Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Tim Burton delivers another masterpiece in Sweeney Todd. Johnny Depp plays a vengeful barber who becomes a serial killer, while his wife Helena Bonham Carter makes meat pies out of the bodies. The movie will have the amount of gore and grief you would expect from an R-rated movie about a serial killer, even though it's a musical. The singing was pretty good, even by Depp who reportedly had not sung in decades. Tim Burton said that auditioning so many people singing was as intimate as seeing them naked for a porno. The singing certainly brought a level of intimacy to the film that contrasts the dark tone, and the score was as grandiloquent as the barber himself. If you like Tim Burton's aesthetic, then you will love Sweeney Todd. Almost the entire movie was colourless, except of course for the blood, and two brief scenes bookending the movie.

The sub-text played on the theme of how "man eats man," the eating of human meat pies a metaphor for this. The judge wants something that Sweeney Todd has, his beautiful wife, and so unfairly sentences him to life in prison. The judge reflects man's selfish nature. Todd, who escapes and comes back years later, requires vengeance, in his all-too-human nature. Todd has a great capacity for evil, and carelessness, definite traits of humanity. This was probably Tim Burton's darkest movie, but it was a great one, and further cements his status as one of the best director's of his generation.