I really, really, really wanted to like X-Men Origins: Wolverine. 

 EZ's dad, upon hearing the title of the film we went to see, wondered aloud how we could have expected it to be anything but bad, but that's because he is 65 years old and only likes subtitled Eastern European films about people getting killed by Nazis.  

But in an accidental way, he was totally right.  Just based on the title alone, I should have suspected that liking X-Men Origins: Wolverine was going to be an uphill battle.  I mean, why wouldn't you just call the movie Wolverine?  What kind of convoluted movie title is  X-Men Origins: Wolverine, anyway?  I'll tell you what kind of title it is:  it's the kind of title bestowed upon a film by people who are thinking to themselves, "FRANCHISE!"  As a title, it practically screams, "Hey kids, get in line for X-Men Origins: Nightcrawler,  X-Men Origins: Gambit,  X-Men Origins: Magneto, and (somethin' for the ladies, or, really, for the guys who like to look at ladies) X-Men Origins: Storm.  Then go buy the comic books based on the movies that are based on comic books.  Then go buy a Mountain Dew from Burger King in a giant collectible X-Men Origins: Wolverine cup and drink yourself into diabetic shock while mooning over the YouTube trailer for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which looks like another Real Winner, btw. ( Seriously.  Am I the only person who's not impressed by cars that turn into robots as the driving force behind an entire two hour film?  Well, okay, me and EZ's dad...)

Yes, I think a Magneto movie would be cool, too.

Wait, no, actually, I don't!  Because they're just going to totally fuck it up like they did the Wolverine movie.  Honestly, it's hard for me to comprehend how this could even happen.  I mean, you've got Hugh Jackman, he's naked, he's got adamantium claws... how can you go wrong?

Let me list a few suggestions.

You could start by totally overusing the voiceover/flashback montage device every time Wolverine has a quiet moment to brood half-nakedly.  For instance: right after his girlfriend gets killed. You know, he's sitting there looking all upset, and I find myself wondering, "I wonder what could be wrong with Wolverine naught but two hours after cradling the bloody corpse of his true love in a wooded dell?"  But then, thank GOD, I hear the voice of his true love calling, "Wolveriiiiine...", and I'm like, phew!  This also helps me to remember the title of the film.  (Well, part of it.  It might be a little better if Wolverine's dead girlfriend could have cried, "X-Men Origins: Woveriiiiine!")

Then you could take a beloved X-Men character like, say, Gambit, and turn him into a weird, two-dimensional Jar Jar Binks-like deus ex machina who always and only happens to show up when one of the many plot holes needs [sloppy, half-assed] mending.  Logan's about to kill the bad guy, but it's too early in the film!  Oh, wait, Gambit's here to screw it up for him.  Nevermind.  How the Hell will Logan get to Three Mile Island?  Oh, wait, here comes Gambit in his own personal Cessna!  You'd think an easier way to fix the many problems in the plot would be to write a different one, but that would require one writer or writing team with vision, or at least an interest in comic books, films, or people.  It's clear though, that the script for XMO: Wolverine has passed through the hands of so many studio hacks, it begins to take on a kind of "roomful of monkeys" randomness.  A butterfly flaps its wings in the rainforest, and Logan loses his memory.

Then, you could equip the movie with a bad guy who's so bad, he's actually bad at being bad.  I'm talking, natch, about Wolverine's arch nemesis and raison d'etre, his former Army boss, William Stryker, who seems to enjoy killing people and being a dick so much that he's constantly putting his own Evil Plans at risk to do it.  I'm not saying that I expect every comic book movie villain to be some kind of Hannah Arendt meditation on the banality of evil, but for once, I would enjoy a bad guy that's at least a little pragmatic. 

Top the whole thing off with a large, irritating helping of Winking References and character cameos for those few fanboy illuminati among us who are passingly familiar with the X-Men universe, and overly expository dialogue for the millions of unwashed masses (Sure.  Because most of the people  sitting in the dark with me for  two hours watching a movie called X-Men Origins: Wolverine probably just stumbled in by chance, because the theater was sold out of tickets for The Soloist).*  

*It reminds me of the so-gagworthy-it's etched-in-my-brain-for-eternity scene from Star Wars Episode III in which Natalie Portman gives birth to the twins and then cries "Luke!  Leia!"  as though there is a single human in the universe who's watching Star Wars Episode III going, "Hunh!  I wonder who those babies are?"

