V For Vendetta: The Movie

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.

also, i think it was invented for big summer movies like 'independence day', but i never like those 'scenes of random people in their homes/pubs watching tv' scenes.

i did read the comic but forgot that. they all had flat-screen tvs. this obscurely annoyed me. perhaps it needed more 'brazil' type oddness.

How did you feel about the ending in the comic? Because I think the very final scene (with the policeman) was actually grimmer than in the movie, i.e. there was nothing to suggest that the people were actually gonna build a better anarchist society.

how does stephen fry come across to people who aren't used to him as a tv wit? i can't quite take him as a Real Actor.

where do you get off with the 'ugh trash' thing? it's especially ludicrous given the james mason love. like gainsborough melodramas were abstruse works of high modernism or something.

My beefs are few:

1. Fry's being beaten and detained for making fun of the chancellor is not that great as an illustration of living in a crazy fascist state, to me. I think the audience could have dealt with a little more complex illustration of that than the cartoon they provided. OTOH, Benny Hill tribute = haw haws. But seriously why would you even expect to get away with that, if everything is so crap? It raised a few too many questions re: how crap everything really is, in the time frame where most of the action takes place.

2. I would have preferred people marching on parliament to not be so well costumed. uniforms against uniforms isn't really making much of a point. Perhaps just the masks, for the purpose of the unmasking at the end (which was a nice effect) - but everybody dressed up exactly the same doesn't sit well with me as a people's revolution.

3. The timeline of V's origin and the biological warfare and the death camps and the rise of fascism is really pretty fucked up, all because of that dim, unresolved monologue he delivers to Finch while disguised. If that conspiracy theory is supposed to make any sense, then it seems to put V & Valery's incarceration BEFORE the chancellor takes over. Eh. It's a movie.

Apparently you need to reread my posts.

Unless they feature cowboys fucking each other, apparently.

Though frankly I would watch Aeon Flux again before I watched this.