Sunday, September 09, 2007

Initial promotion for Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd"

It's still going to be a long wait before Sweeney Todd comes out (no release date set for Poland yet, but I think we'll be lucky if it comes out any earlier than February 2008). But even though we don't have a trailer yet, the temptation to write about it is too big - I've been extremely excited for this film ever since I first heard about it!
I mean you've got a very gory Broadway musical translated to film with Tim Burton as director - that's got to be interesting in itself, right? But once the plot and cast is put in place it gets better!
It's about Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp) who is a barber in 19th century London. He has a wife and a very young daughter, Johanna. And then one day, with the purpose of er... taking the barber's wife for himself, judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) imprisons Benjamin Barker on false accusations. Many years later (by which time the judge is lusting after Johanna, who is now 16), Benjamin Barker comes back as Sweeney Todd and decides to revenge himself on the world for the injustice that has happened to him and proceeds in cutting the throats of all who come his way. He has help in Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham-Carter) who uses the corpses to make meat pies.
We're also going to get Timothy Spall (he'll be playing some sort of accomplice to judge Turpin) and Sacha Baron Cohen (who will be playing a rival barber).
All of them are going to be doing their own singing which is particularly interesting in that this is supposed to be one of the most difficult Broadway musicals to sing. Some go as far as to call it an operetta rather than a musical.

The poster is out, but more interestingly just recently the first clip of the film was shown to an audience. This was at the Venice festival. Unfortunately, it hasn't surfaced on-line, but hopefully this means we won't have to wait for a trailer too long. The clip (in which Johnny Depp is psychotically singing to a razor) has gotten rave reviews, here's one of them.
And here's Stephen Sondheim (the author of the musical) teaching Guildhall School students the song in question:

It's going to be really fab, isn't it? :-D

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