Maybe it’s the brooding atmosphere the cinematographers created (sets were built and feats of lighting and smoke and colour paid off – you can read some interesting behind the scenes on this here), maybe it’s Danny Elfman’s beautiful, haunting score, maybe it’s the fun of playing spot-the-Harry-Potter-actor (hint: there’s a lot), maybe it’s the puzzle box script or Johnny Depp back when he was indie or Miranda Richardson stealing every scene she’s in, or the theme of reason and logic versus emotion and heart. Sure, the romance between Ricci and Depp is a bit naff, but it’s all part of the charm.

The Cast

Johnny Depp is an awkward topic of conversation these days (why oh why did you not stay with Vanessa Paradis?) given a raging court case with ex Amber Heard and accusations of domestic violence. It can be hard to put knowledge of his real life dramas back of mind when watching him in a film, especially when many feel he has been dialing his characters up to 11 since the second POTC film. In Sleepy Hollow, he walks a difficult tightrope between leading man and character actor and in my opinion, pulls it off with aplomb. It’s one of Depp’s best performances in my humble opinion.

Police Constable Ichabod Crane comes to Sleepy Hollow from New York City to investigate a series of murders in the village of Sleepy Hollow by a mysterious Headless Horseman. His cowardice, snobbery (as a city slicker he sees himself as superior to the rural town he comes to deliver justice to) and childhood traumas make him an interesting lead. Crane is prepared to place women and children in danger before he himself is risked, but also shows courage, grit and determination in vowing to deal with a supernatural creature he only half believes in.

Christina Ricci as the leading lady, Katrina Van Tassel, is so-so and she and Depp have some cringe romantic lines, which in some ways simply add to the charm of the film (it’s so cheesy it’s fun). It’s also fun to see her play a different part (even if the age gap between her and Depp is a little creepy). Miranda Richardson as Katrina’s step-mum is, of course, brilliant (you can always rely on Ms Richardson to deliver her A game and she has an important role in this story). She’s also very beautiful. The supporting cast (including Michael Gambon, Casper Van Dien, Jeffrey Jones, Richard Griffiths, Ian McDiarmid and Michael Gough) are all good and each has an important part to play. Christopher Lee has a fun cameo and Christopher Walken is astonishingly memorable in his key part. One things certain, Burton put together a dream cast for this film.

The Visuals

Burton has always been known as a visual story-teller and that’s certainly the case with Sleepy Hollow. The contrast between the city and the village is cleverly done through use of fog and colour (or lack thereof), with each and every shot looking like a painting. The costumes are also extremely rich, with Miranda Richardson and Christina Ricci especially, having some beautiful outfits. There are some nifty steampunk touches too which I appreciated, curtesy of Crane’s newfangled detective contraptions from the city.

Some images really stand out … the young child watching a lit Halloween lantern cast shadows on his bedroom wall, the fog creeping as the horseman approaches, snuffing out the village’s torches, Crane’s bird in a cage trick, blood spurting up a pumpkin scarecrow, the way heads spun, the very landscape like a dream culminating in the Tree of the Dead.

Many reviewers at the time noted this is an old fashioned movie, doing visuals lovingly and painstakingly with every ounce of the sweat and tears of the production team evident on the screen. Ian Mcdiarmid was quoted as saying (having just come off the set of Star Wars: Phantom Menace):

Having come from the blue-screen world of Star Wars it was wonderful to see gigantic, beautifully made perspective sets and wonderful clothes, and also people recreating a world. It’s like the way movies used to be done.

For all it’s horror and death, this is a very beautiful film and it makes the journey memorable and worth watching again and again. I notice a new loving detail every time.

The Music

A lot of people feel Danny Elfman’s music sounds the same across Burton films. I’ve always disagreed with that. I think he’s a very good composer and when he’s inspired, his work is truly beautiful. Just think of Edward Scissorhands, Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride and the Batman films. I’d add Sleepy Hollow to that count. His music for this film tells its own story, full of eerie choirs, violins and crashing horror sounds. It’s a strong enough soundtrack I can happily listen to it on Spotify. The music really adds to the dread of the film and it wouldn’t be as good without it.