 Then throw in some really unsatisfying fight scenes, all leading up to a Forrest Gumpian climax in which Wolverine releases a bunch of mutant supermodels from bondage and then causes the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster while Patrick Stewart swoops in on a helicopter wearing pancake makeup and practically gives the camera a thumbs-up. 

Did I mention that they kill Charlie from Lost off in the first reel?  Assholes.



A photo of the Three Mile Island Disaster.  Notice how no buildings were actually destroyed by eye lasers.

The mythos of George Lucas is that he was once an auteur of some talent.  The early success and the gobs of money and the years of being pandered to by a fawning fanship have made him go all soft, and now he's lost his chops, and that's why everything he touches these days turns to poop instead of gold, mais oui? 

Well.  You know what I think?  I'll tell you:

HACK!  HACK, HACK, HACK, HACK!

George Lucas was always a lousy director and a lousy screenwriter with no sense of grace and tin ear for dialogue.  If you want proof that he never was sci-fi's answer to Orson Welles, all you have to do is go check out his back catalog.  THX 1138, anyone?  There are some movies that exist only so that they can be used as cool video walls in goth clubs.

Lucas was always a big idea man, but never the go-to guy for, say hashing out a complicated plot point, which is why his best work is that which he did not do himself.  He can imagine up all the swashbuckling space heroes and interplanetary princesses he wants, but for god's sake, do not let him write their love scenes!

Now George Lucas and his hetero life-partner Steven Spielberg, after years of blabbing about it and then dashing our hopes, have finally brought Indiana Jones out of retirement for one last cash infusion...er, I mean, adventure.    Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a hideous train-wreck of a film that is so poisonous to the imagination, that to finish watching this movie is to awaken, as though from a nightmare whose images are indelibly etched into your brain.  At least, I feel that it helps me to think of the film this way, as it makes it easier to preserve my love of the previous three Indiana Jones movies.  You know, the real ones.

Though it is also true this film is an insult to film everywhere, it is only because I am such a big Indiana Jones fan that I spew such bitter bile.

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull features Harrison Ford (natch) in the titular role, with hottie Shia LaBeouf, dudded up in leather daddy gear (he's supposed to be a greaser, but for my money, he looks just like Al Pacino in Cruising) and wasted in a thankless role, playing Robin to Ford's humorless Batman.  Years have passed since Indy's last hi-jinx, and he is older, more sombre, and more able to withstand a 10 megaton blast of nuclear radiation.  Perhaps the reason that he seems so down at the mouth is that all of his interesting side-kicks are dead by now.  Or perhaps it is because he has run out of Nazis to kill.  Instead, they have been replaced by a gaggle of Ruskie Commies, including Cate Blanchett, (Again, wasted.  There is nothing for her to do in this film but strike poses and lay on her best "Boris, get moose and squirrel!"  Unlike LaBouf, though, her career will probably recover.) who somehow becomes the main bad guy of the film, despite not being that important to the plot.   Unfortunately, as bad guys, the dour Reds can't hold a candle to those awesome, fey comic book Nazis of yore.  They're just gun fodder...like making an entire Star Trek episodeusing nothing but redshirts.  Oh, nyet, they've killed Ensign Jonhsonovitch!

In the time-honored Indina Jones serial, the movie usually starts at the end, catching us up with Indy at the conclusion of another adventure, the details of which we are left to richly imagine.  But KOTCS abandons form and kicks right into the meat of a plot which is both thinner and more convoluted than the other Indy films.  This only helps to cement the impression that Professor Henry Jones has somehow become embittered towards life. The rakish half-grin we love has been replaced by an unlovable and inscrutable half-grimace.  Ford looks like my dad does when his knees are acting up.

