We went to the cinema today to watch Sweeney Todd, a relatively new movie since it released only 2 days ago in the UK. The film is a part musical and part movie, which is an interesting combination.

The story of the movie is fairly simple, Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp) is a barber who gets falsely sent to prison by Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who falls in love with Barker’s wife. Barker returns to London after 15 years, and adopts a new name, Sweeney Todd. He meets an old friend, Mrs.Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who owns a derelict pie shop, and agrees to help him get revenge on the judge. Todd then proves his skills as a barber in a street shaving competition with Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen) and establishes himself as a credible barber in town. The rest of the story is about how he gets his revenge on the judge, murdering several people along the way. I’ve only mentioned the main plot of the movie but there are a couple of more sub-plots in the movie, which add to the numerous twists in the plot. These plots include one about a sailor boy falling in love with the Judge’s daughter, who is infact, Todd’s daughter and another one, which, if I reveal will probably spoil the movie for you.

Since it is part musical, there were several scenes where the characters start singing the dialogue lines. The background music during these singing scenes, was perfectly co-ordinated with the sights and sounds of the scene. I did not enjoy these scenes too much, but some of my friends felt otherwise.

The look of the movie was just spectacular. It appears as if almost the whole movie was converted to HDR (High dynamic range) which definitely enhanced the atmosphere of the locations. The post processing of the entire movie was very well done and was successful in giving the look of old London, and along with the well made sets, it looked great.

Generally, many people usually don’t pay much attention to the make up in movies, but the make-up work in this movie specifically caught my eye as it was done in a manner where it did not look freaky but still seemed unnatural . The blood, however, in my opinion did not look too real, and I felt that it looked a bit too red.

Cinematography was absolutely prefect in every situation, always maintaining an innovative angle yet retaining the detail in the scene.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie, and was quite impressed by the cinematography. It is a good movie, recommended for fans of blood, musicals and Johnny Depp.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 11:12 am and is filed under Movies, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.