Note: Every once in a while, Infuzemag.com will provide a second opinion on a noteworthy movie. This time around, Josh and Emily Pardy (or "Team Pardy" as we call 'em around here) have offered their own take on Tim Burton's interpretation of the Stephen Sondheim musical, Sweeney Todd. Enjoy! -- Ed.

 

The dark, dynamic duo has done it again! Sweeny Todd is the highly anticipated film spawned from the collaborative genius of director Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. Taking on the macabre musical originally created by Stephen Sondheim, this truly legendary tale takes on a whole new life. Thanks to this re-envisioning of the story, the viewer doesn't have to be familiar with either the Broadway production or the English legend in order to enjoy this adaptation to the silver screen.

The story is simple enough to follow: Sweeny Todd (Depp), formerly the barber Benjamin Barker, has returned to London a wronged man after serving a 15-year sentence for a crime he didn't do. The man responsible, the corrupt Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), engineered Barker's demise because Turpin craved his beautiful wife. With nothing left to live for, Todd seeks vengeance against Judge Turpin. With the help of poverty-row baker Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), Todd quickly resumes his occupation, enabling him to come razor-close to those he seeks revenge against.

Johnny Depp's already on board to play John Dillinger in Michael Mann's upcoming film, Public Enemies.

 

Now Christian Bale is negotiating to play Melvin Purvis, the G-man who led the FBI's manhunt of Dillinger.

 

The film is based on Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-43, Brian Burrough's nonfiction account.

Mann also wrote the script.

 

The film is scheduled to start production in Chicago in March.
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It's been a wild week in the wacky world of labor agreement negotiations in Hollywood.

As the Directors Guild of America (DGA) and Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers (AMPTP, negotiating on behalf of the major motion picture studios) get closer to starting their own negotiation track, the chill between AMPTP and the striking Writers Guild of America (WGA) continues, with neither side proposing anything to break the current impasse.

But individual movie production companies are following the path blazed by TV talk-show production companies in negotiating independent agreements with WGA. Tom Cruise's production company and United Artists both reached interim working agreements with WGA earlier in the week, and the Weinstein Co. joined the fray yesterday by signing one of its own with WGA to get back to work on a full schedule of projects. Among the projects the Weinstein Co. has current designs on is a film version of the Broadway musical Nine, itself based on Federico Fellini's film 8 1/2, and a remake of Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai.

This stratagem by WGA could increase pressure on the studios to reach a deal that will give writers more of a cut from new media revenues, the chief sticking point in current negotiations.
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"But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment."
-- Werner Herzog, from an interview in Burden of Dreams

So many things have to go right to make a film shoot go smoothly that it is a wonder that any do. There are just so many "moving parts" in making a film -- so many arrangements to be made, so many things to be coordinated -- that problems are inherent to the process.

Every shoot has its challenges, but there are a few that rise to the level of legend. At the top of that list must be Werner Herzog's amazing film, Fitzcarraldo, whose shoot was documented by filmmaker Les Blank in Burden of Dreams. Filmed in the Amazon basin in Peru (near the Ecuadorian border), the Fitzcarraldo shoot spanned an agonizing four years and went through two casts as everything that could go wrong, did.

The horror/scary movie genre has seen better times. Hollywood still likes to pop a few out every year, and the draw of the genre remains an argumentative topic. Cheap thrills always score high, whether they're found in amusement parks or captured on celluloid. Once in a while, the genre allows for a terse and sometimes profound examination of deeper matters. But there are few remaining original scares among the current crop, many of which amount to poor remakes billed solely on the gross-out factor. Others, however, have turned toward the assortment of material popular in Japan, like One Missed Call.

As Beth Raymond (Shannyn Sossamon, The Holiday, Dirt) counsels her friend Leann through a recent break-up, an odd ring tone chirps from the Leann's cell phone. "One missed call," the phone's display reads, bearing the next day's date. They listen to the message, and hear the eerie sounds of the Leann's final words just before she dies. The next evening, creeped out by odd visions of bugs and distorted faces, Leann dials Beth, who races to meet her friend and walk her home. But Beth is too late -- and over the phone, she hears the very same events heard on the voicemail from the previous night.

Here's a movie I never thought anyone would make: a biopic about Ian Curtis, the short-lived songwriter and lead singer of one of the most storied bands to come out of the immediate post-punk era, Joy Division. But if anyone were to make that movie, it would have to be Anton Corbijn, the photographer who shot the band (and so many others) for British music weeklies and many other publications.

Control is Corbijn's first film, but it shows the studied eye of an experienced helmsman. That he is so intimate with the subject matter, and relied on someone even more so -- Curtis' wife, Deborah, and her biographical book about her tormented husband and their marriage, Touching from a Distance -- reveals itself, ironically, in the distance that surrounds Curtis (Sam Riley, a gifted newcomer) throughout this film.