Some might posit that the reason Indy 's buckle no longer swashes is that Harrison Ford is getting too old to play the role, but I don't find that to be the case.  The problem here is that the script has chosen to play it that way.  Why, I can't imagine.  I get the impression, though, Lucas and Spielberg are trying to insure themselves against the future by setting up LaBeouf as heir to Ford's fedora.  That would be fine, I suppose, if the character they created for him was in any way interesting or dynamic, but he is not.  ( Possible title for the next film: Mutt Williams and the Specter of the Undead Franchise!  Just a suggestion.)  Again, this is not LaBeouf's fault, but the fault of a script that treats its characters like placeholders.  If Lucas could've found a way to replace them with CGI, he probably woul have, and then spent the rest of the movie flinging them off cliffs like rag dolls. 

The actors in this film may not desrve Oscars, but they do deserve a collective Purple Heart for bravery.  The film repeatedly asks them to do and say things that go way beyond the call of duty.  It's funny, because I am well aware that the Indiana Jones legacy is not built on realism.  And yet, while I can easily suspend my disbelief while watching Temple of Doom to think that sure, it's possible that you can jump out of an airplane in an inflatable raft, land on the edge of a waterfall, go down the waterfall, float downriver for two miles and never lose one's hat, for some reason, when Harrison Ford seals himself in a refrigerator in Crystal Skull and gets blasted a half mile into the air by a nuclear test missile, lands safely and emerges unharmed, I think to myself: "Wouldn't he break his neck?  Wouldn't he get locked into the fridge?  Wouldn't the radiation sickness kill him?  Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!"

Also cringeworthy are the many winking references to Indy's past and therefore, to other Indy films.  At the Center for Disease Control, they call this Kevin Smith's Syndrome, and it is deadly.  No film survives it.  Not even Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.  Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, though, takes it's KSS even further, spinning it into a huge, painful, cliche plot thread.

Ther are so many other offenses, both large and small, that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull commits, both against its predecessors and against cinema as a whole, but I would like, instead, to end this review by leaving you with an image, which I think cuts to the heart of all of the film's many problems:
There's a scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in which Indy and crew are treated to  a totally fucked up meal of monkey brains served in the skull of a dead monkey, eyeball soup, giant roasted beetles, and a serpent stuffed with live baby snakes.  Imagine for a moment that we, the audience, are Willie the lounge singer.  This movie is the gross meal we're being forced to endure.  And George Lucas?  He's the snake.  Or, more accurately, he is Cronos, the titan of Greek Myth, father of Zeus.  Sitting up on Mount Olympus, lazy and bloated as Jabba the Hut, devoring his own young.

A Few Notes: The first of which is that I am blogging tipsy...which is not often advisable. The second is that this review contains what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs call "spoilers". Although how one can spoil a movie like I Am Legend , which already stinks like a tuna casserole in a Hefty bag left in the sun in the Makgadikgadi salt flats, is beyond my comprehension. It's not exactly a predictable film, but it's not exactly Presumed Innocent, either. Still, if you're the type of person who doesn't like to "know" what "happens" in a movie before you've "seen" it, maybe you shouldn't read this.

On to the blog..

So, hey, what's up with Will Smith these days, anyway? Not that I was ever a huge Will Smith fan (Lies! In fourth grade, I bought a cassette tape of He's The DJ, I'm the Rapper and listened to it UNTIL IT BROKE. Yes, I did that.), but I miss the good old days, when the Fresh Prince used to kick it in Bel-Air. (Remember Carlton? He was black, but he acted like a nerdy white guy! Ha, ha, what a spazz!)

These days, it seems like all Le Prince Frais does is star in shitty, barely recognizable film adaptations of classic sci-fi novels. First, there was I, Robot, which resembled the Asimov book only insofar as it was called I, Robot. Also, there were robots in it.

Now, there is I Am Legend, part two of what is undoubtedly slated in the mind of some daft movie exec to be a special edition boxed trilogy with three different collectible designs, the last film of which will probably be I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, starring Smith as hard-boiled NYC cop, Detective Maya Angelou.

I am Legend owes more to the campy 1971 Charlton Heston film Omega Man than it does to the 1954 horror novella by Richard Matheson, upon which both films are based. But if Omega Man can be said to be loosely based on the book, then I Am Legend must be loosely based on Omega Man, and there is a palpable sense of diminishing returns; a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.

