The Closest Shave You'll Ever Have

In case you haven't seen it yet, run - nay, FLY - to the nearest theater to see Sweeney Todd. It's funny, it's gory, it's... damn, it's freaking scary.

I found myself laughing at Tim Burton's dark humor, expertly communicated through the acting genius of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter. That was disturbing enough, to be sure; but the cause of greater discomfort was the performances of Depp and Bonham-Carter.

Depp's Todd was obsessed with vengeance, such that as he committed brutal murder after brutal murder he showed no real emotion, dispatching his victims with all the detachment of a machinist putting bolts on assembly-line cars. Man in the chair, lather his cheeks, slash his throat, hit the switch to cast the crimson-oozing corpse into the cellar; NEXT! No gloating, no sense of exhilaration, no pseudo-sexual release of tension; just a grim satisfaction, another day at the office, just something he must do, la-dee-dah. His indifference to his own evil was truly terrifying.

Helena Bonham-Carter's Mrs. Lovett is scarier, but in a very odd way. While Todd is consumed by his desire for vengeance, Lovett is consumed by her desire for Todd. At the same time she is concocting plans to grind Depp's victims into fodder for her meat pies, she is fantasizing about a Victorian middle-class life with the somber Todd and young Toby, a boy she takes in as a helpmate and adopted son. The scenes played out in her imagination are surreal and frightening because they are so normal, while she and Todd are anything but. She is a Lovecraftian ghoul who doesn't seem to realize how depraved and out-of-sync with reality she really is. She yearns for bourgeois respectability, but her method - turning strangers into meat pastries - is utterly insane.

And the blood - oh, the BLOOD. Burton's blood budget must have been huge. It spurts, it flows, it rains in torrents. It's not tasteful, it's grotesque - but it's meant to be. Murder is not sanitary, after all. The oceans of ichor are just a by-product of Todd's work, however; nothing to fret over, get out the mop and everything will look as it did before, pull the lever, body gone to the basement, NEXT!

And the machine grinds on...

Scary, scary movie.

No One Dreams of a Dry, Brown Christmas

"Daddy, is it Christmas today?"

"Yes, Xio, it is."

"But where's the snow? It can't be Christmas without snow!"

Even a four-and-a-half year old knows, from what she sees on t.v. (and from what I call an intrinsic understanding of the what's right for the season), that Christmas time is supposed to be white with snow and crisp with cold temperatures. Yet here in the southeast, it's been dry (we are in the middle of a rather nasty drought) and anything but cold. Sixty-plus degrees on Christmas Day? Preposterous! Geez, you can't even see your breath, never mind anyone wearing gloves and parkas.

More so than in any Christmas I've yet spent in North Carolina, I truly miss New England. The Northeast has been hammered with winter storms, and I know plenty of people living up there would happily trade places with me now, and call me crazy. But colored lights strung over bushes and atop houses just don't have the same charm unless they are being reflected by that dusting of ice crystals that just doesn't appear here.

So I wish it would snow. Perhaps part of me hasn't grown up. (No perhaps to it, really, I know there's a spoiled, willfull child in my mess of a brain.) But this just doesn't feel like Christmas to me.