V For Vendetta: The Movie

In an alternate timeline where Germany won World War II and Great Britain is now a facist state

also of interest: Aranofsky to direct Watchmen! (note: Aronofsky no longer attached to title, just the thread title)

http://www.watchmenmovie.com/

now its just about them evil nazis taking over.

That's just a singe splash page, not a website! And I'll believe it when I see it.

Watch them put in an "unmasking of V!" scene

Count on it!
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0700856/ is a hottie!

From what I've heard, all versions of the script up to now have taken out the big alien and the ending. Don't ask me how. One screenwriter (I forget who) said, "You can't have a movie end with four million people dying in Manhattan. It's too ugly."

x-post Fuck, yet another depressing yet believable cop-out.

The only ostensibly positive thing about either movie getting made would be raising Moore's profile/making him a bunch of money and giving him a modicum of financial stability.

and, more importantly, james purefoy

(if he has any say in the matter, I mean)

oh I can think of a way they replace the original work. A SHIT LOAD MORE PEOPLE SEE IT, WTF.

haha - good for him. he's an upstanding chap.

"oh I can think of a way they replace the original work. A SHIT LOAD MORE PEOPLE SEE IT, WTF."

but the original books are still there, perfectly unmolested, available for all to read if they so wish. Movies are not comics. One does not replace the other - they exist parallel to each other.

let's face it - the best hope for a decent Watchmen movie was when Gilliam wanted to make it. But then Munchausen bombed and Gilliam got cold feet re: translatability of the script...

At the bottom of the Aronofsky Watchmen thread linked above there's another link to an interview with the guy who IS directing Watchmen that might allay some concerns.

Easy to say when it isn't your words putting bacon on the table. PK Dick was so damn broke at the end of his life, he would have been elated if they cut him a check to turn one of his movies into a musical comedy.

Moore has already had one movie not translate from the comic very well with "From Hell".

One?! Can we get the full list of bad Moore adaptations? I'll start with LXG and SWAMP THING!

LXG was awful.

"It's a common device for serial killer films to let you know who the killer is right away."

Please tell me what these movies are, because I disagree. Obviously Jason/Mike Myers/Freddy etc are not analogous with Dr. Gull. I guess there's "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" and the various Gacy movies, but those don't involve a cop/investigator as the main protagonist - they feature the killers themselves as the protagonists (an approach which also wouldn't have worked with From Hell, I don't think).

*this has always vaguely annoyed me abt moore's "from hell" actually: gull is the easily least interesting of the various proposed rippers; a "from hell" based round james maybrick wd have been better

It would've been nice if they'd squeezed Oscar Wilde and the Golden Dawn into the movie, but what can ya do... at least they managed to get the Elephant Man in there (tho not the reference to Ganesha, the Opener of Ways, sadly. Actually that's what I missed most from the movie - the depth of magical/mystical ref. points)

Dick's being thoroughly mined now Mark, don't worry. He wrote enough trash to fuel a million crappy sci-fi flicks.

Anyone, turns in to more counterfactual nazi pron. yawn. Still, Natalie Portman eh? Can't all be bad.

Henry, Silence of the Lambs, The Minus Man, American Psycho, Felicia's Journey (arguably), Eye of the Needles (arguably), Freeway, Natural Born Killers, I Was a Teenage Serial Killer, Summer of Sam, Bonnie and Clyde...

Wow. I missed that. This thread makes me want to reread those comics...

and anyway none of these suggest a workable template for From Hell (w/the possible exception of American Psycho)

Dude, just let me have my From Hell movie dream.

ihttp://vforvendetta.warnerbros.com/img/poster_1.jpg

Actually, a unique namedropping encounter, in that David was saying 'hello Martin' to me while I was still not sure if he was who I thought. I've not met a famous person before where that's happened.

I haven't heard any more advance press about it. Are they still going with the Nazi angle? Is he still not going to blow up any buildings?

And no, it doesn't look bad. Shame about casting Natalie Portman, but it has Stephen Rea, too, and it's always good to see him. And Hugo Weaving will be perfect if they can resist an unmasking scene.

The repeated use of the word "uncompromising" in the ad campaign is perhaps a good sign. Did they actually stick very close to the source material? They want us to believe so, at any rate.

Surely there's a good (if un-PC, heady, and uncomfortable) movie in the material, no doubt. And the original GN has always been my least favorite of Moore's works -- it's him finding footing, and it's messy.

I have hope.

Taken all together, I am now very excited by this.

David Lloyd was reported to have commented on the script at the recent Bristol comics convention. Superherohype posted a fan report talking to Lloyd, saying "he thinks it was very good for an Action Thriller, but is very much different from the Graphic Novel. He said that the character of Evey is less of a victim in this film and that he had met with The Wachoski Brothers."

http://www.alanmoorefansite.com/news/may2005.html

V: "This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is it vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished, as the once vital voice of the verisimilitude now venerates what they once vilified. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vangquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.