The opening of the film is lovely. The streets of New York City, abandoned by humanity and reclaimed by nature, are beautifully realized in a way that many Doom & Gloom Post-Apocalyptic movie mis-en-scene are not. Usually in films such as this, vegetation is curiously absent, as though whatever scourge it was that took down the humans has mysteriously scorched every green thing as well, which always seemed to me to be a little bit presumptuous. This version of the City Without Us seems more convincing, though...like an abandoned parking lot that has been broken into asphalty bits by the prairie grasses it once smothered.

The post-human idyll is soon interrupted, however, by the roaring engine sound of Will Smith in a fancy sports car, in which he is inexplicably (and, one can only imagine, ineffectually) hunting gazelle. This image can be used as a shorthand for everything that's wrong with this film. Actually, with modern cinema in general. Just when things get good, here comes Will Smith, roaring through in a sports car.

As anyone could probably glean from watching the trailer, or even just from being near someone who has watched the trailer, Will Smith is the Last Man on Earth...or the Last Man in Manhattan, anyway. (If you believe the movies, Manhattan pretty much is the world, though, so it's really the same diff.) All the other humans have succumbed to some kind of mystery virus that has made them into these sort of zombie vampire things. Vambies? Zompires? It is never really made clear which one they are. In the book, as in Omega Man, they are vampires, although the vampires in the book are presented as mindless and gross to behold, more like zombies than like, say, Tom Cruise in a blonde wig.

The Vambie Zompires of I Am Legend, the film, are like a thousand svelte, pale, identically computer-generated Michael Stipes with detachable jaws. The virus also seems to have given them superhuman strength and speed. Y'know, like viruses tend to do.  They move with the rubbery limbs of the CGI monster, and do not seem to exist real in space.  They look fake. Unlike the ones in Omega Man and in I am Legend, the book, these zompires do not speak, only howl and gibber, like huge animated bats. Their clone-like multitudes are scary enough, but only in the way that wild animals are scary, (not like REAL zombies and vampires are scary, like people who used to be human but now are inhuman would be scary.)

Will Smith (excuse me, I mean Dr. Will Smith, World's Most Perfect Human), when not cruising the buckled streets of New York in a Mustang, spends his days hunting the zompires, and his nights trying to cure them by developing a vaccine in his incredibly advanced basement laboratory, where he also keeps a captured girl-zompire.  (She looks like a comic-book heroine...ropy muscled and hairless, her large, pale chest heaving in a way that seems to be ill-advisedly titilating.)

Huh!  And some people just have pool tables in their basements.

But not Big Willie Style.  Not only does he have the good fortune to be the only person in New York City to be immune to the Michael Stipe Doomsday Bug, but he is also a military virologist AAAAND, if one is to judge from the gigantic retrofitted vambie-proof brownstone he calls his home, not only wealthy, but incredibly handy with the sheet metal.

Did I mention that he is also incredibly buff? (A fact that is driven home with many tight tee-shirts and one armed pull-ups. Although, there is no sequence in this film to match the soft porn shower scene at the beginning of I, Robot. which, in my opinion, is a damn shame.) This is one of the more radical departures from the book. The Robert Neville of Matheson's novella is an everyman...middle aged, smoking, drinking, and living in what seems to be an average suburban neighborhood in Anytown, USA (as opposed to, say THE NICEST BROWNSTONE IN MANHATTAN). The Robert Neville of "I Am Legend" the film is a rich, buff, incredibly successful, disease resistant Ubermensch. AND he raps!  What a lucky break for all of humanity that this Man Among Men should be their Last Hope.

Make no mistake, though, Dr. Will Smith has one fatal flaw: he loves Bob Marley. 

There is a moment, early in the film, where we are treated to a wistful glimpse of what this movie could have been, in which Smith, locked down for the night in his fancy prison, lovingly washes his dog and sings "Three Little Birds" to himself while outside, the remnants of shattered humanity wail and groan.  It isn't subtle, but it's effective, and it is one of the few moments when we feel real loneliness for the loss of the world.

