A Sweeny, A Sweeny Storm

It was 60 degrees when I left St. Louis today. I actually stood outside for a few minutes talking to my neighbor in my bare feet. It was 23 just now when I came in the house.

I met my two oldest nieces and our friend Ashley at the Great Escape in Moline for a 9:55 showing of Sweeny Todd.

Whoa. The movie was awesome. It was SO true to the musical, and the music was great! Oh Sondheim… plus Burton, Depp, and my chick from Fight Club. It was as dark as it should be. And as bloody as well. Ew. Ew. Ew. Man, he really went at those throats. And the spurting, oozing… it was more than any Noble Cause jouster could dream. I use this comparison because the blood was clearly fake. Burton made it far too light a red. But it was still absolutely disgusting in its quantity.

The film actors didn’t have the most perfect voices ever, but sometimes that’s so much more realistic. And they pulled it off. Sweeny is tough; it’s got hard music. To successfully put Sondheim on screen… it would almost have to be Burton and Depp, at least right now for this movie. People could certainly make arguments for the film versions of West Side Story and Gypsy, but for those he just wrote the lyrics, not the music in his style.

After watching the credits run, we came out to a a scraping party in the parking lot. Seriously, it would have been funny if it hadn’t been so damn cold. If the ice wasn’t the kind that didn’t want to come off. The drive home was probably the scariest snow driving I have ever done. I had to stop twice to try to get the ice off my windshield wipers. I wasn’t very successful. I nearly literally crawled home. I was thankful there were so few people out, because it was difficult to guess where the lines were.

In Moline and most of the way home, the ice continued to fall in small pellets. Not far from home, the pellets turned into massive snowflakes. All the same, I could only see the last couple miles by crouching low and looking out a small space on the bottom of my windshield that wasn’t covered in ice and dripping water that wouldn’t be removed by the frozen plastic scraping over it.

So a dark and spraying movie released us into a dark and spraying night. Heh. Good times. Great movie.