"The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose vis-à-vis an introduction, and so it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V."

Evey: "Are you like, a crazy-person?"

Is it just me, or is "an uncompromising vision of the future, from the creators of the Matrix trilogy" one of the most unappealing taglines ever?

-- Tuomas (tuomas.alh...), June 29th, 2005.

it's just you.

i hope they set this in the actual 1997-8. it needs updating because the surveillance state looks very archaic (and it's run by about 6 people wtf). i can't believe they'll follow the 'logic' of v's anarchy, but then, the premise that self-government will miraculously follow a period of chaos may be a little bit shakey to begin with.

But the comic isn't saying that "self-government will miraculously follow", is it? People are free of the fascist government, but what happens next is (decidedly) left open.

well, there is ambiguity there, but the logic of the thing is that self-government will miraculously prevail. perhaps i read it opstimistically, but i think that's how it's meant.

cuz that's horrible...

And it DID blow goats.

Will Natalie Portman return to her adolescent brilliance? I mean, same basic setup as Leon the Professional. I don't have audio @ work so can't tell if she's being totally boring again or what else is going on.

includes this (inadvertantly?) amusing one

Larry Wachowski in 2003 (in the middle)

For the record, he's been doing this wrt film projects for 10 years.

There was an interesting feature on V for Vendetta in Vanity Fair last month.

From Hell is an okay film. LXG is unwatchable.

For the record, this is the first film project he's done this with.

If the film's look and feel refuse to flee from the real world, its dialogue takes every chance to connect to it. We are told about the recent past, that "America's war grew worse and worse, and eventually came to London." Hot-button terms like "rendition" are sprinkled about; dissidents are handled as in a third-world dictatorship; and our hero (who calls himself V) lectures citizens who have surrendered their liberties to a government that promised to protect them from terrorism.

So it looks like the "what if Nazis won WWII" story might not be the basis for the film after all. If they've actually tried to make the films future sort of a logic continuation of today's situation (just like the comic was), that should prove interesting. Also, the word "terrorist" was used right in the trailer - so if this film actually tries comment on the current world politics too, I think that'd be a better approach than to try to adapt Moore's obsolete dystopy of the early eighties down to every detail. Then again, perhaps I'm placing too much trust on the Wachowski Bros. screenwriting abilities.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/38/Alanmoore.jpg

I hope your days have been brightened.

the end

And League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Why so patronising and so wrong, Kenan?

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xp - that's Tom Ford!

Really--if Lindsay Anderson made a guilt-wracked, *really* angry socialist action movie, this would be it.

I can't imagine Moore complaining that it pulls any punches--if it were more explicit in its dusgust with both the USA and UK, it would be one endless libel suit.

Fuckin great stuff.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434409/board/threads/

Some sample threads:

-Terrorists will like this movie

-Libertarian Party (Join the NEXT Revolution)

-Why would a conservative dislike this movie?

-THE VARIETY REVIEW SLAMMED THIS AS AWFUL

-Another Anti-American film

I believe that was pointed out, like, a month ago. I feel appropriately dumbassy. But thanks for stopping by.

When two Christian/Fascist G-men try to rape Portman and V shows up and *baffles* them into submission with this high speed monologue mainly using words that start with "v" and then sorta bitchslaps em with his hard, highly shiny cane.

That's right--you read it here first folks--recent advances in bleeding edge modern technology have invented devices that allow for steady, fluid camera movements!

x-post

Thank the good folks at the IMDB boards, home to the most reactionary contrarianism by way of subliterate IGN types you'll find anywhere outside of certain ILM threads.

hugo weaving's voice has always been his trump card

heh

Internet Rule 452. b

Any imdb message board ALWAYS has a great chance at bringing the funny business.

definite changes, but nothing severely drastic. i think where they did change things it just clarified or short-cutted certain things.

i enjoyed it. my expectations were low tho. and my movie tastes are probably weak. etc.

certainly political... but...

m.

-- Shakey Mo Collier (audiobo...), March 14th, 2006 11:44 AM. (later) (link)

My bet is it's completely gone, creating the "massive plotholes" Moore's been complaining about--Rose Almond and Helen Heyer aren't in the cast.

let me see if i can come closer with.... V doesn't turn into a unicorn at the end, but stuff does blow up.

don't let me overhype and ruin this for you.
m.

:( :( :( :( :( :( :( :(

Drudge has started posted links to reviews:

Torygraph (who take pains to point out that Tony Blair's son helped work on the film)

Roeper's

and i can't wait for the endless lazy "_____ for ____" constructions.

Also, how exactly did they pull off the "Britain is fascist now" explanation in the flick? Did they go with the much safer "WWII was lost" type of thing(as Roeper mentions), or do they actually infer that the people brought it on themselves(as in the book)?

This isn’t to discount McTeigue’s participation. He was the second unit director on all the “Matrix” films and on one of the “Star Wars” sequels. Listening to him last night, he’s obviously a smart man. But “V” is just too complex. Let’s just say he had around-the-clock and up-the-wazoo assistance from the strange Wachowskis.

