Archives for January 2016

While this movie is generally very highly regarded and even considered to be a classic, I am mystified by the small but vocal minority that actually manage to not like this film. For this reason, despite the fact that the majority of the people who read this will feel I’m preaching to the choir, I feel the need to make the case for its merits.

Much has been made of the salacious nature of the film’s choreography, but what the people who view it only as a poor man’s substitute for porn are missing is that, quite apart from its supposedly scandalous nature, this is some of the best choreography seen in a musical film since the Fifties. Kenny Ortega’s later musicals, like Newsies and the High School Musical franchise, would not distantly approach this film in quality, but his choreography would continue to be one of the best things about them.

And while Patrick Swayze may not have been a Shakespearean-level actor, he was probably, next to John Travolta, the best dancer that Hollywood had at that time. Jennifer Grey wasn’t quite his equal as a dancer, but that made sense in-movie, since she was supposed to be his pupil, and her heartrending performance and impressive ability to convey character through her imperfect dancing more than made up for it.

The film also has one of the greatest soundtracks of the Eighties, no small achievement considering that the decade produced far more great movie soundtracks than successful musical films. A common complaint from the film’s detractors is that the six Eighties Pop songs mixed in with the collection of Sixties classics breaks the mood of the film. And while the best of the Eighties songs, “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” and “Hungry Eyes”, seem to inexplicably blend in with the older stuff, I’ll admit that some of the other songs, particularly the risque “Yes”, feel a little out of place at times. But simply as a collection of music, the soundtrack is phenomenal; the period hits chosen here are all glorious classics that have aged beautifully.

And I’d argue the film’s attempt at romance-as-class-war was successful…certainly more successful than the myriad of other films that have used the same device without ever thinking about it as deeply as this film does. The class struggle is implicitly bound into the plot, not just by the usual rich-girl-falls-for-poor-boy concept, but because the entire reason the heroine gets mixed up in the plot is her idealistic belief that all people are the same and her compassion that refuses to condescend.

Also, when the characters call each other out for their behavior, it consistently seems justified, whether it’s the heroine pointing out her father’s hypocrisy or the leading man seriously questioning whether she ever really intended to tell her father about their relationship, avoiding a common problem with movies of this type.

The film even, unlike so many rich-girl-poor-boy plots, ends on a couple that do seem to have a possible future together. The plot of the movie was apparently semi-autobiographical on the part of the screenwriter, and it really does have a feeling of reality that most versions of this stock plot lack.

There really is substance to this movie beyond the music and the dancing, and it actually deserves a greater level of respect than even its fans generally give it. Along with Saturday Night Fever, Grease, and Fame, this was one of the only Pop-style musical movies of the era to constitute a complete success, and like those movies, even people who love this film rarely look beyond its surface glitz to see the genuine level of depth underneath.

This movie has gained most of its notoriety less from its obviously low quality, and more from its questionable methods of securing its funding. Essentially, this was a real-life example of a ‘Springtime For Hitler’ scheme—raise a lot of money by fraudulent means, create a low-budget failure and abscond with the difference.

But just for the record, ‘Springtime For Hitler’ schemes are not particularly rare in the real world—Mel Brooks himself may have been inspired by the Broadway cult flop Oh, Captain, which was actually a pretty decent show, but is rumored to have closed before its time because one of the producers was selling phony shares of the show and pocketing the resulting cash.

And even if you analyze this movie purely from an artistic perspective, it isn’t exactly a new thing. There was a Seventies b-list animated film called Journey Back To Oz based on almost exactly the same concept, and it suffered many of the same flaws, such as an uninspired retread of the original Wizard of Oz plot, exaggerating the characteristics of the companions from the first movie, and some exceptionally weak musical numbers.

That said, at least Journey Back To Oz drew its inspiration from the later books in L. Frank Baum’s Oz series, which, as strange as they would become in the later installments, still had genuine creativity and the stamp of authentic Baum. Legends of Oz, on the other hand, is based on the work of Roger S. Baum, a great-grandson of the elder Baum who tried to cash in on his connection to a great author by writing a series of subpar children’s novels based on the Oz franchise that would have gone completely unnoticed had they not been written by someone bearing the Baum name.

I’ve read the novel that inspired this film, Dorothy of Oz, and it’s arguably even worse than the movie itself. The plot is just an uninspired retread of Baum’s original storytelling style, and the prose is not only written in an extremely simple, juvenile style designed to pander to young children (who never seemed to have a problem comprehending the elder Baum’s more sophisticated prose), but is flat and lifeless even by the standards of books aimed at the beginning reader set.