It's not enough to satisfy an insecure filmmaker, though.  I mean, what if the audiesnce doesn't get it?!   Better turn Bob Marley into a symbolic figure of All That's Right with Humanity, as opposed to the squalling demon beasts outside Will Smith's steel-reinforced front door.  Even with all of the weird suspensions of disbelief and logical inconsistencies to follow, this remains the hands-down most irritating aspect of the film, precisely because it signals, fatally, that this will be That Type of Film.  You know what I'm talking about; the type of film that doesn't trust its audience to pick up on the themes it wishes to impart, and so bludgeons us over the head with them with a lot of flashbacks and speechifying.  Also, I really can't stand Bob Marley fans.  (I mean, the guy was a musician, not Benazir Bhutto.  Give it a rest already.)

Clumsy as it is, this setup bumps along in a surprisingly satisfying rhythm until about halfway through the film, when tragedy strikes and Will's world, not to mention the film, starts to fall apart. Will Smith is out on his vambie hunt one day when he finds that the tricky beasts have actually been picking up a few ideas from his own vambie-trappin' handbook.  He falls into an incredibly elaborate trap that the seeming "leader" of the vambies (if you can call him that.  It's safer to refer to him as "The Zompire Who Gets All the Close-ups") has set for him.  This would seem to suggest that the vambies have an intelligence heretofore unguessed by Our Man Smith, who has been picking them off like so many cockroaches this whole time.  Having read the book and seen Omega Man, I though to myself, "A-ha!  At last, the twist!"

But, no.

Incongruously, it never occurs to Smith to be impressed by or even notice the zompires sudden show of clever resourcefulness, even as we, the audience, are thinking, "How the hell did they get that car strung up there?  How the hell did they know that Will Smith talked to the mannequins at the video store?  When the hell did they do this, if they can't go out in the daylight?  What the fuck is going on?"  It's as though a chimp walked up to Jane Goodall one day in the Gombe and said in English, "Hey, what's happenin'?  Got a banana?" and she just wrote in her notebook, "Bobo displays a curious new hoot.  Maybe a mating call?"

The result of this clever booby-trap leaves Smith dangling by his foot on loading dock for the better part of a day, leading to a sunset escape in which his dog saves his life, but gets mauled by the zompires and dies tragically in Will Smith's arms while Will Smith sings "Three Little Birds" to him, which you totally never saw coming!  Nonetheless, this choked me up.  I'm a sucker for animals.  Also, I was sad at the loss of the best actor in the film.

Cut loose of his connection to the one being left on the Earth that he cares about, Smith goes on an ill-advised suicidal late-night vambie-killin' rampage, which almost kills him, and which he is miraculously saved from by two wandering survivors, a young woman and a boy, who have themselves miraculously not died at the hands of the vambies, despite the fatc that they aren't even buff super-doctors, though, based on their  tanked-out SUV, one must conclude they are apparently even more handy with a blow torch than the Doc is.  Make no mistake.  In the event of a vambie zompocalypse, the first place to loot is the Home Depot.  

The movie just gets worse and more muddled from here...a horrible speech about Bob Marley is made ("What do you mean, you've never heard of Bob Marley?!  Well, let me tell you about Bob Marley..."), some shit happens, zambies get in the house, but not before it is discovered that the good doctor's search for a cure has brewed up a success!  He has cured the lady-zompire in his basement! 
He tries to tell the vambies the good news, but of course, (being smart enough to rig up a Volkswagen to fall over a bridge, thus causing a rope to pull up tight around Will Smith's ankle and capture him just like in a Warner Brothers cartoon, but not smart enough to understand that Will Smith is trying to communicate with them), the zambies simply swarm and kill him.  I think at that moment he blows them up, but by that point of the film, I had ceased to really pay attention.

 It's okay though, because the two people who rescued him escape to a magical colony of survivors, bearing with them the magical vaccine that Will Smith has concocted, even though none of the survivors need it , because they're all immune, or they wouldn't have survived, duh.   A voiceover tells us that this is the meaning of the title of the film: that Dr. Neville, having martyred himself for humanity, is a legend. 

He is legend!  Get it?

Get it?

Because if you don't, maybe we could put in some sort of flashback.  Like a slow-mo flashback? 

And a Bob Marley quote.

Oh yeah, that's good...

Let's tell it like it is, here.  Tim Burton's dark vision is of himself as a younger, more attractive cross between Robert Smith and an anime character.  That's why he always hires heartthrob Johnny Depp to play himsel-whoops, I mean his leads, in all of his movies.
 In truth, Tim Burton looks just like a gene splicing three-way between Rick Ocasek , Siouxie Sioux and Huckleberry Hound.
 