We all know just how strange they are: by now the world is well-versed in brother Larry’s bid to be a transgender, and about his relationship with a dominatrix. It’s “Transamerica” for real, except instead of Felicity Huffman playing the part, it’s the man who helped think up “The Matrix.”

I'm curious about the segment of Fox's audience who're both completely clueless on the TG part yet culturally savvy enough to get the Transamerica mention.

From what little I know of the comics (my brother just gave me the graphic novel collection, but I haven't read it), this doesn't sound right at all: "What's remarkable about the Wachowski scenario, as opposed to Moore's original, is the degree to which it stands Fawkes on his head—recuperating this proto–suicide bomber as a figure of revolt."

it's basically sounding like several post-iraq wars happened, etc ... it provides details about the US that i don't recall from the book. although it's a little hard to trust some of that cause it's news propaganda. essentially there's a bunch of biotech fiascos that screw everything all to hell. some of that spelled out as government created fiasco. not fall out from greater disasters. seems like in reading the book, i had thought it was total nuclear insanity and britain was about all that was left.

that's funny that they are calling him a terrorist and not a freedom fighter... i mean, at every crossroads it's obvious that this is a futuristic, hardcore totalitarian state. how is he not fighting for their freedom? despite connections you could make to modern day states, it's still way beyond. sure, when they show torture chambers with prisoners in black hoods, you might think of abu ghraib, but... the offensive part is entirely the movie's fault is it? in the context of war/terror/revolution... what's the difference between terrorist and revolutionary but your perspective on the state being rebeled against?

one other thing... brace yourself for a couple of the hallowed jukebox selections... i believe i recall some cat power and some antony and the johnsons.
m.

The idea that the script is based on an alternative history 'if the Nazis had won world war II' seems to be a completely bogus internet rumor. Lawson and the other reviewer were having a laugh about the film's concept being that the Tory party had lurched to the authoritarian right in a crisis. The very idea etc. How soon they forget.

I'll make up my own mind on Friday. if it's half as good as the Dr. Phibes movies which inspired it, I'll be well pleased.

i'm guessing they didn't go with "What a Wonderful World"-type golden pop tunes as symbols of innocence and/or the world gone by, huh?

xpost

"Beneath This Mask Another Mask"

Perhaps I don't understand the problem with granting 'absolute moral superiority' to a guy opposing (essentially) the Nazis? I can understand how doing so could make for a boring movie, but I don't really grasp the moral objection.

x-post to kf...

there are some older classics. don't fret too bad. as a music fan tho, i'm a little on the fence still about cp+aatj's classic status in 15 years from now. at least he didn't get jiggy with "my humps" or some mediocre boy band of the moment.

m.

i'm suddenly reminded of the spawn soundtrack... featuring metal/hip hop hybrids i think... coworkers subjected it to me.

it's nowhere near that bad.
m.

Shame about Portman's accent...she has a great English accent actually, but it's a little posh girl voice instead of a wee urchin.

David Lloyd was there, giving a little talk about how happy he was with the film, and pleading with fanboys of the original to 'just go with it' and recognise that while some things have been changed, the essential spirit is still there.

That newsweek quote up there is really annoying: "the movie plays like a clumsy assault on post-9/11 paranoia". Well perhaps the reason it seems 'clumsy' is that actually, no, it's isn't just about fucking america!

Supremely ironic considering the book was a reaction to Thatcher's England. :D

Seeing all these reviews condemning it for portraying a terrorist as a hero make me really curious--in the comic, V was never the out-and-out hero. Anarchy was presented as the ideal form of government (real anarchy), but the fact that V was killing innocent people, torturing Evey, and making things a lot worse before they were better wasn't dismissed. Also, it was made pretty clear that he was absolutely insane. Does the movie gloss over all this, or are these reviewers merely very dense and hypersensitive to any image of a man blowing up a building?

(Completely unrelated aside: so is a "freedom fighter" just a terrorist who has more of a goal than just scaring people, or just one who is fighting a "bad government"?)

And James Wolcott's peevish dismissal of Denby's drift towards (ahem) "neo-conservatism":

I anticipated that my Upper West Side neighbor David Denby--such a trial for him, bumping into me wherever he goes--would render a negative verdict on V for Vendetta, and so he does, rapping his gavel with stern monotonony as he pronounces sentence. With this review and his pan of Why We Fight, I fear David is drifting toward neoconservatism, a doctrine more congenial to the sort of principled stands he likes to take, offering more room for rhetorical heroism. I pray I am wrong.

I think they know that. Their point was that times have changed and the film launches at a time when Cameron is reforming the Tory leftwards.

Hah!

the book (am just re-reading this) has WWIII happening in about 1987, nuking of africa, nuclear winter over europe, fascists coming to power due to lack of anything else. book is set in 1997-1998. he's just sent out valentines. it is a very english book, am quite annoyed that it's been repositioned as anti-american.