The Themes

I loved the motif running through the film about masculine coded reason and logic versus feminine coded emotion, imagination and superstition. It is only when Crane works with both sides that he is able to crack the crime and find love. I also thought the film did a good job of showing why Crane had fallen so hard on the side of logic (“I am beaten down by it”) whilst allowing nods to Hammer Horror and gothic horror tropes (for this is a film that nods to past films including the original Karloff Frankenstein). It really adds a little something to rewatches when you see how the scriptwriter wove this theme throughout the plot and character interactions.

To conclude …

I’m one of those people that just can’t get enough of Burton doing gothic horror. My favourite films by him all edge into that territory … from Batman Returns to Sleepy Hollow to Corpse Bride to Sweeney Todd, something about his lonely, constructed worlds speak to me. Though Sleepy Hollow was popular at the time, it’s a Burton film I hear less and less about as time goes on. I suggest it’s high time people dusted off their DVD jackets or hightailed it to a streaming service. There’s a lot to enjoy in this bloody, eerie tale. It may have little to do with the original Washington Irving story, but it remains a fun jaunt through a beautifully constructed world that could only exist at the movies.

In one of the more interesting fairy story appropriations, there has even been a Tony award winning Broadway musical featuring the memorable rapping witch, Bernadette Peters, in a post modern opretta. With songs like Children Should Listen, Last Midnight and No One is Alone, Sondheim further cemented himself as a musical composer and lyricist of considerable skill with Into The Woods.

It’s fair to say that I care quite a lot about this one. I was more than a little worried, however, when I heard that Disney were making Sondheim’s Tony winning musical. The very idea seems an oxymoron. Though the first act follows tried and true fairy tale paths, albeit by revisiting the origin fairy stories of those we know and love today, the second act tracks what happens after ‘happily ever after’ has faded and becomes a moving treatise on relationships between parents and children and the importance of stories in shaping children. It’s hardly something I would have thought was up Disney’s alley.

I also wasn’t too happy when I heard that Meryl Streep had been cast as The Witch (aside: why must Hollywood insist there is only one woman over 50 suitable for Hollywood roles? It’s very tedious. Years ago Miranda Richardson pointed this out despite cries of ‘sour grapes’ but her point feels more relevant than ever these days. I like Meryl Streep and she’s a wonderful actress, but other excellent older women who act are out there!) It’s just that Bernadette Peters made that role and The Witch is the best character and I couldn’t see Meryl being as powerful a singer as Bernadette. However, it is my brother’s favorite musical and every time an adaptation is put on near us I can’t see it, so I felt like I owed it to him to see it. Also, I quite like Emily Blunt.

Surprisingly, the film isn’t as bad as you’d think it might be. Actually, it’s rather, well, good. The first half religiously follows the first act of the musical, a quest story held together by The Baker (James Cordon) and his wife (Emily Blunt), who must reverse a witches curse by collecting items from people from popular fairy stories (Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel) so that they might get their long sought after child. This half sits more comfortably with Disney’s modern oeuvre, particularly modern films like Burton’s take on Alice in Wonderland. All of the cast are competent singers, with some of them genuinely very good. It’s no surprise that Daniel Huttlestone (Gavroche in Les Miserables) is excellent, but though I’d heard Blunt sing once before in Poliakoff’s excellent Gideon’s Daughter, I was surprised by how convincing she was as The Baker’s Wife and Anna Kendrick sang a beautiful Cinderella. Johnny Depp was also perfectly cast as The Wolf and The Prince’s entertain in the wonderful Agony sequence. In fact, the only real quibble I had with the first half of the film was the decision to leave The Narrator in. Given that he didn’t play the part he was meant to play in Act 2 of the film, it just sounded silly to have him tell us what characters were about to do just before they did it and he threw me out of the story. The only other minor quibble I had was that Meryl Streep sounded a bit out of breath during her rapping sequence at the start.

On the other hand, Disney didn’t edit out the line, ‘he was robbing me, raping me,’ which I was certain they’d do. Actually, they left a lot in. Cinderella’s sisters still mutilate their feet to try to win The Prince, Rapunzel’s Prince still gets blinded by the angry Witch, and most importantly of all, they left Little Red Riding Hood’s sequence with The Wolf as an ode to emerging sexuality. I was dead certain they’d tone that controversy down. Johnny Depp was creepily pedophilic as he crooned Hello, Little Girl and when Little Red Hiding is rescued and later sings ‘And I know things now, many valuable things, that I never knew before…’ the Freudian overtones were still there. It was perfect.

