A Movie to Look Forward To

There are many movies that I look for­ward catch­ing this com­ing sea­son. I can’t wait to see the screen ver­sion of The Golden Com­pass, after hav­ing loved the book of the same name by Phillip Pull­man. The other book that is now a film is I Am Leg­end and it also looks inter­est­ing. Get Smart, a TV com­edy series that I loved as a kid, looks won­der­fully silly with Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart. Today I found out about one that I hadn’t expected at all, and prob­a­bly because it’s a musi­cal.

I’m not usu­ally a fan of musi­cals. The gee-whiz corn-fed whole­some­ness of Okla­homa, Carousel or South Pacific is just not my cup of tea. I can do with­out the Dis­ney tourist attrac­tions like The Lion King, and Beauty and Beast, and can’t stand any­thing by the sug­ary yet taste­less Andrew Lloyd Web­ber. There are prob­a­bly only about 3 musi­cals I really do like: Bernstein’s West Side Story (which is cel­e­brat­ing its 50^th anniver­sary this year and is Pam’s favourite music of all time), Sondheim’s Sun­day in the Park with George and also his Sweeny Todd.

I pretty much go for any­thing Tim Bur­ton does. To me, he is the mor­bid genius who puts the cough in Kafkaesque, so it’s his adap­ta­tion of Sweeny Todd that I’m sur­prised to find­ing myself antic­i­pat­ing. If it weren’t enough that it’s a Tim Bur­ton pro­duc­tion, the cast includes Johnny Depp, Helena Bohnam Carter, Alan Rick­man and Sacha Baron Cohen. With a cast like that, I can’t imag­ine it being any­thing less than fas­ci­nat­ing. I thought Burton’s Night­mare Before Christ­mas (and yes, I know that he didn’t actu­ally direct that, but was a pro­ducer) suc­cess­fully linked an Edward Gorey sen­si­bil­ity to a score by Danny Elf­man that sounded at times like Kurt Weill’s The Three Penny Opera, so this lat­est project, which cov­ers some of the same ter­ri­tory and tone, sounds really promis­ing. It will cer­tainly be in my movie-going plans in Decem­ber, when it’s due out. Can­ni­bal­ism, Self-Destructive Obses­sions with Revenge, and Grungy 19^th Cen­tury Lon­don are all good Christ­mas Sea­son fare.