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.