Unfortunately, the second act of the film became a bit of a mess, and from what I’ve heard from many of my friends who haven’t seen the original musical, for them it was both incomprehensible and confusingly amoral. It all stems from the fact that they cut the Act 2 Prologue which shows what happens when the initial ‘ever after’ has started to fade. This is really important to the story because it explains why The Baker’s Wife strays and commits adultery with Cinderella’s Prince (because her baby won’t stop crying at all hours and her husband is too insecure to help her look after the baby) and because in cutting this song and later Agony Reprise (the line, ‘ah well… back to our wives…’ is deliciously ironic), we don’t get a sense of just how misogynistic and flighty The Princes are (In the original, Rapunzel’s Prince abandons her in the wood for Snow White and Rapunzel is left roaming the forest mad until she gets killed and Cinderella’s Prince seduces The Baker’s Wife after singing about how much he wants Sleeping Beauty). This omission seriously weakens the character of The Baker’s Wife and makes her seem like a right floozy, though poor Emily Blunt does her best with what she is left with. The cutting of the Rapunzel story arc also makes The Witch’s motives in Last Midnight less coherent, which in turn, weakens the ‘children should listen’ theme.

Still, it was all beautifully sung, and Meryl Streep seemed a lot more comfortable singing Children Should Listen and Last Midnight (my favourite song in the entire musical) then she did rapping at the start of the film. It is also a very complex musical, as all of Sondheim’s pieces are, and filming his stuff well is nigh on impossible, even if Burton did succeed with Sweeney Todd (I would argue this is because he is an auteur director though). The fairy story revisionism part of Into The Woods is only the tip of this rich play. Digging deeper, it is a Freudian look at relationships between parents and children, a post modern take on morality and the way we, as individuals, choose to tell our stories, and a parable about the need to take action, to journey, to do with all of your being (to go into the woods) even if doing so undoes you. I absolutely love that the musical and the film end on Cinderella’s final ‘I wish.’

I’ll leave you with the finale lines which sums up the entire point of the show:

Careful the wish you make,
Wishes are children.
Careful the path they take,
Wishes come true,
Not free.
Careful the spell you cast,
Not just on children.
Sometimes the spell may last
Past what you can see
And turn against you…

All
Though it’s fearful,
Though it’s deep, though it’s dark
And though you may lose the path,
Though you may encounter wolves,
You can’t just act,
You have to listen.
you can’t just act,
You have to think.

If Disney had taken as much care with the second half of the film as they did with the first half, this could have been a second Sweeney Todd. As it is, it’s a passable effort with moments of brilliance.

Into The Woods: 7/10 inky stars

I have read criticisms of this film that criticise it for not casting people of colour. Whilst I get where this criticism comes from and acknowledge it’s a valid one, given that diverse casting is a wider Hollywood problem, I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to single out this film for all of the blame.

In 2010, I went to his art exhibition in Melbourne and even shook hands with the man himself. I have a lot of respect for Mr Burton. His partner is my favourite actress and has been since I was roughly ten and saw her in Hallmark’s Merlin. I like Burton’s take on fantasy. I like his visuals. I like his actors. I did not like Alice in Wonderland. It didn’t feel Burton. It didn’t feel true to him. Much to my disappointment, I did not like Dark Shadows either. Is my love affair with all things Burton really at an end? I sincerely hope not. His art exhibition proved to me that there is still oodles of inspiration and imagination and story left in him. If only he would stop taking vanity jobs, and get on with it.

So what is Dark Shadows about? I’m not sure if I even got that straight. Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) wrongs a witch (Eva Green) by jilting her love, and ends up with a revenge vendetta; his lover dead, and Barnabas cursed and buried deep as a vampire for centuries, a curse also on the family name. Flashforward to the 1970s: A governess gets a job with an aristocratic family who has fallen on hard times. Barnabas is reawakened and wants revenge on the witch, who still both loathes and loves him. Who will win out, and can Barnabas still win back his reborn lady love? Sound confusing? It is. And I haven’t even gone into the side characters yet, such as a random son/father plot that came out of nowhere, something about a werewolf, a psychiatrist (Helena Bonham Carter, who was so awful there was a moment there where I was ashamed to be a Helena fan. Fingers crossed for Les Miserables and Great Expectations) who falls in love with Barnabas and meets a sticky end, and Michelle Pfeiffer’s (utterly wasted) turn as the matriarch trying to hold her family together with only faded pride for company.