(is great to see lloyd's art on buses btw)

(in an interview at the time moore said words to the effect of 'we had supposed that it would take a nuclear war to make england veer towards fascism. in the end all it took was giving people the right to buy their own council house...')

No, it doesn't. V is still morally very dubious and at times is frightening, and Evey is much more resistant to him and his ideas than she was in the book. The relationship ends up being kind of similar to that of Jack and Tyler in Fight Club, actually, and I think the film manages to maintain a similarly detached attitude to its 'hero'. Whichever review it was that said "She kisses him, therefore the film agress with him about everything" was just mindless.

am quite annoyed that it's been repositioned as anti-american.

I don't think it has. It's still very british, and politically is perhaps more believable than the original. The ruling government is explicitly shown to be a third party (not labour or tory) who gained power on a wave of post-terror fear and a swing to the right in the electorate, not the ruling power, ie yes, people did bring it on themselves. Unlike the book, this didn't require anything as drastic as a collapse-then-rebuilding of government after a nuclear war, just (what appeared to be) a large scale terrorist attack followed by the promise of protection. So the society they end up with (in the film) does feel less removed from where we are now, and that strengthens the story a lot I think. The feeling is that the people haven't had their freedoms forcibly taken away, so much as they've willingly given them up in return for their security. Which for my money means that the film is definitely anti-British rather than anti-American (Hello ID cards, etc).

Again though, this meant it felt closer to reality, and therefore, I think, better. The acceptance of dictatorship was an insidious, electorate-approved thing, not a seizing of control by an unpopular power.

everyone in the movie seemed well fed and well dressed and pretty content.

Kind of like in modern day China, perhaps? It doesn't make sense for a dictatorship to keep its subjects miserable, that just inspires revolt. Much more sensible and dangerous to keep them reasonably happy with one hand, whilst with the other hand you take away their freedoms.

The last time I looked, London seemed more like a prosperous pleasure garden

Jesus wept...

"England's not-quite 9-11 (a pretext for a crackdown on Catholics and foreigners), this thwarted conspiracy—celebrated every year as Guy Fawkes Day—has an even more hysterical significance. Had it been successful, the explosion would have vaporized half of London and thus, in its state-of-the-art carnage, offered a foretaste of Hiroshima."

i'm not an expert on explosives but: o rly?

i'm not an expert on explosives but: o rly?

Um. No. There was a show last year at a MoD range, presented by Richard Hammond, where they exactly replicated the blast (down to authentic gunpowder). It would have been a very big bang, and certainly would have as good as destroyed parliament and caused fairly significant damage for about a mile radius (through the blast wave and thrown rubble), but wouldn't have caused that sort of effect.

"It doesn't matter that they all have funny accents, this movie is CLEARLY an attack on america and the president!" etc

i hope the movie isn't demonized... because a) we all need to be reminded that our country isn't this bigbro+nazi++ totalitarian regime... and b) where our country is like this country, we need to be thinking hard about that...

i wish people would see a movie like this and not dismiss it.
m.

haha, xpost!

um, 'newsflashes and stuff about america' != CCTV

that's what I meant. is there an updated thing in the flick that takes the place of the threat/symbol of CCTV circa 1980?

yeah, there are little nods to stake out vans... and "88% of conversation indicates that people still think xyz".... and office rooms being bugged, so the good cops pull out some kind of jammer device or something... etc.
m.

yeah, maybe my opinion is awful. what do i fuckin know? it was free and i had a good time.
m.

That's what I felt it was missing - ok so maybe today's dictatorship ensures its citizens have some degree of comfort, but if there's *no* privation or repression - and I didn't get much of a sense of any from the movie - then what is the point in rebelling?

Don't answer that...

Portman Bold ... and Bald ... in 'V for Vendetta'
Thursday, March 16, 2006
By Michael Kane

Natalie Portman, why must you grow up? You were just so perfectly pixie, skating around and doing the "doo, da-doo, da-doo" from that Lou Reed tune in "Beautiful Girls," or getting teary-eyed at a funeral for a hamster in "Garden State."

Now you're playing a gangsta rapper on "Saturday Night Live" and blowing up British Parliament in "V for Vendetta."

And, Natalie, can we talk about the hair? Does a nice girl go out and get her head shaved?

Meet the radical new Natalie, 24 years old and graduated from Harvard. Out of "Star Wars." And out to change the world, one subversive psychodrama at a time...

and it goes on, etc

i have never seen her give a good performance in a movie, however.

help me out here dudes

Anyone else think the guy playing the ranting TV journalist had modelled his look and mannerisms rather closely on Christopher Hitchens?

It totally kicked @$$ and I'm going to see it again!

Aaronovitch or Littlejohn, surely?

it was an especially good hollywood superhero fantasy

most people seemed to think it was too slow. i overheard one guy saying "natalie portman's tits can save most bad movies, but ..."

