V for Vendetta in London

Are we abandoning the Alan Moore adaptation = rubbish principle then?

James Wolcott loves it.

But yeah, that's a headscratcher alright.

Its sold out but as I have to be out of the country, I have a spare ticket.

25th march Tate Britain 15:00.

will sell ticket for £9 ( 7.50+booking fee)

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/eventseducation/talks/alanmooreongothicnightmares4643.htm

email me if your interested.

"I could scarecely have been less impressed if it had called V for
Vasectomy... When this is released on Friday, I beg of you to please
not let your curiosity get the better of you..."

So yeah, basically all the right people are hating this. All it needs is Peter Bradshaw weighing in against and I'll be set!

David Lloyd's Q&A from the ICA was recorded, BTW. I can probably get a copy and maybe look into getting it online, should this be of any interest.

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

As to Moore, why doesn't he forget trying to reason this issue out and just say (more honestly), 'I hate it because they DARED to change something!' Because, much as I love Moore, his problem is that he thinks he's smarter than everyone else alive, and he isn't. In fact, before he starts making political remarks he might get a basic understanding of politics first--he still sees things through the eyes of an anti-establishment teenager who labels everything he doesn't like as Fascist*. The film doesn't NEED a mis-applied word like fascism to work; it doesn't need the word anarchy because it's self-evident. (Having said that, I'm pretty sure V uses the word anarchy at least once...)

(*Been there, done that. And I'm STILL anti-establishment.)

I was more surprised than I should be, actually, to read in the latest Mustard that Moore freely admits to being stoned 24/7. I mean literally. Go read it. And he has all the marks of it--the slightly off-base but unvarying perceptions and general slant toward groundless paranoia. He may be a brilliant writer but his judgement is inherently suspect.

(That's not an anti-drugs position from me. I admit to having smoked dope a load of times in the past, though not for about nine years. I found it rather deadening, stifling, and not particular entertaining, to be honest...)

The biggest bogus lead is Moore's idea that setting it in the UK is a cowardly move. I don't think the setting matters much in that sense: it is so damning of the religious right and its potential that it would piss a lot of people off even if it were set on Mars. And isn't it, in fact, more distrubing to float such an idea in light of a phoney terrorist stunt rather than the purple device of this happening after a nuclear war? The closer something seems, the more scary it gets. We all preferred to believe the Big War was never gonna happen anyway, and anything set in light of it, we had a desire to see as pure fantasy. But THIS... almost seems like it might be round the corner.

I'm not saying the film's a masterpiece (nor is the comic, exactly), but conceptually it's on pretty solid ground. The point is, if cowardice is an issue (it isn't; quite the opposite), why didn't Alan take a bolder stand with V and show the real situation in early '80s Britain leading naturally to such things? He dropped a bomb on the landscape instead. He added a moderately comfortable level of separation between then and the premise... it MIGHT happen tomorrow but it felt like a thousand years away.

Of course, even without dope I can say that I share some of Moore's paranoia, and I'd have exactly the same attitude toward people altering my ideas. So I'm a hypocrite. But it's not MY idea, so I don't feel the need to share his annoyance. ;-)

http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=22753

Because most of his complaints predate the film even being written, and he's been articulating them consistently for 17 or 18 years now? Just a thought!

"V For Vendetta is also V for Valueless gibberish, writes Peter Bradshaw."

And we're on!

Superheroes essentially work to uphold the status quo
If I was a rich man, or even marginally well-off, I would mail you a copy of The Superman Archives, where Supes, SUPES is a total revolutionary, waging class war (the miners story, most blatantly) and in complete opposition to the fuzz. I'm not sure where his cheating at football scheme falls, but overall, early Supes was big up on the proles and while not OVERTLY STEVEARLISH, definitely wasn't a Status Quo stooge.

I didn't like the movie, but I totally disagree with all but one Tuomas's reasons why - the exception being John Hurt getting at most one dimension to his character.

i largely agree with Tuomas on the film too. it did what i expected it to do, and i think a few minor touches improved the comic. it was a good fist of telling much of the same story. as many have mentioned the way they preserved the Valerie sequence is quite telling - it is the emotional heart of the story.

Time has yet to make this movie better in my head, but I still love Stephen Fry.

up until the post-torture scene seemed promisingly hard to get a bead on: thereafter you realised that every interesting idea it dabbed at would ONLY be dabbed at, then just forgotten

why does rea pronounce "lever" as if it rhymes with "ever" -- i know it does in some places but not in england?

couldn't afford to lose fry and i don't even like him on the whole

made me actually want to READ v for vendetta, which i didn't get on with at the time -- on a "can moore have handled this material as badly as the wachovskys, if not i shall revised my opinion of him upwards (a bit)" basis

how the fuck does everyone get to work if the underground has been shut down? i think the spraypainted logo for his revolt shd have been this:

http://img.epinions.com/images/opti/1a/fc/London_Underground-resized200.gif

not as bad as the matrix

and the rhyme goes:
remember remember the fifth of november gunpower treason and plot

but the film had:
remember remember the fifth of november THE gunpower treason and plot

which i have never heard anyone say and is less good (and important to get right if quoiting shakespeare etc is a mark of goodness)

(ie most obviously: "you're a monster" -- yes evey said this, and elsewhere she snarked abt how horrible it must have for mercedes to be married to the count of monte cristo, but the story did not in ANY way pursue it)

i'm glad its commentary on current politics was as vestigial as it was: it made it seem like they were saying less stupid things than they were probably trying for

