The Award for Worst Picture

If an Academy Award were given for worst picture, I'd nominate Sweeney Todd: The Demon Butcher of Fleet Street. The film seemed to be a dark amalgam of Oliver Twist (there is a kid from a Victorian workhouse), Little Shop of Horrors (its a musical about a tiny business that thrives through the consumption of human flesh), Eating Raoul (a comedy about eating bodies to cover evidence), the Burbs (a comedy about a family that murdered people and then incinerated them in the basement in their furnace), and Romeo & Juliet (someone lies to the main character by telling him that his wife died from drinking poison from an "apothecary.")

In the film, a barber returns home from exile to Victorian England. Once home, he changes his name and establishes a barber shop in a run down apartment above a failing meat pie shop. His plan is to slit the throat of the men who exiled him. To dispose of the bodies, he dumps them down a chute to the basement where they are processed into ground meat and baked into pies by the pie shop owner whose business is revitalized because, as it turns out, human meat tastes better than the cat meat she had been dishing out before. Of course, one thing leads to another and the whole situation spirals out of control as Sweeney Todd begins killing everyone who comes to him for a shave - slicing their necks from Jugular to Carotid. The on-screen result is a musical montage of throats being cut, blood spurting from necks, and bodies falling backwards and down two stories to the basement floor. "Everyone has done something worthy of death," reasons Sweeney Todd. His character is without grace, hope, love, forgiveness, mercy, or any personal warmth. He makes the villains in The Golden Compass seem snuggly by comparison.

I went to see the film with some friends of mine and was absolutely aghast - not only at the film, which was bloodier than any of the Freddy Kruger films - but also to my friends' reactions to the film. They apparently found watching innocent people having their necks sliced open by a lunatic - and my discomfort with such - to be funny. Very disturbing.

The more I think about it, though, the more Sweeney Todd reminds me of President Bush. Sweeney Todd is harmed by an evil judge and policeman who separate him from his wife and daughter, as a result Sweeney Todd begins to seek revenge against them but soon expands his quest for vengeance to include murdering innocent people. Likewise Bush was seeking revenge for 9/11 when we began the "War on Terror" but soon expanded the war to include attacking a nation which had not harmed the US.

Come to think of it, the folks I viewed the film with are Republicans and Bushmen. It all makes sense now. :)