-- Chuck_Tatum (sappy_papp...), March 18th, 2006.

um, you do know that the US gov't has experimented on unwitting citizens many times in the past, right? do the tuskeegee experiments ring a bell? the radiation experiments that clinton belatedly apologised for? or the cloud of bacteria sprayed over san francisco by the navy? MK-ULtra experiments?

but you're right, the movie was kinda "meh" though

ilx, help me decide: should i go see this or "she's the man"?
That's a tough one. "She's The Man" is being called this generation's "Mean Girls," so...

She's the man, obv.

-- vahid (vfoz...), March 18th, 2006 9:10 PM. (vahid) (later) (link)

That's the problem, though--IT WASN'T. It should have been, and it could have been, but it wasn't. Batman Begins was easily FAR superior. In fact, as a hollywood comic book movie, it was decidedly mediocre. The direction, cinematography, production design, and most of the acting (Stepehen Fry, Stephen Rea being the notible exceptions, Hugo Weaving gets points for trying VERY HARD) was decidedly uninteresting. Especially the directing. CLOSE-UPS ON FACES MEANS IT'S SERIOUS BUSINESS.

As for film vs. comic books, it was as good as adaptation as one could expect, they just didn't focus on what *I* would have liked to have seen a focus on--namely, the questionable morality of V's actions (most notably changed in his broadcast to the populace, where he sided with the people instead of blaming them for their government) and the "it could happen IN YOUR COUNTRY" air of the government in the comic. I felt the "OMG A CONSPIRACY" explanation was in place to make it seem less of an all-too-real threat of elected fascism and simply the well-planned coup of a few people. Honestly, all those reviewers bitching about the "anti-US/UK sentiment" are really hypersensitive and should never be allowed to read the comic lest their poor little brains explode for being so offended. I felt that the absence of Rose Almond was SORELY missed, as it kind of took all the emotional strength out of the "this government sucks" argument. Also making her parents into "activists" instead of just people with "the wrong kind of past" made the government less scary.

In conclusion, Stephen Fry stole the fucking movie away from everyone else and ran with it, I am mad V didn't show Delia his face, and that whole "love story" thing was gross.

i got bored w/ "batman begins" about 2/3rd of the way through. let's stop acting like "batman begins" is the "citizen kane" of superhero movies. there was a bunch of garbage in that film, too.

"v for vendetta" = "darkman" done right!

The best superhero movie thus far (haven't seen V yet) is Hellboy. Even that wasn't as good the second time around, it lost a lot going from big-screen to DVD.

b-b-b-b-but...he was a NINJA. :(((((

Oh and props to Hellboy! So underrated.

And, of course, Howard the Duck (or did the comic book come after?).

It predates the film by about a decade or so. My cousin Alan drew a few issues in the mid-70s.

Okay, I accept the likely possibility that that speech is worded differently in the book (which I haven't read) but what part of "if you want to know who to blame, you should look in a mirror" was ambiguous in that speech?

Seriously, do some of you EVER pay attention to ANYTHING you watch or hear????

-- Hal! Jordan! HAL! JORDAN! (b4rim4_...), March 19th, 2006.

oh in this one she magically changes instead of dressing up?

HA HA! Big time! I knew he seemed familiar.

The sequence with Evey's torture and the note and everything was terrific, and I loved all the scenes with the crusty, disinterested cop (who is never revealed to have a heart of gold or anything).

(Also noted that despite the 30-year time difference and apparent destruction of continental Europe or somesuch, they were still making 2006 BMWs. Fascist cops drive like this...)

-- Dan (Wow) Perry (djperry@gmail.com), March 19th, 2006 4:08 PM. (Dan Perry) (later) (link)

I DID hear that line, but the overall tone of the speech was drastically different in the book, which had a much more scathing indictment of the populace. I didn't mean to say he let the population off entirely, just that the general focus of the speech had changed from an indictment/warning to a call for an uprising.

anyway like i said above i liked that movie V avoided some of the really shitty stuff in the original, but overall... i dunno. despite really liking a lot of it, the way they went with the ending still bothers me.

and the best superhero movies are:

superman
blade ONE

http://img23.imagevenue.com/loc24/th_87460_sey_12.jpg

The thing about that Valerie letter, and some of V's speeches, was that they dangled profundity in front of you, which didn't sit very well with the hokum of the rest of it. It was frustrating. Easier just to write it all off as enjoyable exploitation flick, as Mark Kermode did, but I couldn't quite do that.

Anna Paquin would have made a good Evey, I think.

