A couple of friends and I got together for our "Women's Night Out" yesterday. We witnessed Sweeney Todd's musical mayhem and followed it with a marathon of catching up.
Movie Review: Sweeney Todd
The movie's production values were high, the singing surprisingly adaptable, the plot demented with a slathering of humor, the blood blessedly obviously fake, but the gore and viciousness too much for me. Nausea rose a bit high. If I hadn't eliminated meat from my diet last week, I would have after last night.
There was a time I watched slasher flicks and horror movies. That time passed about 15 years ago. The brutality of them became too real and too painful. People laughing and cheering as a villain massacred a victim made me ill. Sweeney stands on a higher step than those films, in that it's point isn't the demented violence, or even the desire to manipulate an audience with fear. Sweeney points to the unspoken, polite, socially-condoned and legally enforced violence which society's can inflict. The story paints violence from oppression as the equivalent of slitting the throats of and eating a society's people. In this way a society kills and eats itself. As in the movie, societies often consume the isolated and strangers among them, and likewise, most of us never notice they're missing. There are other themes that can be drawn, but this will do for now.
As for the cockroaches, well, I'll have nightmares for a while.
Evening Review: lovely. Being in the presence of two people I relate well to, whom I trust, admire, and adore, revitalized me, even as I flopped into bed for a few hours sleep before sunrise. The feeling is something akin to hope.
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