The movie switched points of view so many times I lost count. I couldn’t identify with characters at all. None of them were likeable. None of them had fleshed out stories. Don’t get me wrong; there was a story buried deep within this movie, but Burton needed to pick one and run with it. Alternating between a fish out of water tale, a love story, a horror, a comedy, and a pastiche, by the end of the movie I’d stopped caring, and started laughing, and not in a good way.

My friend, Elise, describes movies in inclines and declines. Shutter Island gets the thumbs up from her because the story draws you right in, pulling the rug out from under you in clever, emotional ways every time you think you’re onto the script writer. Elise spent most of Dark Shadows rolling her eyes and laughing at how far down the slippery slope the film was falling. The first ten minutes were ok, but then the steep decline began, and it didn’t let up all the way to the bitter (and inevitable sequel driven) end.

Dark Shadows reminds me an awful lot of Mars Attacks! which was a spoof of big block buster sci fi, alien invasion films of the 80s/90s. The problem with Dark Shadows is that it is a spoof of a very particular tv show sit com, and the joke isn’t funny if you don’t know the source material. Heck, even if you do know the source material, it might not be funny, depending on how much you took the original show seriously the first time round. My friend, Tegan, asked confusedly afterwards, why Burton and co. didn’t just film the whole project in a backshed and release it that way. That way, he might at least have gotten on with making a decent block buster.

In some ways, it really felt like the joke was on us. Certainly, the film was no expert comedy, and heaven knows, Burton has really reached new lows with this film. One  scene involved his partner sucking off his best friend. I was scarred and disgusted. Where is the clever, quirky humour of the old Burton? Where is the class? This time, it was all about the lowest Hollywood denominator. “Ha!” Burton chortles in his London home. “Look at the cast I can assemble! Look at the big name production company! And the script? Who needs one? Let’s see how many are sucked in for a second time! Mars Attacks! was not enough to teach the audience a lesson about Hollywood excess!”

Mercy Burton! I most solomnly do swear I have learnt my Hollywood lesson! Please… please… please go back to films like Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, and Sweeney Todd. Please. Come on Burton. We all know you are better than this. Prove it to me next time. I’m begging you, before I too, jump the Burton ship.

Dark Shadows: 2/10 inky stars, for the rocking music track, and for Michelle Pfeiffer, perhaps the only actor in this film to make it to the credits with her dignity intact. Welcome back love. I’ve missed you.

His skin was pale, and his eye was odd.

He shaved the faces of gentlemen

who never thereafter were heard of again…’

So begin’s one of Broadway’s most chilling musical pieces…

I first saw Burton’s movie in 2008 when it was in cinema’s in Australia. I’d never heard of the original horror story before, and generally I hate horror, but my love for Helena Bonham Carter won out, and got me to the cinema. I ended up seeing the film three times in cinemas because I loved it so much. For me, the power of the movie was the jarring combination of Sondheim’s soaring and beautifully complex score and lyrics combined with the sheer brutality of the story being told. Lovely art direction and acting definitely helped.

My friend lent me a copy of the original penny dreadful, with the popular culture legend based off the weekly periodical, and even though penny dreadful’s are renowned for catering to the lowest common denominator, meandering all over the place, due to their status as a newspaper weekly periodical written by multiple writers, or by writers writing multiple tales at once, I was keen to read this one, if only to find out how much the tale has evolved.

Rather alot it turns out. The original penny dreadful is surprisingly readable, and for the most part, keeps its story straight. Mrs Lovett has about four chapters dedicated to her out of thirty seven and the story starts off with her already in cahoots with Sweeney. Sweeney Todd is a right evil villain, without a backstory for it beyond greed, cunning, and a desire to make it big, quick. Johanna and her lover, Mark Ingistrie (later becoming Antony) are lovers before the story begins, with Mark going to sea to make his fortune in order to marry Johanna. Mark brings back a string of pearls with disatrous results. Sweeney kills the messenger, literally, runs off with the pearls, and kills his clients with wild abandon in an effort to shut up shop and retire fast. His clients get disposed of via the chair which links via passageway to Mrs Lovett’s pie shop. And yes, she does bake those bodies into pies. Tobias is Sweeney’s latest shop assistant and upon finding out about Sweeney’s evil secret is incarcerated in an asylum. Mark Ingestrie is hidden in the narrative right up until the rather obvious end, when he and the plucky Johanna live happily ever after. St Dunstan’s market and church make an appearance, and so does The Beadle briefly, though as a good guy. There is no judge at all.

