Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Sweeney Todd is a funny, scary Les Miserables. The dark aesthetic, the time period, the returning-criminal-looking-for-redemption character, the poverty, the weird daughter dynamic, the singing-- all reminded me of Les Miserables, however, it was dark and freaky. It also started out as a musical, like Les Miserables. The ending of this movie really reminded me of Crimson Peak, or of a dark Guillermo Del Toro ending.
I didn't know what I was expecting this movie to be. All I knew going in was that there was a barber that killed his clients and, who I thought was his wife, made meat pies out of them and their business was booming. That's all I thought I knew about this movie, and then Sacha Baron Cohen showed up and Alan Rickman is the main villain and I was confused but also simultaneously pulled in. Also like Les Miserables, I was not expecting so much singing in this movie. More so in Les Miserables, but still there are a lot of songs that get thrown in at weird times. It's weird to compare Sweeney Todd to Les Miserables but the comparisons reveal some interesting similarities.

Black Mass

When I saw the trailer for Black Mass, I saw a clip of the scene where Jimmy (Johnny Depp) is just casually shooting an automatic gun in broad daylight in a parking lot, and at that point, the main reason I wanted to see Black Mass was to watch that scene. I wanted to see that scene and I wanted to see Johnny Depp in all that makeup (just a step under Steve Carell in Foxcatcher). I was not disappointed. I have previously talked about how much I enjoy violence in movies and I have now realized there is a difference between Quentin Tarantino's over the top to the point of ridiculousness violence, and this serious, cringe-y, very much real violence that came up in Black Mass. Not saying I disliked the violence in Black Mass, I just couldn't derive any joy from it, especially because the people who are killed in this movie are people who are a threat of gangsters, so they aren't doing bad things and in no way deserve to die unlike the amazing violence that takes place in, specifically, Inglorious Bastards.