I don't mind the idea of V being mad and not a hero, and he suggested as much himself when he said that for every reaction there was an opposite reaction, that he was a monster born of their monstrosity. But there's accepting that idea in principle, and then there's feeling like a film coherently conveys it, and I don't think it did. It cast him as the clear-thinking, righteous crusader too often. It's not a problem if V himself is incoherent – but the film shouldn't be.

who was it who said every superhero movie is really about the moment the main character goes from being a "normal" to being a superhero?

i think every superhero movie is sort of a let-down after the "becoming a superhero" scene. def for me, the climax (and best part of this film) was evey in the rain, and just like "batman begins" once that point had passed the movie wasn't so great anymore.

it's too bad that the cop's imagined ending (the girl getting shot, brixtoners retaliating, riots starting, etc) was so much more exciting than the actual ending.

as for the poster who asked what and how had made the family political after st mary's ... i think they showed the little girl (evey) passing out biohazard-marked fliers. i guess the family just became hardline greens or something. or maybe the turned into "us gov't did 9.11" type crazies.

or, do we need to know EXACTLY HOW bruce wayne ends up in rural tibet? and how the the league of shadows tracked him to rural tibet? etc etc.

if you measure v for vendetta by the superhero yardstick it makes good sense. if you try to treat it like a police procedural, you're being unfair.

But there's accepting that idea in principle, and then there's feeling like a film coherently conveys it, and I don't think it did. It cast him as the clear-thinking, righteous crusader too often

you can say what you want about bin laden, but you can't argue with "clear-thinking" and "righteous". why should he not be clear-thinking? i mean, part of what makes him the particular superhero that he is is his singleminded doggedness about his revenge. he's a moral juggernaut! and anyway i think that "monstrous" doesn't need to mean "confused and wrong". you can be "clear-thinking, righteous" and still be monstrous! (see: bin laden, bush, etc)

well. v never said "i'm out to spread valerie's message of love". he wanted bloody revenge for her death (and his own mutilation) and that was it. there's no reason why v shouldn't be the inverse of valerie's ideal (every action produces it's opposite, right?). the person who really ended up picking up that thread and going with it was evey, who lived out valerie's happy ending in real life: shaved-headed but safely underground (in the fake ID sense), doing her own thing, watching old movies.

does it make me a bad person that i was disappointed that the soldiers stood down?

i think every superhero movie is sort of a let-down after the "becoming a superhero" scene. def for me, the climax (and best part of this film) was evey in the rain, and just like "batman begins" once that point had passed the movie wasn't so great anymore.

oh yeah, i was thinking the exact same thing about BB today... i was loving it up to the point where he becomes batman, then i fell asleep. but i think i already said that exact thing upthread so never mind!

i don't understand why they didn't have the scene of evey putting on the v mask! and i was NOT onboard for the crowd of "V"s. i hate crowd/mob scenes in movies, they're always so corny no matter what.

-- vahid (vfoz...), March 19th, 2006 9:09 PM. (vahid) (later) (link

No, it would have been a WAY BETTER ENDING if the soldiers had just opened fire on everyone.

you can say what you want about bin laden, but you can't argue with "clear-thinking" and "righteous". why should he not be clear-thinking? i mean, part of what makes him the particular superhero that he is is his singleminded doggedness about his revenge. he's a moral juggernaut! and anyway i think that "monstrous" doesn't need to mean "confused and wrong". you can be "clear-thinking, righteous" and still be monstrous! (see: bin laden, bush, etc)

See, this would make more sense if the word you repsonding to was "self-righteous". Righteous actually means, y'know, right.

Cracking heads when you're outnumbered 20/30-1: not such a bright idea. Also, cracking masks.

Huh? Valerie didn't act on V - the government did.

I think we were meant to assume that the regime had disintegrated from within, like in East Germany or Czechoslovakia, only in a more telescoped fashion to suit the demands of a film. i.e. the regime had been acting more and more erratically, demoralising the soldiers, and without some senior regime type shouting "shoot the fuckers" down a radio it was enough for the soldiers to just give up.

This was not the part of the film that required greatest suspension of disbelief.

Oh for fuck's sake.

It would have made more sense if they actual people had been riddled with bullet holes then.

http://www.mtv.com/shared/movies/interviews/m/moore_alan_060315/

maybe thats were all the bollocks in the film came from

e.g. the whole "order from chaos" bit.

Let's keep in mind that everyone slamming this film for deviating from the GN is aligning themselves with Charles Manson.

http://www.mtv.com/shared/movies/interviews/m/moore_alan_060315/images/main2.jpg

http://www.calendarlive.com/media/photo/2006-03/22487024.jpg

Codsarnit, i thot elves couldn't grow facial hair!

from this L.A. Times bit

Doubtless I'll eventually see the film but I agree that this would have been a cool road to go down.

(xp)

y'know, that's entire possible. hmmm.

http://www.najical.com/s-o/season2/sno/conv_intdec3.jpg

xpost wtf is that?

You don't know? Dude.

http://www.sifl-n-olly.com/

Stephen Fry was fine, but I'm not sure the director told him what kind of movie he was starring in; nor was he introduced to the rest of the cast. The always-terrific Stephen Rea was more convincing as a man of pained conscience than Natalie-as-Falconetti. No one's mentioned Rupert Graves, veteran of lots of Merchant Ivory films, as Rea's assistant.

