The 10 movies I saw from 2007, part II

To continue with my post of a couple days ago in which I planned to rank and review all the movies I saw that were released in 2007 (beginning with There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men, my two favorites):

3) Sweeney Todd

I hadn't seen, heard, or even really known anything about Sweeney Todd the musical beforehand apart from its major plot point of people getting baked into pies, so I for one am not going to whine about the exclusion of X Song or how Helena Bonham-Carter isn't as a good a singer as Y Actress was. I did, however, grow up with Tim Burton's movies. As mentioned in a previous post, I adored Nightmare Before Christmas back when it was still a darkly-alluring children's movie rather than a neverending franchise of Hot Topic merchandise, and I can't remember how many times I watched Beetlejuice before I was out of elementary school. (I watched Beetlejuice again a few months ago, for the first time in a few years, and for the first time realized how much of it was meant to satirize Manhattan art-world yuppies. Beetlejuice himself also rather reminded me of a particular young man I was in a weird situation with at the time.)

I must say, the working-class mid-19th-century London of Sweeney Todd was an excellent outlet for Burton's hyper-stylized dark, macabre, (fine, I'll say it) gothic aesthetic. Burton even finds opportunities to poke fun at his own image, as when Mrs. Lovett sings of a longing for a nice domestic life with Todd and her streetwise, orphaned bakery assistant and Todd wears the same brooding, haunted expression throughout Lovett's fantasies of a wedding and a jaunt by the seaside. Johnny Depp, by the way, was terrific (as always) in the title role, but then I have an unfortunate weakness for those intense, self-destructive loners in old-fashioned clothes. (Especially if they know about film. But I digress.)

I've heard Sweeney Todd described as a musical for people who aren't necessarily into musicals and I'd have to agree with that. The songs are there to advance, or comment on, the plot and explain what's going on in the characters' heads, which to me are the best uses of songs within musicals (as opposed to moments when songs seem arbitrarily added because the director or author decided, "It's too quiet, let's paste another song here"). I also prefer it when the use of music is either fairly realistic (as in Cabaret, where most of the songs take place onstage since one of the protagonists is, after all, a cabaret singer) or very obviously grounded in a sort of fantasy world (as in Burton's previous Nightmare Before Christmas or, in a different approach, Chicago, where pretty much every song that doesn't take place onstage is a daydream of Roxy Hart's), rather than some quasi-"realistic" scenario in which people just happen to burst into song about nothing. I love Evita, also: yeah, it stars that gifted actress Madonna, but there are so few plain-old spoken lines that it's practically an opera (and most of Madonna's lines are shouted from a balcony, so her melodramatic delivery makes sense).

Did anyone else think Sweeney Todd's daughter was really uncomfortable-looking? She had the face of a child, but the figure of a fine young lady. I mean it was really weird, Humbert Humbert would surely buy this DVD just to watch her scenes and write lyrically convoluted paragraphs about them.


4) Eastern Promises

This might shoot up to #3 if I saw it again, but it's been a few months and right now the DVD is $20 at Target, which is currently too much for my unemployed ass to spend on a single disc. Viggo Mortenson turns in a fine job here as a charismatic Russian mob man who isn't all that he seems: too bad he has to compete with Daniel Day-Lewis in all this year's big film awards.

I definitely liked this better than Cronenberg's previous History of Violence. History was hardly a bad film, but it seemed like a short story where some other movies seem like novels: turns of events where it felt like the real plot was just getting started were actually revealed to be at the climax of the movie. Eastern Promises likewise suffers from Cronenberg's seeming inability, since embarking on more "normal" fare following years of grotesque genius like Videodrome and Dead Ringers, to know when or how to really end a movie.

Ah, yes, and then there's the whole !!ZOMG ARAGORN PEEN!!! thing. Yes, there is frontal male nudity in this, and yes, it's very tastefully and naturally presented: if someone tries to shank you while sitting in a sauna, of course your fucking towel is going to fall off at some point. I only wish more filmmakers had the balls (no pun intended) to show male nudity, and I don't say that out of prurient interest: not to go on a tirade about the Male Gaze, but in most movies, if you see a man's naked ass, it's often an attempt at comedy, whereas a woman's naked ass on film is inherently seen as sexual (unless she's elderly or obese, in which case it's seen as funny because it's not sexy). Real human beings have real naughty bits, so if you're filming a scene in which it would look staged and superfluous not to include nudity, please don't crap out just to protect the poor hetero male viewer's insecurities about his wee willy winkie.

5) Atonement

This won the Best Picture Golden Globe over No Country AND There Will Be Blood? Really? It's one of those movies I described in my last post, that have general critical approval but which I inevitably consider to be good-but-not-great.

This is a rare case where I've actually read the book it was based on long before the film was even made. As such, my perspective is naturally different from someone who came into this movie as a fairly blank slate: I mean, I already knew how it was going to end, and it was interesting to look for characters and scenes I recognized from the novel. Like, there's one character who rapes a pseudo-sophisticated 14-year-old girl while the rest of the family is out searching for her two runaway brothers, and when he's first shown interacting with her, I had to think: "Hey, it's that creepy rapist! Oh, man, why are you talking to her like that? You're a creepy rapist, you creepy rapist."

The plot point this story hinges on is the misidentification of another young man as said creepy rapist. Briony, a 13-year-old girl (whom I thought, also while reading the book, was awfully naive about sex for that age, but hell, maybe it was different in an isolated upper-crust country manor house in the '30s) who aspires to be an author invents her own fanciful, simplified explanations for events earlier in the day involving her college-aged sister and the young man who has, until now, only admired her from afar. Rather than acknowleding that her sister is a grown-ass woman who wants to bang the hot servant boy, she leads herself to believe that saintly Big Sis is being menaced by a sinister "sex maniac." As a writer myself, I've often been familiar with the drive to fictionalize people and events from my own life in order to help myself explain or otherwise deal with them, but all the same, it stays in my head and on the page where it belongs, and would never be presented as truth during a police interrogation. In the end, I don't think Briony genuinely "atoned": while she did finally understand the depth of her actions and wish to atone for them, she seemed to believe that lives ruined by fiction can likewise be mended through fiction, which doesn't seem to indicate she has truly learned very much in that area.

I have to gripe that one of my favorite parts of the book, the section about Robbie's experiences on the French battlefront during WWII, was severely truncated in translation to the screen, and I felt like one didn't get such a poignant picture of the depth of his suffering as a result. I must say, though, that Atonement's director and cinematographer often make death and suffering look absolutely beautiful.

Another small annoyance: can't anyone think of a better way to indicate that it's the same character played by different actresses at different ages than by giving her the exact same haircut at age 13, 18, and 80? Who the hell keeps the same haircut in retirement age that she had in middle school?


That's it for now; reviews of the last five will be posted whenever I feel like it. And will also be generally shorter than these because I saw them longer ago.