Obv Rea would have objected to l-EVer, so it must have been imposed on him. i figure that the niggle of an unusual pronunciation would detract in a totally inappropriate way at that point in the emotional rhythm of things, and they went for the "correct" answer which is to annoy the least number of ppl. ie the americans. and yeah, that "THE gunpowder treason" stood out for me too.

one detail i loved in the film was the way they built up the character of the girl who says "bollocks" to the camera (u kno, with jam-jar glasses)

i'm also actually glad that the film didn't go into the whole philosophy of anarchy. WHAT A CHATTY FILM. Blimey, vvvvv (ha!) talky.

the alternative "resolution" i.e. the shenanigans with Tim Piggot-Smith and Hurt was not bad at all - the regime turning against itself works. though the knife porn was ugly, and it WAS pornogrpahic. Not showing V's assault would have worked equally well, but they thought we needed to see it, peckinpah blood and all. meh.

They did it a bit differently in the comic, but that's basically how it happened there too. Okay, it was Rose Almond who killed the Adam Susan (was it really necessary to change it to "Sutler"? we get it, he's Hitler, okay?!), but it was made clear Creed would've done it anyway. And then the remaining regime leaders basically destory each other.

I agree that the knife scene was totally unnecessary. For a Wachwoski Bros. film V contained surprisingly little violence, which made that scene appear all the more gratuitous.

hence the hugely expensive mail-out of (non-cheap) masks paid for HOW EXACTLY MR FREEDOM FIGHTER!?? it's like that father brown story where the murderer is a postman and no one spots him because no one sees postmen -- clerarly one of the evil effects of fascism is the closure of all competent CSI departments

*ok let's say interlopers

so in effect ALL the possible "types of bad guy" in several sharply different political/thriller plots are collapsed into one -- this is what looks as if it might be promising at first, but in the end you realise that the makers aren't being provocatively ambiguous in order to make you think a bit about the assumptions behind yr distinctions, they ACTUALLY DO THINK THIS!

which is rub

I had forgotten Adam's name change. It made me think of a Monty Python sketch where various ex-Nazis were in a hotel in Torquay or somewhere under the names Mr Bitler, Mr Bimmler and so on.

I mean, I'm saying really obvious things here, so I suspect I've just compeletely missed the point you were making.

the film is WAY too wordy

(i am being slightly jokey about this specific word -- hence re-jigging it as "interlopers" -- just bcz raycun said batman was anti-invader and v is the anti-batman ---> but i think the point generally stands, VfV requires its villains to be ALL of these difft. things... it does this by making SOME of them depraved and SOME of them puritans, yes, but basically this is cake-and-eat-it territory, not an interesting exploration of tensions within authoritarianism -- or even a serious exposure of hypocrisy)

(the bishop of england bit can TOTALLY FUCK OFF, it was awful even as a dave allen hommage) (haha also p43do priests = in "current politics" terms cf the church whose rule mr g.fawkes was hoping to RE-ESTABLISH, tho i can see why that diet o'wurms = not one they wanted opened much)

you don't need a policeman on every corner if you've got five snooping vans in every borough Eh? (as hitchens would say!)

surveillance on its own is meaningless -- you need enforcers! The "small number" meme is total bullshit: cf the membership of the baath or the stasi -- both worked by a kind of moral blackmail principle; you had to join in order to get jobs= you became complicit in the depraved official acts of yr fellwo party members = you would tend to work to support it bcz if it fell YOU will be in the gunsights even tho actually you yrself never tortured anyone or did anything more than ordinary plod-work...

another potentially interesting dimension dabbed at unexplored = interrelationship between anarchism as a project and the kneejerk celebration of crime (viz: the V-masked shop robber quoting the pistols while firing his gun into the ceiling)

the p3do priest thing is pretty unpleasant in the comic - this is pure Moore hatred of all establishment religion. the method of killing in the comic makes deliberate fun of the sacrement, which would be a deal breaker in getting any sympathy for the (anti) hero

(= this is why anarchism is silly) [/reactionary huffpuff]

so chuck is right -- this is a conservative film, it is a replay of the GLORIOUS REVOLUTION of 1688 (which among other things disenfranchised the catholics)

why oh why are the wachkowsky bros not better constitutional scholars and historians :(

what was the readership of Warrior? my guess 11-15 yr olds (i.e. slightly older than 2000 at the time)

haha another key allegorical lacuna: WHO HOOVERS V'S FLAT?

chuck as well as worrying who was going to get blown up by mistake, i did think -- briefly -- that they were going for an interesting twist where finch and evey realised v's vision by NOT pulling the um levver, and the masses would walk into parliament and be all "But where is the fireworks? We are here in parliament waiting for fireworks?? OH WAIT DO YOU SEE: WE ARE THE FIREWORKS!! but they had already budgeted for the model and the pyrotechnician

Revolutionary PogOism! THE EXPLOSION IS US

alan Otm. Whereas the film is basically just Deathwish for bunker libertarians.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I thought it was kinda unnecessary. In the comic the climax was the government falling down and people uprising in the streets, and the final explosion taking down Downing street was just of a side note to that (though it was at least made clear that that's where the Fascists' headquarters were).

(weird bit which really doesn't work: when evey kisses v on the mask)