Gentlemen of the world, I feel for you. How can you possibly be at ease with yourself when, somewhere out there in the world, there exists a man so fine that, even when he looks like the love child of a corpse and Susan Sontag, women want to jump his bones (pun fully intended)?
I just read that Johnny Depp won a Golden Globe for best actor in a comedy or musical for his part in Sweeney Todd. I saw it last night and I’m a little meh about it. I mean, Tim Burton can do no wrong when it comes to art direction and style, and I adore his aesthetic so much that I named my freaking cats after characters in a movie he had a huge hand in. And isn’t it so cute that he keeps casting Depp and Helena Bonham Carter and giving them hairdos that are strikingly similar to his own? No. It’s not cute. It’s annoying. It’s like the filmic equivalent of Groundhog Day — same details every time, just rearranged endlessly.
It’s one thing to have muses, but it’s entirely another to limit yourself only to what’s comfortable and formulaic enough to just get you by.
That said, there were moments of subtle awesomeness in Sweeney Todd. Probably my favorite sequence is the bit where Mrs. Lovett fantasizes about her and Mr. T’s life living on the beach. Seeing a brooding Todd sitting there in his stripey swimsuit, looking like a pissed-off ghoul burning in the sunshine, was worth all the singing and silly rhymes.