In view of today’s Sweeney Todd opening, a partial re-run of my 11.30.07 review: I went to Sweeney Todd (Dreamamount, 12.21) with a guarded attitude. And then it began, and less than two minutes in I knew it was exceptional and perhaps more than that. Ten minutes later I was feeling something growing within me. Surprise turned to admiration turned to amazement. I felt filled up, delighted. I couldn’t believe it…a Tim Burton film that reverses the decline!

All my life I’ve loved — worshipped — what Stephen Sondheim‘s music can do for the human heart. Blend this with a tragic, grand guignol metaphor about how we’re all caught up with some issue of the past — needing on some level to pay the world back for the hurt and the woundings. Add to this Burton’s exquisite visual panache and precision, the drop-dead beautiful, near monochromatic color, the ravishing production design and…pardon me for sounding like a pushover, but this movie pushes over.
At times it melted me like a candle. I was lifted, moved. I was never not aroused. Every frame is a painting and a pageant and a falling tear.
Johnny Depp is fantastic as the Demon Barber of Fleet Street — he has to be a Best Actor candidate as of this moment. Helena Bonham Carter can’t sing very well but she’s great anyway. Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Jamie Campbell Bower (a major new arrival), Jayne Wisener, Sascha Baron Cohen…everyone fills the bill.
Sweeney Todd is a locked Best Picture contender at this stage. It’s too beautifully made, too full of feeling, too exquisitely performed to shunt aside. But it won’t win because of the blood.
I was lifted, touched, moved, melted…and also showered and sprayed. And I’m sorry for this. If only Burton had held back and focused harder on the metaphor of a man consumed by bitterness, determined to pay back those who ruined his life…if he’d only elected to turn away and not indulge his B-movie director’s fetish for the gushing red vino, as if from a garden hose or a fire hydrant. The film is its own tragedy, in a way. So near and yet so far.
Something very deep-down kicks in when a human being is killed or mutilated or both. It’s horrible and ghastly, and the spirit naturally recoils unless — and this is a very big “unless” — the style and the context turn it around and redefine it in some way.
Al I know for sure is that I was mesmerized. I loved the duets, the look of it, the control, the poise, the ache, the tragedy. This is a major, major film. Way up there. Better, impact-wise than the B’way stage version I saw a couple of years ago with Patti Lupone. The finest big-time movie musical since the under-appreciated Evita, which I feel is Alan Parker‘s best film ever.
So into the top-five slot it goes and let the back-and-forth begin. It almost certainly won’t win the Best Picture Oscar because Burton, intractable mule that he is, allows a gore fetish to override the emotion and the metaphor and the beauty. Okay, perhaps not “override” but he gives too much exposure and power to the plasma. But this is still a masterful work. Heart-stopping, heart-lifting. I came close to tears several times, and I don’t like admitting this stuff because people use it against you later on.

A New York reader caught a research screening of Ron Howard‘s Frost/Nixon last week near Union Square, and has some generally favorable things to say. Shot only about three months ago, this adaptation of Peter Morgan‘s play about the famous David Frost/Richard Nixon TV interview of 1977 is “a solid, satisfying historical drama….no knockout but it fights a good fight and lands its share of solid punches.

“Frank Langella‘s Nixon is very good,” the guy says. ” Wearing very little make-up (thankfully), his performance is fully felt and fleshed out. His Nixon is competitive and guarded, but Langella makes him sympathetic, a political fighter angling for one last twilight bout without being scrubbed entirely clean of his…uhm…imperfections.”
Universal will be releasing Frost/Nixon sometime in the late summer or early fall…I think. Unless they come to believe that audiences will be sick of the ’08 presidential campaign by then. An instinct is telling me this may be the case and that Frost/Nixon, certain to be commercially limited in any season, will play better in late March or April or perhaps even early May — sometime before the nominating season peaks in the mid to late summer.

“I think Sean Penn is the greatest living American in a certain way, because he’s a man of action. I feel by being a neutralist in this area, in my actual field of endeavor I can be more effective. You do not become militant if you wish to be a successful propagandist. Because all you will do is preach to the choir and further entrench your opposition.” — Jack Nicholson speaking to AP’s profiler Ryan Pearson.

“Sweeney Todd is as much a horror film as a musical: It is cruel in its effects and radical in its misanthropy, expressing a breathtakingly, rigorously pessimistic view of human nature. It is also something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme — I am tempted to say evil — genius.

“It may seem strange that I am praising a work of such unremitting savagery. I confess that I’m a little startled myself, but it’s been a long time since a movie gave me nightmares. And the unsettling power of Sweeney Todd comes above all from its bracing refusal of any sentimental consolation, from Tim Burton‘s willingness to push the most dreadful implications of Stephen Sondheim‘s story to their blackest conclusions.
√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚ÄúSweeney Todd is a fable about a world from which the possibility of justice has vanished, replaced on one hand by vain and arbitrary power, on the other by a righteous fury that quickly spirals into madness. There may be a suggestion of hopefulness near the end, but you don√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t see hope on the screen. What you see is as dark as the grave. What you hear — some of the finest stage music of the past 40 years — is equally infernal, except that you might just as well call it heavenly.” — from A.O. Scott‘s 12.21 N.Y. Times review.

The first trailer for Guillermo del Toro ‘s Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Universal, 7.11.08), introduced by Guillermo himself. May the Gods protect this exceptional filmmaker and delightful human being from the scaly claw-clutch of Peter Jackson…please. (Thanks to UnChien for the link.)