Before I start trashing Tim Burton's new adaptation of Sweeney Todd, I must say two things.  The first is that I consider myself a Tim Burton fan.  So anything I'm saying here isn't just me being a bitch...it's Tough Love.  Tim, baby, you need an intervention.  We are your friends, and we don't want to see you go out like this.  Fergodsake, listen to me, Timmy!  It's for your own good!

The second thing I must make note of before I commence the brutality is that I watched TB's version of Sweeney Todd raw, a Sweeney Virgin, if you will.  So you can cut the "you're just a Sondheim purist" jazz right now.  I will  say, however, that after seeing Burton's version,  I went out and got the dvd of the famous stage version with George Hern and Angela Lansbury, and it was mindblowingly good.  That said, I will be making comparisons between the two versions throughout this piece.  But you should know that I had no preconceptions when I came to Burton's Sweeney.  The whole thing was very scientific. 

After the sound drubbing I'm about to give this movie, you're probably going to think I hated it, but actually, I thought it was okay.   Better that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, at least, which had a creep factor of, oh, about a gazillion.  People make a big thing about Burton's Sweeney Todd being gory, but that, to me, wasn't a drawback, especially compared to the utter ickiness of Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka, who makes one's skin crawl before he even speaks a line.  He takes Gene Wilder's gentle (and dare I say, a li'l bit sexy) Wonka and turns him into a mincing spazz who probably has the bodies of dead children stacked in his factory basement.  Now, that's terror.

The sad thing about Burton is that he once was a director with real promise.  Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, (and even Batman and the critically panned Batman Returns) all had a sort of cracked charm.  They were creepy, but in a warm fuzzy way. Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, in particular, are enjoyably odd little tales that are beautiful to behold.  Tim Burton has...or at least had... a unique aesthetic, most gorgeously realized in The Nightmare Before Christmas, which, sadly for him, he neither wrote nor directed.

  But being a director with promise and being a director with genius are two different things, and all that early praise seems to have gone to Tim's head.  It's easy to be your own golden goose when anything you shit out is treated like pure gold.  Burton's "vision" has become an affectation.  Is the movie dark?  Make it darker!  Darker I say!  Are the stars thin and  beautiful and pale with big, big, sad puppy eyes ?  Make 'em paler!  Sadder!  I don't want eyes, I want two black holes in the middle of their faces!

Hence, we have Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter as Sweeney and Mrs. Lovetts.  Both are beautiful, both pale, and neither can really sing, at least, not in the way that Sweeney Todd needs to be sung.

They are both just a little too young for their roles...or at least too young-looking.  Mrs. Lovetts, in particular, seems that she should be a bit more blowsy and hard.  It's not that I think Bonham Carter did a bad job in the role, but she's just too doll-faced to really pull off "slatternly". 

It doesn't help that Burton has directed both she and Depp in to a dull, lifeless corner.  Any moments that begin to border on the delightful are quickly squelched by the insistence that this is a serious movie, dammit!   Not just some Broadway frippery. Songs that are supposed to be funny are barely amusing.  Songs that are sad are maudlin.  Any urges towards theatricality are shut down by Burton's insistence that, though this is a musical, it's not going to be y'know, all musical-y.  

I watched the dvd extras afterwards and it turns out (surprise!) that Tim Burton doesn't like musicals.   Which leads one to ask: well then, why the fuck is he making one?  The only song that really sings is "By the Sea", a frilly little island number in which Mrs. Lovetts fantasizes about getting the hell out of London (and the way Burton paints London, who can blame her?).  It is the only moment when Burton allows himself a little directorial license, whisking Depp and Carter away to exotic locales through the benefit of Lovett's imaginings.  And it's actually pretty funny to see Depp's unsmiling, hollow-eyed Todd sitting like a lump on a beach in a ribboned boater.  This is the only number that is more successful than the stage version.  

Johnny Depp got a lot of props for his portrayal of Todd, but I'm not sure why.  He adopts a broad British accent and sneers his way through songs like he's Trent Reznor. (On second thought, that's giving him too much credit.  Really, he's more like David Cook from American Idol.)  His one note is Dour.  He spends the majority of the film scowling, barely blinking, unmoved and unmoving.  It makes you wonder what Mrs. Lovetts sees in him, since he clearly could care less.

