DVD Traffic Report: March 2008 Archives

Tim Burton may not seem like the ideal adapter of a Stephen Sondheim musical, but when you consider the wry ghoulishness of this throat-slashing tragedy, the aptness of Burton’s dark flamboyance is clear. With input from Sondheim himself, Sweeney Todd has been smartly and ruthlessly condensed to fit a two-hour template — some songs cut entirely, several more liberally pruned — without completely gutting the original musical. Burton’s re-conception of the material is where the bigger changes have taken place. The casting of Johnny Depp, performing a brooding character study that shaves the comic surface from his famous pirate Jack Sparrow, is a stroke (turns out he can sing, too!), but Helena Bonham Carter, in strung-out goth mode, is never quite able to nail down her character (or maybe it's just difficult to imagine such an anti-Angela Lansbury in the role). Alan Rickman and the rubber-faced Timothy Spall can play comic adversaries in their sleep, and the anatomically enhanced Sacha Baron Cohen steals each scene he appears in as the barber Pirelli. The bloodletting is copious and graphic, but executed with a theatrical flair that softens the grisliness. Finally, Burton’s vision of the aspirationally romantic “By the Sea” is a riot — a perfect mini-movie with a stone-faced Depp channeling Buster Keaton. It’s a terrific musical in an uncommonly good year for movie musicals. (A version of this review originally appeared in the White Plains Times.)

Buy it from Amazon.com: Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street or Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Two-Disc Special Collector's Edition)

No Country For Old Men is, probably, the single most critically lauded film of the Coen Brothers' career. It's also a departure, especially in that it largely subjugates their own exhibitionist hallmarks of style and characterization to those established in the source material – in this case an expertly grim genre potboiler by Cormac McCarthy. No Country gets great benefits from the outstanding performances at its center – Javier Bardem's cold-blooded killer the kind of outsized stereotype that self-identifies as a Coen creation, but paying dividends in counterpoint to Josh Brolin's quiet desperado and Tommy Lee Jones's mournful good-ol-boy sheriff. I was yanked out of the story when vibe-busting reminders of the old-school Coen Brothers' schtick appeared on screen, especially the straight-out-of-central-casting types who inhabit the film's smaller speaking parts – the motel clerk who woodenly insists Brolin select from a menu of room choices, the mama who dodders through her scenes like a Spike Jonze Jackass parody of the elderly, and even the gas-station proprietor whose highly directed performance almost wrecks that crucial early, mood-setting scene with Chigurh. In a broad comedy like the wonderful paean to country folk and bluegrass O Brother Where Art Thou or the bountiful ode to stoner lifestyles The Big Lebowski, they'd be welcome, maybe even show-stealers. But juxtaposed with No Country's sad-eyed hero performances, they feel forced, inauthentic, even (here's that accusation so often lobbed at the Coens) crudely condescending. That's not to say that the Coens' style is a liability; they make consistently smart decisions in condensing and adapting McCarthy's novel, especially when it comes to packing the gist of Ed Tom Bell's lengthy monologues from the printed page into snatches of dialogue on screen. They work the story for suspense, fully exploiting the conventions of crime drama in a narrative (McCarthy's) that, eventually, deliberately flouts genre convention to terminate in a meditation on aging and mortality and maybe nostalgia. And they invent a scene that has the sheriff and the killer coming almost eyeball to eyeball across the portal of a motel-room door with a blasted-out lock cylinder, their simultaneous proximity and distance a necessarily cinematic expression that vaults beyond the source material. But the irony remains: two of our greatest cinema stylists have made the most critically lauded film of their career by ruthlessly corseting their formidable drive and vision into the literary strictures dictated by a great American novel. Seeing it a second time, at home, the melancholy grandeur of the film's final cut to black became even more apparent — reassurance that I wasn't simply bowing to conventional wisdom by placing it on my top-10 list. No Country For Old Men is a triumph for sure. But for the Coens, it's also something of a capitulation.

Buy it from Amazon.com: No Country for Old Men or No Country for Old Men [Blu-ray]