If you're still at "who?" at this point, let me explain: Joy Division put Manchester's scene and then-nascent Factory Records on the map. The band released only two studio albums, riding a meteoric rise to stardom in the UK and Europe leading to the inevitable American tour, which never happened. Ian Curtis, the band's epileptic lead singer, killed himself on the evening before the band was scheduled to fly across the Atlantic. Exit Joy Division; enter Joy Division's far-reaching legend, as well as the band that arose from JD's ashes, the far-better-known New Order. (All together now: "Oh!")

Joel and Ethan Coen (No Country for Old Men)), Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood), Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), Sean Penn (Into the Wild), and Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) will contend for the Directors Guild of America award, according to the DGA.

Except for Joel Coen, all are first-time nominees. Joel and Ethan Coen are officially recognized as a directing team as of 2004's The Ladykillers. It's the second straight year a directing team has been recognized among the nominees; Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine) were nominated last year.

The DGA winner is almost always the winner of the Best Director Oscar, as well. Only six times in the award's 60-year history has the DGA winner for feature film direction not duplicated the feat at the Academy Awards.

The 60th annual DGA Awards will be presented Jan. 26.

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Warner Bros. could lay off up to 1,000 of its lot employees after Friday, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The Warner Bros. production studio lot sent out pre-layoff warnings, called WARN mailings, to 1,000 of its lot employees on Nov. 12 to alert them of imminent layoffs. The slips don't guarantee layoffs, but they are required by California state law to be sent 60 days in advance of layoffs.

Warner Bros. has not confirmed it will in fact lay anyone off, or how many will be let go if it moves forward with layoffs. Warners spokesperson Stacey Hoppe said that the studio hopes "to bring them back to work once the WGA strike ends."

The studios aren't alone in feeling the pinch. Several companies that serve the movie production industry in Hollywood, including Axium, a company that provides payroll services and production funding, have closed their doors indefinitely and laid off staff.

The strike is now in its 66th day. Expect more layoff announcements in the coming weeks.
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It's official: There will be no Golden Globe Awards telecast, according to Variety.

With negotiations at a standstill for over a month now between the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Produces (AMPTP) and the striking Writers Guild of America (WGA), there are many doubters as to whether the Oscars telecast, scheduled for Feb. 24, will be cancelled soon, as well.

One note of optimism in all this is the ongoing negotiation between the Directors Guild of America (DGA) and the AMPTP, which could spark renewed talks between WGA and AMPTP. Complications abound, but while DGA has solid leverage in the talks given the stalemate between writers and studios, the directors are also under pressure to come up with an agreement that won't rock the boat too hard with WGA and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Both DGA and SAG contracts expire June 30.

There are several possibilities that could save the Oscars telecast. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences could approach WGA for a waiver, or could proceed with unspecified contingency plans. In the meantime, the Academy and broadcaster ABC are assuming there will be a show and a broadcast, and are proceeding accordingly. Stay tuned!

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The long-running controversy over what effect on-screen violence has on the viewer's own propensity for violence got another jolt last week, when two economists published research results that assert a negative correlation between movie violence and the real thing.

At the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, Prof. Gordon Dahl of the University of California, San Diego, and co-author Stefano DellaVigna of the University of California, Berkeley, presented research documenting a decline in assaults specifically in those areas where violent films are being shown. Their research points to a decline of 1,000 per weekend, or 52,000 per year, in assaults.

Dahl and DellaVigna traced crime figures in communities showing violent films in the days and weeks following showing, then compared those figures to the rest of the year. They found no spike in incidence of violent crime even weeks after violent films were screened. "From 6 p.m. to midnight on weekends -- when the largest numbers of people are in theaters -- violent crimes decreased 1.3 percent for every million people watching a strongly violent movie, the study found," reports The New York Times. "Violent crimes dropped 1.1 percent for every million seeing a mildly violent film." Those figures dropped further in the hours following the theaters' closing for the night.

One interesting possibility Dahl raises: Those who are watching violent films at the theater on a Friday night aren't engaging in behavior likely to lead to violence, such as drinking alcohol or using drugs.

The new research seems at odds with a growing body of evidence that shows a strong link between onscreen violence and a desensitization toward real violence, among other negative effects. Prof. Dahl was quick to point out that their research did not contradict those findings; rather, it addressed more specifically the immediate effects, on a broader social level, of showing violent movies at local theaters. Left unaddressed by this study, Prof. Dahl noted, are the long-term effects of viewing on-screen violence, or the specific brain responses involved in individual viewers.
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