Anyone else think the guy playing the ranting TV journalist had modelled his look and mannerisms rather closely on Christopher Hitchens?

So OTM. I said so to my companion: "He's Hitchens turned into what his leftist critics always suspected he was."

i don't get what you mean... are you saying that we should take it less seriously just because it's based on a GN?

haha excellent point.

There's this fellow called Peter Hitchens...

This is a film whose intentions are seriously misguided. Of course, in case we missed the point the director soaks us in violence done by the purported hero that's no different than what the totalitarian state does: the execution of the police in the final third is slowed down so that we don't miss any evisceration, laceration, or spurt of blood.

Oh yeah draw that line reeeeeeeeeeeeeeal thick.

[blast you slicko]

?

Mark Kermode on V for Vendetta

arggghhhhhhhhh - way to dismiss an entire medium out of hand. very astute of you.

Now I'm going to reread The Watchmen.

Time Warner promotes terrorism and anti-Christian bigotry in new leftist movie, 'V for Vendetta'

Gospelcom.net: One gets the distinct impression from this film that the true threats to the freedom of man are the adherence to Christian and conservative philosophies..

MensNewsDaily: Too many great quotes from this one to count. Moore was not really writing about Thatcher, Nazis are really Socialists, etc etc

WND: Ironically, points out Baehr, a homosexual character who owns homosexual pornography also owns a banned copy of the Quran.

IRONY!

Plugged In: Nevertheless, V makes blowing up buildings look very cool and very justifiable. It's hard to measure or predict the impact such images and ideas might have in today's culture, where blasting buildings to make political statements has become a raw reality.

(tho the last one is a bit more even-handed/level-headed)

I say BRING ON THE MENTALISTS!

honestly the idea he tosses off in the last paragraph about a US-centric story sounds 100% better than whatever the Wachowskis have come up with

otm!

i'm not posting these due to them surprising anyone, i'm linking them b/c they tend to be funny, revealing, and in the case of that MND one, really weird. It's like documenting the batshit War on Christmas stuff; watching these guys get themselves into a froth over a not-too-sublte cultural jibe holds a bizarre fascination for me.

Also, the one from Plugged In(the movie review site linked up to Focus on the Family, is surprisingly charitable.

V for Vendetta
W for Wrevenge
X for Xtremism

*As I expected, they downplayed the anarchist themes, which was unfortunate. It's easy to make a story where someone opposes an evil fascist government, but for better or worse I think Moore's ponderings on anarchy is what separates the comic from other similar dystopies. So the V's telly speech about how it was the people's own fault for letting their leaders guide them was toned down drastically, the monologue with the justice statue was changed, etc. The only hints of anarchism in the movie were rather subliminal, i.e. the shoplifter saying "It's anarchy in the UK!" and the fact that V's symbol is almost like an upside down anarchist "A".

*The ending with the Houses of Parliament blowing up was probably the weakest part. The comic ended with angry folks uprising against the fascists, which was a much stronger finale. In the film, the bombing carried an enormous symbolic weight, but it was symbolic of what exactly? The failings of parliamentarism? If the film would've included the comic's anarchist themes, that might've been an option, but now the symbolism was kinda weak. Of course V's speech about how bombing a building can be revolutionary act was a brave move, but still... The comic ended with the explosion of Downing Street, which was the fascist government's operational center, but I'm not sure if the movie ever implied the government resided in the Houses of Parliament.

*The scenes with the V masks and the ending with people taking them off was a very nice touch, one of the changes to the comic that I think actually played out fine.

*Another thing where I felt the film improved upon the comic was the final scenes with V and Evey. V says that he must leave the final choice to Eve, and that his work is done. This I think was a better ending than in the comic. In the film V is more of a counterforce to the fascists, a necessary monster they've created, and once the fascists are dealt with he must perish too, and leave people's fate into their own hands. Whereas in the comic Evey becomes the new V, and it feels like her job is to watch that people don't stray from the narrow path again, which is against the very idea of anarchism. Of course, a single person deciding the fate of a nation is rather anti-anarchist too, but since V is supposed to be a symbol of anarchy rather than a real person, it's sort acceptable. Evey, however is clearly a real person and not a symbol.

*Stephen Rea was very good as Finch, but he wasn't given that much to work with. The humanizing scenes with Finch that were in the comic were mostly left out. I can't say whether Natalie Portman was good or bad, since in the film he was mostly V's puppet, and had very few scenes of her own. Again, a lot of the stuff that fleshed her out in the comic was left off. Obviously they couldn't have included everything from the comic, but what I missed the most were all the subplots with characters like Rose Almond, which showed the banal side of fascism. Now, the actual analysis of the workings of fascism was kinda thin, though maybe you shouldn't expect that much from a Wachowski brothers film.

*I'm glad they kept Evey's prison scenes from the comic almost intact, since that obviously was the true climax in both versions. The scenes with Evey reading Valerie's letters actually made me cry. I like Alan Moore the idealist more than the disillusioned cynic he later turned into.

