2012

Last night I was watching Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, directed by Tim Burton, on Blu-Ray DVD. The film stars Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd who sets up as a barber in London's Fleet Street sometime during the 19th Century, and is in the habit of cutting his customer's throats, and then dropping the corpses through a trap door to the pie shop below him, where his friend Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) uses them to make her meat pies. The film is an adaptation of the 1979 Stephen Sondheim musical. The character of Sweeney Todd is quite a famous figure who originated in the 19th Century "Penny Dreadful" magazines. I normally don't like musicals but this one I liked a lot. The film is very stylishly made with some fun music.

Today my mouth was still pretty sore. I'm still taking painkillers. I was feeling kind of depressed and so, to cheer myself up, I went along to the movies. I had originally intended to go and see the movie Jennifer's Body, a kind of horror-comedy film, but due to the bus taking nearly an hour to get to the cinema, I missed it. Instead I saw 2012, directed by Roland Emmerich. It's based on the idea that the ancient Mayan calendar calculates the end of time to occur on 21 December 2012. In the movie the Earth starts to suffer from massive displacment of the crust. This causes massive tidal waves, earthquakes and volcanoes all over the Earth's surface. An unsuccessful science-fiction writer and divorced father of two (played by John Cusack), and a top US Government scientific advisor (Chiwetal Ejiofor) are among those struggling to find some kind of safety as the world falls apart. It's kind of predictable and over long but it is fun, with some really great special effects and spme pretty exciting action sequences.