The movie took the book’s uncreative retread of the original story, and added a good deal of weak humor, particularly for the film’s embarrassing attempt at a comic villain, the Jester (who manages to be off-puttingly humorless and impossible to take seriously at the same time), and some of the weakest songs heard in a theatrical movie musical in some time. The score is largely by Bryan Adams, whose last attempt at scoring an animated film, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, featured some of the best work of his career, but here he puts as little effort into his work as anyone else involved in the project. While instrumental film music is certainly a legitimate genre, in a vocal musical it’s generally considered a bad sign when the instrumental title sequence is the best music in the film.

Apart from one mildly enjoyable operetta pastiche for the China Princess, the songs are pretty dire, from the utterly underwhelming attempt at an “Over the Rainbow”-style wanting song for Dorothy, “One Day”, to the grotesque pseudo-psychedelia of “Candy, Candy”, to the soppy ballad “Even Then”, to the Jester’s tuneless villain song, to “Work With Me”, which is a blatant rip-off of “Happy Working Song” from Enchanted, a song that was already a pastiche of a well-worn genre cliché to begin with.

The one thing that indicates some hint of an actual budget is a collection of slightly-less-than-A-list celebrity voices, and they provide the closest thing the movie has to a redeeming feature: while most of the performers are either phoning it in or hamming it up (with Kelsey Grammer and Martin Short making particularly memorable asses of themselves), Bernadette Peters as Glinda, Megan Hilty as the China Princess, and Lea Michele as Dorothy really seem to be trying, and do as well as can be expected with this material (Michele apparently took the part because she had always dreamed of playing Dorothy, which is kind of sad if you think about it).

The secret to successfully pulling off a ‘Springtime For Hitler’ scheme in real life is to aim for forgettable mediocrity rather than legendary awfulness, thus not drawing attention to your crimes and avoiding the pitfalls portrayed in The Producers— and indeed, while it is totally without merit, this movie is by no means as unbearable as the absolute worst of the Disney DTV sequels. Don’t get me wrong, it’s bad, but it’s not really memorably bad. Still, this is one film where not only is the end result a soulless piece of sellout product with no actual artistic merit, but we actually have fairly clear confirmation that this was the creators’ intent from the very beginning, so the special outrage it seems to draw is perfectly understandable.

This film got some flack for its lack of fidelity from the Sondheim fanbase, but I found it to be a rather interesting, if not entirely successful, stylistic experiment. Director Tim Burton was basically allowed to impose his own vision onto the material, and he certainly did so—the story and score are more or less intact, but the tone of the movie is far more like a typical modern Burton movie than it is like the original stage musical. The film takes a much more serious approach than the stage show, deleting the prologue and other lightening elements and closing on a perverse romantic fadeout as Sweeney bleeds his life out over his wife’s corpse.

The film’s main problem is that the more comic numbers in the show, like “A Little Priest”, tend to play awkwardly, as they break the film’s otherwise consistent tone and the performers seem unsure whether they’re trying to get a laugh or not. The other problem is that Burton cast his wife, Helena Bonham Carter, as Mrs. Lovett. Don’t get me wrong—Carter is a wonderful actress and even a fine singer, but she is completely the wrong type for the part, and given that her part is extremely large and important, her presence does do a lot of damage.

In contrast, Johnny Depp is one of the best Sweeneys of all time, arguably right behind Len Cariou and George Hearn. When he was cast, and especially when it was announced he would not be dubbed, the show’s fans panicked, but it turns out he not only gave a brilliant and chilling acting performance but proved to be a strong and compelling singer. Alan Rickman was equally superb as Judge Turpin, giving a fascinating portrait of a remorseless sociopath, and the supporting players, including Jayne Wisener as Joanna, Jamie Campbell Bower as Anthony, and Ed Sanders as Tobias, sang the score beautifully.

I admit that, while the film is worth watching for Depp and Rickman’s performances alone, it is, on the whole, inferior to the original stage musical. Still, when you consider that Sondheim’s last film musical, A Little Night Music, had been both an ultra-faithful stage adaptation and a total disaster, and also that there were already two excellent video versions of Sweeney Todd, one can understand why Sondheim felt the need to experiment with reworking his material to fit the film medium, and the things he learned would be put to much more successful use in his next film adaptation, Into the Woods.