According to the Times Online‘s Will Lawrence, Will Smith “is one of the most ebullient actors working today, constantly joshing and joking, the twinkle in his eye as bright as the expensive diamond studs that nestle in his ear-lobes.” This is precisely why I can’t stand the guy. He’s a salesman first and a vulnerable human being second. The more Smith gets away from joshing and joking and giving off those Scientology-loves-you smiles (which he avoids pretty well in I Am Legend), the more tolerable he becomes.

Another early ’08 dumper — Gregory Hoblit‘s Untraceable (Screen Gems, 1.25.08). You can smell it off the trailer, which reveals most of the main plot bones (apparently) except for the last half of the final act. FBI agents (Diane Lane, Colin Hanks, Billy Burke) after a serial killer who uses website hits to help perpetrate killings, and thus reminding us that we’re all vulnerable to cyber invasions. Gives every indication of having been a completely cynical paycheck job for everyone concerned.

The Criterion Collection Two-Lane Blacktop two-disc set is an absolutely beautiful thing to buy, hold, unwrap and feel cool about owning. It’s got the two DVDs with the remastered feature on one disc and several “looking back” video shorts by director Monte Hellman, plus Rudy Wurlitzer‘s original script and an essay booklet. It’s a first-class package all the way.

But the film, which I saw clear-eyed for the very first time this morning, is only a so-so-thing. It’s great and irksome, in and out, good and mundane…but certainly not an under-appreciated masterwork or the greatest road movie ever made or whatever the fans are saying.
In some ways this 1971 road poem is cool because of its lack of interest in being conventional. It’s about a couple of stock-car freaks (James Taylor, Dennis Wilson) in a ’55 Chevy making their way across the backroads in hopes of…pretty much nothing. They’re supposed to be in a big cross-country race with the owner of a GTO (Warren Oates) with the winner taking the other guy’s pink slip, but they stop racing after a while. They get to know each other, share meals, piss each other off, help each other out and generally drive around and get into minor little encounters and scrapes.
The film has a script that Esquire magazine felt was good enough to print back in ’70, but there’s no story here at all. There’s some atmosphere and aroma and a certain romance-of-the-road thing going on. I didn’t care at all about conventional beats, but I did want Hellman’s film to be mesmerizing on some level.. The truth is that it’s not. I don’t hate it. It’s diverting or moderately cool or a semi-engaging time-travel thing…whatever. But it’s not the Citizen Kane of road movies. Not by a long shot.

The dirty little secret of Two-Lane Blacktop (i.e., which the elite DVD critics and friends-of-Hellman will never mention) is that it doesn’t look all that great. It is often dark and muddy and lit without the slightest visual intrigue. It doesn’t begin to approach the painterly quality of a Terrence Malick film. The work by dps Jack Deerson and Gregory Sandor has a kind of funky-monkey blah feeling…like it was shot on the fly and the cheap. Laszlo Kovacs‘ lensing of Easy Rider (a low-budget road movie shot two years earlier) is much more engrossing.
So what happens in the film? The three guys compete in a lackadaisical passive- aggressive way for the affections of “the girl” (the late Laurie Bird). None of them win her over at the end. Perhaps she’s too flaky or hippie-ish to be won over…who knows? Wilson does her one night in a motel room, then seems to shine her on. Then Taylor gets interested and then more interested, and then Oates makes a play. In the end she winds up taking off with some kid on a motorcycle.
I don’t have a problem with art movies in which “nothing happens.” I’m a major admirer of Michelangelo’s Antonioni‘s L’eclisse and L’Avventura and Christopher Petit‘s Radio On. I even have a place in my head for Marguerite Duras‘s Le Camion. The problem with Two Lane Blacktop is that it’s not empty enough. In an existential vein. It toys with this and that story element and then loses interest. And then the film melts at the very end. Gimme a break.
Not empty enough, not pretty enough, not funny enough, not weird enough, not kinky enough and not crazy enough.

Hollywood Chicago‘s Adam Fendelman talking recently to a subdued, almost whispery John Cusack about Grace is Gone.

There Will Be Blood star Daniel Day Lewis speaking to the N.Y. Observer‘s Sarah Vilkomerson about the film’s startling ending: “To me, the symmetry was absolutely right. It may be outrageous, that last scene, but to me it seemed absolutely right. I love that there’s an exuberance to it.”

Exuburance…absolutely. But this scene wouldn’t work without that final period, that final “Day in the Life” chord, that All The President’s Men typewriter-key wham: “I’m finished.” (And no, this is nothing like a spoiler. You can say these words when you’ve finished eating or watching a film, when you’re ready to go to bed, when you’ve fucked up royally or when you’ve finally completed a great task. Context is everything.)
And this: “Paul [Thomas Anderson] thought we were making a blockbuster. I thought we were making a film that would have us sort of drummed out of town with bell, book and candle. So I feel we’re going to achieve some kind of middle ground. It’s just so great Paul thought that. I just love it: There’s no woman, no romance, no nothing — just fucking filthy guys digging holes in the ground.”

Statement #1 by Oscar show producer Gil Cates to USA Today‘s Anthony Breznican, spoken last Friday: “The only thing I can tell you without any equivocation is that the [Oscar] show is going to go on. That’s absolutely for certain.”
Cates statement #2, spoken two days ago: “It’s my fondest hope that the strike will be over by [2.24.08].