I say. Macavity is a criminal cat with magic that kidnaps all the contestants because he wants to win, but when Old Deuteronomy arrives and he has kidnapped all the others, she still refuses to chose him. She says that it is the soul that counts and she will never chose him, so he magics her away too to force her hand but she still refuses, and Mr Mistoffelees brings her back after being encouraged by Victoria and the other cats.

Victoria sees an old, sad cat that sings alone of her past memories, and encourages her to come in and sing, and she is chosen and ascends, up and up, until she disappears. 

The cats that had been kidnapped free themselves now and join the others. Victoria is now accepted as a Jellicle cat and has found a place to belong.

It’s still not clear to me if the choice was made because after all she was the only contestant present or if she would have been chosen anyway, since after all all the others were still away, kidnapped by Macavity. 

Victoria - Francesca Hayward

Mr Mistoffelees - Laurie Davidson

Macavity - Idris Elba

Old Deuteronomy - Judy Dench

Gus the theatre cat - Ian McKellen

Bombalurina - Taylor Swift

Munkustrap - Robbie Fairchild