As a fan of the musical, I absolutely could not stand this movie. My full rambling ranting review is at my journal.

Please, please do yourself a favour and listen to the 2005 revival album instead of watching this crap.

As always with a Burton film, the look of the movie is nice and dark and dreary and the plot is lovely and gruesome. Unfortunately someone told me the best bits of the plot, I might have enjoyed it more if I hadn´t known. I didn´t think the singing was bad. Admittedly, we had subtitles, so maybe that helps. The songs weren´t very catchy though, there was just one that had me snickering.

All in all, quite entertainment to watch, but not a movie I´d put on a second time.

Silly me I did not realise that this movie is a straight lift of the Stephen Sondheim stage musical. For some reason I thought it would be dialogue based with the occasional bit of singing. But no, it’s nearly all musical but that should not necessarily be a bad thing. The main problem with this movie is the Sondheim music.

After about 15 minutes it starts to get very, very irritating and even worse it becomes apparent that many of the cast including J Depp cannot sing to save their lives. The big problem with this apart from the fact that it sounds bad is you can’t understand what the actors (for this is what they are) are singing about. This is a bit unfortunate when the songs make up the main dialogue. After a while it starts to become tedious. I have to admit I did not watch much more than the first half hour and that was more than enough. On the positive side the film does look really good almost animated in some scenes and the art direction is second to none.

I know there are some who love Sondheim maybe this movie should be ring fenced only for them.

it seemed like something was missing i;m going to try and read the book and then maybe i;ll understand the movie better.

beautiful costumes, but horrible music! : ( if it hadn’t been for that, it would have been another phantastic Tim Burton movie…