影视英语听力 第38期：理发师陶德

受法官塔萍(阿伦.瑞克曼)陷害，被迫流放他乡15年的陶德(约翰尼.德普)回到伦敦后，满心的怒火，只想复仇。他的妻子露西(劳拉.凯利)已经不知所踪，而女儿乔安娜(珍妮.怀森纳)则被塔萍作为养女囚禁在深宅大院里。

陶德遇到了馅饼店老板娘洛薇特夫人(海伦娜.卡特)，也是一直爱恋他的女人。在馅饼店楼上，陶德重新开张了他的理发店。渐渐的馅饼的生意好了起来，只是烟筒里不断冒出恶臭的黑烟。理发店的客人也很多，却很少见到有人走出来。那里，陶德一直在等着法官塔萍的到来。

对话文本:

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is Tim Burton’s extraordinary adaptation of the popular and much revived stage musical by Stephen Sondheim. It stars Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd and Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett who makes meat pies out of the demon barber’s victims.

The story is a simple one of vengeance. Sweeney Todd started out a happy-go-lucky young barber in London. His wife and daughter were stolen from him by an evil judge played by Alan Rickman. And he’s come back looking for revenge. Now one thing that Burton has done is he’s taken a lot of the humor and whimsy and playfulness that was in Sondheim’s original. And that was, I hear although I didn’t see it, in Hal Prince’s original staging back in the 70s. And he’s made this into a very dark, gothic fable. It’s a strange mixture of genres. It’s certainly a musical. There are songs in it. The characters sing. There are costumes. There are even bits that are kind of song and dancy.

There are a few funny grotesque6 bits in it. Sacha Baron7 Cohen shows up as a rival barber. Timothy Spall plays the Rickman character’s second-in-command with a kind of a louche swagger.

But it’s also a horror movie with some very extreme brutal8 violence and blood and an overall atmosphere and mood of somber9, vengeful misanthropy. This is a movie about how horrible people are and just how low they can sink. And it’s one of my favorite movies of the year.

There are a lot of things working in this movie’s favor. One of them is that Tim Burton who has always been one of the most visually inventive directors around hasn’t always been a great storyteller and it sometimes felt a little detached from the emotions of his material. This one he really plunges10 into. This is one of his best movies in a very long time. Burton is really just in full command of his expressive11 as well as his visual capabilities12.

And there is also Johnny Depp, who is Burton’s best leading man and one of the most interesting actors working today, who gives Sweeney a kind of melancholy13 angry charisma14. He’s a very attractive character, but he’s also a monster. But really this is a very dark, grim vision and a very convincing, a very powerful one as well. This is not a movie that may have you singing and dancing on your way out of the theater, but you may find that you have trouble falling asleep at night after you’ve seen it.