The penny dreadful was entitled “The String of Pearls: A Romance” and was set much earlier than later play adaptations, much more about the daring do’s of Johanna and Tobias, fighting to survive amongst the cut throats, criminals and madmen of London’s dark underbelly. And of course, centre stage is the romance of Mark and Johanna. Sweeney and Mrs Lovett are are black as you can get, and you don’t spend a second sympathising with either of them.

In subsequent play productions of the penny dreadful, such was the popularity of Sweeney and Mrs Lovett, it was they who started to claim the show more and more, though still with Sweeney as villainous mastermind, in a kind of centre stage one man show. It was not until Christopher Bond reinterpreted the original story in 1970 to give Sweeney a sympathetic backstory based on revenge, with Mrs Lovett as a still willing, yet this time, deeply in love accomplice, that the story as it is famously known today surfaced.

No longer was Sweeney simply a common criminal; now he was a man wrongly accused, sent overseas and torn apart from his family, because the hand of the law was long and corrupt and lustful. His existential crisis leads him to seek revenge for these wrongs, with the judge and his faithful Beadle, the targets of Sweeney’s murders. Mrs Lovett is no longer simply a conniving and cold hearted money maker, she is now a lady lost in a love she can never have. The simple Tobias Ragg just wants somebody to respect him, Johanna falls in love with the sailor boy Antony, even as she is kept in captivity by the lustful judge, who intends to marry her, as Sweeney’s daughter. And the judge is in some ways more of a villain then Sweeney.

Sondheim saw a stage production of Bond’s play and wrote his own musical based off this version, better known today as the justifiably famous 1979 Broadway play, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. 80% sung opretta, the original production starred Angela Lansbury as Mrs Lovett and Len Cariou as Sweeney Todd. Who could forget the powerful  and reoccuring narrational The Ballad of Sweeney Todd, or the heartfelt raw nihilism of Epiphany, the delightful and disturbing humour of A Little Priest, the sweet innocence of Kiss Me, the chilling beauty, power and devestation of Final Scene? Regarded by Sondheim as a musical about obsessional revenge, and by director Harold Prince as a comment on capitalism, class, and power imbalance in soicety, it won alot of awards, but has never achieved the same popularity as musicals such as Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera.

Burton’s film adapted for a new audience yet again. This time, and due to the nature of a film medium, the external narration was cut, Johanna and Antony take a back seat for Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovett to shine, and Toby is a child, rather than a ‘simple’ man. Mrs Lovett is younger, and her maternal insincts are played up, eyes glistening with longing every time Sweeney looks her way, the camera lingering on her every glance, and movement, as she tries to seduce him so that they can live her dream life, ‘By The Sea.’ In the film version, every fibre of Mrs Lovett’s being is geared towards achieving her impossible dream of domesticity with Sweeney, Toby just wants a family, and Sweeney is so consumed with rage and despair he cares for nothing beyond the judge’s demise. It is, in my opinion, a movie masterpiece.

Burton cast actors who could sing, rather than singers who could act, minimising the theatrical nature of the play medium in favour of strong, visceral, performances.

Johnny Depp’s Sweeney sings in emotion laden rock style, and Helena’s Mrs Lovett is timerous, and soft, oozing both sexuality and soft maternal love. The genius choice to cast Toby as a boy led to one of the film’s finest moments, as Toby sings Not While I’m Around to a devestated Mrs Lovett.

A review by famous Rolling Stones film critic, Peter Travers sums it up best for me: “Sweeney Todd is a thriller-diller from start to finish: scary, monstrously funny and melodically thrilling…Covered in blood, Sweeney is finally engulfed by his emotions, and Depp finds the character’s grieving heart. It’s a staggering moment in a spellbinder of breathtaking beauty and terror.”
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/sweeney-todd-20071213#ixzz1tln2hXON

Though the original penny dreadful spawned one of the west’s most popular tales of urban horror, it is Sondheim’s ingenious musical, straddling both gut churning thriller and melodic beauty, that speaks most to me. Emotional, terrifying, and visceral, it is one of my favourite musicals, and Burton’s film adaptation remains one of the best film’s I have ever seen.

So without futher ado, I urge you to…

Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.

He served a dark and hungry god.

To seek revenge may lead to hell,

but everyone does it, and seldom as well

as Sweeney, as Sweeney Todd,

The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.