Review: "Sweeney Todd" (2007)

I managed to see "Sweeney Todd" opening night, and it was a rather odd creature.

"Sweeney Todd" is based on a Broadway musical and in many ways succeeds. One of the primary challenges in bringing any play to the big screen is fleshing out the world that the play inhabits. So much that can be left to the imagination on the stage cannot be on film, and with only a couple of missteps "Sweeney Todd" is well realized. London is effectively transformed into a dark and dreary Burtonesque nightmare. There were only a couple of scenes where the CG used to bring this about were obvious (one near the beginning where they forgot to add any shadows to the actors, one involving a quick trip down a tunnel which made everyone seem like a cardboard cutout, and one near the end involving a giant meat grinder), but you can't fault the rest of the production values.

As far as acting goes, you can't really fault any of the actors either. Sasha Baron Cohen was an inspired choice as the rival barber, and Johnny Depp truly became the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. I wish Helena Bonham Carter had managed to actually pick an accent and stick with it through the entire film, but her characterization was spot on.

There is one large glaring hole in this film, though. For a movie based on a musical, the musical portion of the film fails miserably. Neither of the film's leads can carry a tune in a blood-spackled bucket. To be quite honest, I think the film would have been more enjoyable had they simply transformed the music into conversations. Quite the shame, given how much I've enjoyed other musicals-turned-film in the past.

If you are a Depp or Burton fan, it's worth seeing, but beyond that it is an ideal example of how to fail when bringing a musical to another medium.

The Rest of the Year

Yesterday was my last day of work for the year. Fortunately, this final day of work for the year didn't involve a surprise layoff. (See the four posts on December 4, 2006 for reference.)

This weekend, I'm trying to finally hit 300 games on VistaGameDoctor.com. I was hoping to hit that milestone earlier this week, but I spent a lot of time trying to troubleshoot some issues with "Star Wars: Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight" on Intel laptop chipsets with little success. When I get my next advertising check, I'll have to pick up a cheap Intel chipset laptop to include it in the process.

Monday is my thirteenth wedding anniversary, and that is a milestone that most people I knew thirteen years ago didn't think I'd make. There was actually a pool going around with people betting that we wouldn't make it three, let alone thirteen. I wonder if outlasting the pool means we win...

Tuesday morning, we're flying up to Utah and will be there until the 27th. We've got friends who are going to be watching the apartment in our absense. I'm going to have limited to no connectivity up in Utah, so there will be no updates to this blog or VistaGameDoctor.com during that time.

We get back the evening of the 27th and I'm off until 9:00am on January 2, 2008.

Spam Plugin Spam

It's always nice when you are advertising a plugin used to keep your blog spam free, and the first comment in reply is spam.


Also, I've got a non-computer-related site that should be going live before the end of the year. I'll keep you posted as I get closer, but in the meantime, go hug your pets. (hint hint)

MSNBC Channels LOLCats

I was reading on MSNBC about how Rodney King was shot, and I noticed something a little odd...look at the image caption.

Link to picture because my wonderful template is chopping off the appropriate part of the image...

Evidently, he was beated instead of beaten.

WORKAROUND: WSE Web References Not Upgraded In VS2008

Symptoms:
You are using Visual Studio 2008 to upgrade a Visual Studio 2005 ASP.NET project that used Web Service Enhancements 3.0 (WSE 3.0). After upgrading, the secured reference is missing.

Solution:
Keep a copy of your old project.
After upgrading your project, open the old project in Visual Studio 2005.
Select "Show All Files" in Solution Explorer, then drill down into "Web References," then your WSE web reference, then Reference.map and finally into Reference.cs or Reference.vb, depending on your language of choice.
There will be two classes in here. The Wse class (which was removed by the VS2008 upgrade) will be at the top of the file. Copy that class into the same file in your VS2008 project.