V For Vendetta: The Movie

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?