Steven Sondheim himself did the arrangements, cutting his original stage musical from a hefty three hour opus down to the film's not-inconsiderable running time of  116 minutes.  Sondheim, in the interview footage, claims to like this version of Sweeney Todd, but  who's to say that he's being honest?  He can't very well say in the dvd extras that he thinks Sweeney Todd is a flaming pile of shit, can he?  Still, it's hard to believe that he enjoys slashing his own score to ribbons.  (Then again, Sondheim once said in an interview that he doesn't like the film version of West Side Story.  So maybe he's just got bad taste in movies.)

 It is not so much what the movie does as what it fails to do that is its downfall.  The cuts are noticeable.  Absent are the choir of the dead who ring in the tale and occasionally pass comment throughout, a damning Greek chorus.  Instead the haunting choir is reduced a mere ghost, rattling its chains through the score.  Even watching Burton's Todd without having seen the original version, one senses that something in the music is missing.
It's a particular  tragedy to hear what a hash has been made of the song "Johanna".  Burton's Anthony is not assertive enough to pull off the vocal fireworks to make the audience believe this very important song.  It is the heart of the piece.  Again, it's hard to really blame the actors here.  Burton seems not to know which bits of Sweeney are important and which parts are not.   Actually, he seems not to even understand what's good about his own film.  For instance, he wastes a pitch-perfect Sacha Baron Cohen in a scene that could be hilarious but is only cute, afraid to play it too broad.

   Burton's consistent mistake seems to be his fear of seeming campy, playing it too much for laughs or too much for tears. (I must make a side note here:  I find it ironic that the man who made Ed Wood should be so loathe to appear campy .  Apparently, Burton has a different vision of himself than the rest of us do.)  Sweeney Todd is, after all, a tragedy, and a little bit of melodrama isn't out of place here.  This is a fact that the satge version never lets us forget, as when the young sailor, Anthony, buys a bird for Johanna, and the seller informs him that the reason the birds sing so prettily is that: "We blinds 'em, so's they don't know if it's day or night."  Moments later, the bird is killed by the Beadle, who cruelly snaps its little neck in his bare hand.  Oddly, Burton's "dark" version leaves such evil little details on the cutting floor. 

And what of Burton's darkness, anyway?  In some ways, the advent of CGI has worked against Burton.  It makes it too easy to achieve the gothic murkiness that is his trademark.  His London is perpetually bathed in that desaturated blue light that is now de rigeur for lazy film directors who want their movies to look bleak.   It's a cheap shorthand for psychic distress, and it's become a cliche.  In the Goode Olde days (like, 1992), fantastic sets had to be built.  Now, everything is greenscreened.  In the case of Sweeney Todd and Tim Burton, CGI only serves to make his work look just as bland and 2-dimensional as everybody else's.
 This is another telling contrast between the stage version and the film version; the stage version uses a minimal set to turn a shallow stage into a vast and secret city.  However, for all the infinitude of tools and possibilities inherent in film as a genre, the movie Sweeney feels stagey and unreal.

Sweeney Todd is the worst kind of disappointment; a semi-earnest attempt by able folks who should know what they're doing  by now, but don't have the cojones to play it for all it's worth.  At least when a movie is just out and out bad, you can enjoy it for its glorious badness.  But with Sweeney Todd, as with so many of Burton's more recent oeuvre, you're left only with the frustrating sense of what might have been, if only a certain lazy director would deflate his bloated ego and put his ass on the line once again.    It's remarkable, actually; Tim Burton seems to be de-evolving before our very eyes, like Deana Troi turning into a lizard in that one episode of Star Trek.

A camp genius who's forgotten that he's campy?  Where have we heard that before?  (cough, cough-Lucas!-cough..)There's a special kind of disappointment for auteurs whose early work that shows they've got potential for greatness turns by default into their great work.  If I could only close my eyes and repeat, "Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse!"  Maybe Michael Keaton would ride in on a giant sandworm and replace Tim Burton the elder with his former self. 

Or at the very least, eat him.