Sunday, January 27, 2008

Parade is the most useless rag out there, I think. There was a question in 'Personality Parade' as to why Tim Burton had to use "so much blood" in Sweeney Todd. The answer, Burton wanted to make the film more box office.

Idiots!

From the Wikepedia:

The Grand Guignol (pronounced [gʁɑ̃ giɲɔl]) was a theatre (Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol) in the Pigalle area of Paris (at 20 bis, rue Chaptal), which, from its opening in 1897 to its closing in 1962, specialized in naturalistic horror shows. The name is often used as a general term for graphic, amoral horror entertainment.

At the Grand Guignol, patrons would see five or six plays, all in a style which attempted to be brutally true to the theatre's naturalistic ideals. The plays were in a variety of styles, but the most popular and best-known were the horror plays, featuring a distinctly bleak worldview as well as particularly gory special effects in their notoriously bloody climaxes. These plays often explored the altered states, like insanity, hypnosis, panic, under which uncontrolled horror could happen. Some of the horror came from the nature of the crimes shown, which often had very little reason behind them and in which the evildoers were rarely punished or defeated. To heighten the effect, the horror plays were often alternated with comedies.[5][6]

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I haven't seen the new 'sweeny todd', but I remember as a kid the barber-chair that swung in the old black&white movie and it was gory and scary as hell.

Burton is always dark, and especially with Depp.

Complaining about 'blood' in a movie about a barber that slits peoples throats and then sells their carcass as sausage to the public.

How would you pull that off without blood???

Duncan McGeary said...

Complaining about a Grand Guignol movie for blood, is like complaining about a comedy for having jokes, or mysteries for having crime.