*The human dictator in the comic was more interesting than the Big Brother one in the film. John Hurt's Hitler mannerisms were okay I guess, but it felt kinda silly that he had to use them to his closest men and not just in his public appearances. It was a nice touch that we never saw him in real life until his final scene.

* The Benny Hill tribute was great!

I liked that too, but I was beginning to think I was the only one.

(x-post)

Quickly designated "a melodrama in sixteen parts," the prologue first appeared in Cerebus #124, published by Aardvark-Vanaheim in 1989. The chapters proper began appearing in Taboo, edited by Stephen Bissette (Alan Moore's former collaborator on Swamp Thing) beginning in Taboo #2. Taboo was published intermittently and stopped publication with #7, which featured chapter 6 of From Hell.
These early episodes were collected in From Hell volumes 1-3, first published from 1991-1993, alone with Moore's appendices. After the demise of Taboo, this series continued with new material, beginning with volume 4 in 1994.

DC bought Wildstorm once the contracts were signed and development work done, first issue or so drawn etc. Moore stuck around because it would be depriving a dozen artists of work if he flounced off on principle. He'd been doing work for hire solidly for six years at that point (Spawn, Violator, Bloodfeud, Badrock, WildCATs, Majestic, Fire For Heaven, Vampirella, Supreme, Youngblood, Shadowhawk, Glory), largely because he needed the dosh after going broke on Big Numbers. [Note to small business owners: when publishing a comic book that comes out once every three years as your sole source of income, do not pay regular salaries to your wife and her lesbian girlfriend for running the office.]

Independent of that, as a movie on its own, a little comic book thriller - yeah I guess it was okay.

how can you manage to make a bad film when for £10 off amazon you can get 200 pages of ready-made storyboards? FFS

how can you manage to make a bad film when for £10 off amazon you can get 200 pages of ready-made storyboards? FFS

how can you manage to make a bad film when for £10 off amazon you can get 200 pages of ready-made storyboards? FFS

i mean i know he's wearing a mask but it doesn't mean he has to be like "mfmfmfmffmmmfmfmfmfmfmfmfmfmfmfmfmfmfmfmmf" for the whole film, i can suspend my disbelief

the more I've thought about this the more I think Moore's assessment of the film's politics is essentially correct - its not that the movie is bad, its just that if they wanted to make a movie about the contemporary political landscape (US, War on Terror, Iraq, etc.), then the only ostensible reason for using the UK/V plot as a basis for the film is because they're pussies

otm

i mean for example V spends about 5 minutes introducing himself, the main purpose of which seems to be to show off the wachowski's ability to use a dictionary rather than introduce the character - he gets 9 short lines in the book

pffft - the graphic novel's great, particularly the latter soap-opera half with multiple narrators. the movie, albeit for fairly understandable reasons, jettisoned all that.

and they weren't shot of running time either, most missing material seems to have been replaced with stephen rea moping round corridors in records offices, hold tight on this roller-coaster ride of an action thriller

(soap opera isn't quite OTM though)

Was Arthur Miller a pussy for writing The Crucible instead of dealing with McCarthy head-on?

Also, would anyone go see an explicit critique of the current war / government? I doubt it.

Oh yeah. *sheepish grin*

I would think its pretty obvious that Miller/the Crucible and Wachowskis/V are not analogous situations,

Does that change the fact that Miller critiqued a current issue through allegory instead of doing so head-on? Is it somehow less "cowardly" to levy a critique with your own allegorical construct instead of awkwardly appropriating someone else's?

not least the fact they dont seem to understand how BRITISHES actually speak!

The operative word is "inept," not "cowardly." This is the only point I'm trying to make.

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c30/explodingkinetoscope/vendetta.jpg

Actually, anarchism is never mentioned in the comic. V has one speech about anarchy, but that's it. Though I agree the comic is much more about anarchism than the movie, which is about more vaguely defined anti-fascism. However, I find Moore's handling of anarchism rather problematic as well: the idea of a single mastermind, V, working alone to change the society, forcing Evey into her anarchist "enlightenment", killing lots of people on the way, etc, seems kinda problematic with the ideas of anarchism, even if V himself thinks he is an anarchist freedom fighter. Moore tries to solve this problem by making V a symbol of anarchism, i.e. he's not a real person rather than an idea (which is why we see Evey's face when she takes the mask off), but V for Vendetta is still more of an fantasy superhero take on anarchism rather a story about what a real anarchist revolution in a fascist state might be like. But I guess stories like this are always parables, so I really like the comic still. However, what I didn't expect the movie to do was make V less of an hero than in the comic - it actually criticized his deeds more.

the policeman storyline is good, the imagined britain is good, the plot is okay, though the flashbacks are needlessly confusing. it's not totally clear what order things happened in and why.

but it was much clearer about v being fucked-up than the comic. the only problem there is, we still have to spend lots of time with him.

i'm not an anarchist and the ending failed to fill me with hope. i did like seeing parliament blown up though.