Bittersweet: Funny Valentines and Heart Throbs

My all-time favorite romantic movies are:

Amelie (Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain en francais - sorry I don't have an accent ague on my keyboard or a cedilla, either) - Audrey Tautou stars in this quirky, French, and fun movie. Paris and a gnome. It doesn't get any better than this.

Room With a View - Lucy (Helena Bonham Carter) decides between propriety (Daniel Day-Lewis) and passion (Julian Sands) in this Merchant Ivory masterpiece.

Runners up in no particular order

Truly, Madly, Deeply - Weepy, spooky, funny flick directed by Anthony Minghella and starring Alan Rickman and Juliette Stevens

Bram Stoker's Dracula - Lasting love: Gary Oldman is a way stylin' Vlad with the shades, the fog, and the bouffant in this Francis Ford Coppola pic. It's knife-lickin' good.

Blade Runner - Replicant love: real or artificial? Harrison Ford and Sean Young give mini-blinds maximum cache' in this Ridley Scott sci-fi classic.

Boomerang - Eddie Murphy finds that perfection ain't what its cracked up to be. Perfect comedy with lots of laughs and lots of big names (Halle Berry, David Alan Grier, Tisha Campbell, Eartha Kitt, Grace Jones, and more) directed by Reginald Hudlin.

Out of Africa - Sidney Lumet's biographical tale of grand passion set against a backdrop of colonialism, natural resource exploitation, infidelity, and war with Meryl Streep in the leading role as writer, Isak Dinesan (Baroness Karen von Blixen). I've never been that attracted to Robert Redford but he is pretty hot in this movie.

Persuasion - Ciaran Hinds (Caesar in Rome, the HBO mini-series) is nautical hotness in this film version of Jane Austen's novel.

Urban Cowboy - Bud and Cissy (John Travolta and Deborah Winger): a juke joint lovestory for the ages.

Lovely Filth: Sweeny Todd's LDN

I saw the Tim Burton movie version of Stephen Sondheim's musical, "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street", over the Christmas holiday and I enjoyed it in a cathartic sort of way. This thought provoking, Gothic tale of revenge, as overwhelmingly dark and bloody as Shakespearean tragedy, triggered a bit of Googling on my part. My search for background knowledge led to the reading of the ubiquitous Wikipedia article on the subject, which now appears to have changed since I looked at it about three weeks ago. Wikipedia is a flighty temptress, too, IMHO.

The story of Sweeney Todd is apparently an urban legend which incorporated another popular contemporaneous urban legend of human remains being used for foodstuff in Victorian London. I found this cannablistic cookery angle interestingly referenced in the Japanese anime film, "Steamboy", also set in Victorian London. The movie has a scene with a newsboy yelling the news that bones had been found in a baker's bread, which also references Jack and the Beanstalk's giant's rhyme. This seems to me to be a country mouse metaphor for the out-of-towner's fear of being killed and eaten by the big city literally and spirituality.

The Leviathan, London, like Jack's Giant, "ate" the lives of its swelling lower class population during the industrial revolution as they became human cogs in factory sweatshops, those "dark Satanic mills", in their efforts to support themselves. The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, a history of the London Cholera Epidemic of 1854, details many even more unsavory job choices available to London's lower classes, such as "night soil man", "bone picker", and "tosher", trades that specialized in profitting from the mountains of waste that London produced.

Contemplating Victorian London's sanitation issues brings to mind "Oliver!" , the 1968 movie version of the Lionel Bart musical, which starred Oliver Reed and was based on Charles Dicken 's Oliver Twist, which appears to be a major influence on the musical and film of "Sweeney Todd". I was particularly reminded of two scenes at the end of "Oliver!" where Fagin is digging in the muck for his lost treasure and where Oliver witnesses Nancy's death at the hands of Bill Sykes.

Like Dickens' work, "Sweeney Todd" captures the urban despair of Victorian London, which Todd's character describes at the start of the film, as having two tiers of society; a heavenly zenith filled with successful, well-off people and a dark netherworld where the gin and opiate numbed masses of the poor struggle to survive. An evil beadle figures in both stories as well. In both cases he is a power-corrupted lackey from the lower world, who profits from his relationship as intermediary through abuse and extortion.

I also made a connection to the song, "LDN", by UK pop star, Lily Allen, which contains the line, "if you look twice, you'll see it's all lies", talking about the way London, or any city, looks great at first glance, but when you look closer you see the urban problems; crime, poverty, etc. I also found it interesting that barbers were historically sources for medical treatment, including amputations of diseased limbs, prior to the rise of modern medicine and the establishment of the MD as prime arbiter of body health. I can't help wondering if the urban legend of Sweeney Todd isn't partly an echo of that past when seeing the barber may have meant losing more than just your locks.

The sewer scenes and urban filth, the violent serial killings, the visit to the Victorian mad house in "Sweeney Todd", and the subject of urban legends and historical mysteries also brought to mind several related subjects, as well, and books about them.

Nonfiction

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson - A history of London's 1854 cholera epidemic and the quest for its cause by John Snow and others.

London: A Biography by Peter Ackroyd - A thorough history of London from pre-history to the present day.

Jack the Ripper: Case Closed by Patricia Cornwell - Did Patricia Cornwell unmask the man behind Jack the Ripper?

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles by Martin Gayford- Did reading newspaper articles on the Jack the Ripper murders play a part in triggering Van Gogh's self mutilation?

The Air Loom Gang: The Strange and True Story of James Tilly Matthews and His Visionary Madness by Mike Jay - Spies, madness, machines, and a 14-year stay in Bedlam, London's most notorious madhouse. Yes, Virginia, truth is stranger.

The Gangs of New York and The Barbary Coast by Herbert Asbury

The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco by Marilyn Chase - It can happen here and it did.

Fiction

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Montmorency: Thief, Liar, Gentleman by Eleanor Updale - Montmorency, as his alter ego, Scarper, uses the London sewers to rob the rich in Victorian London in this YA series.

Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

*****

Picture at top of post, A Gin Shop (c 1809) by Thomas Rowlandson from Museum of London website.

http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/English/EventsExhibitions/Virtual/SatLondon/London/AGinShop.htm

accessed 1/21/08.

LDN by Lily Allen