V For Vendetta

Anyone else excited to see this? It's supposed to be released in IMAX theaters at the same time it is released in regular theaters. I definitely want to get to an IMAX to see it. Anyway, have you seen the trailers, and did it interest you?

 

I wasn't initially very excited. First, it stars Natalie Portman, and I haven't fogiven her for her role in ruining Star Wars yet. Second, I saw this packaged with a whole bunch of trailers that looked like a Uwe Boll montage (House on Haunted Hill among others). Finally, V's mask creeps me out.

However, Kurt Loder gave this movie a really good review, and I've heard quite a bit of other positive hype on it, so I'm thinking it might actually be pretty good. I guess I'll have to go see it and find out.

 

is it out yet?

 

No, it comes out in March.

 

Anarchism, Hollywood-Style

By Anthony Kaufman, AlterNet. Posted March 17, 2006.


'V for Vendetta' is a pro-revolutionary, action-adventure romp that makes other political films look like 'Little House on the Prairie.'





If Andy and Larry Wachowski's "The Matrix" trilogy turned millions of Americans on to cyberpunk culture and postmodern theory, then "V for Vendetta," the brothers' latest project (which opens today), might just do the same for out-and-out revolution.

Conceived by the Wachowskis and directed by their longtime assistant director James McTeigue, "Vendetta" is a pop-culture attack on the current administration's multiple injustices -- a big-budget call to rebellion from deep inside the belly of conglomerate Time Warner. Warner Bros.' film unit already got flack from conservatives for releasing "Syriana," "Good Night and Good Luck" and Palestinian suicide-bomber portrait "Paradise Now," but just you wait: "V for Vendetta" is a pro-revolutionary action-adventure romp that makes those films look like "Little House on the Prairie."

In perhaps the most glaring and controversial example of Hollywood's refusal to toe the Bush party line, "Vendetta's" hero is a "terrorist" -- a violent rebel on a mission to destroy his corrupt government in a blaze of explosives. Is this irresponsible? Does it glamorize terrorism? Perhaps. But for many progressives, whose anti-war protests have fallen on deaf ears and whose activism has been squashed by the powers-that-be, "V for Vendetta" should feel almost cathartic.

Set in the year 2020, "V for Vendetta" takes place in a fascistic London, some time after "America's war grew worse and worse," as one character narrates, "when unfamiliar words like 'collateral' and 'rendition' became frightening." The government is a cross between a full-blown totalitarian state and the current administration's scare tactics: with constant surveillance, a citywide "yellow-coded curfew" that instills paranoia and restricts nighttime movement, and a menacing band of secret police called "Fingermen" who patrol the streets and harass the citizens.

When we first meet Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), she's about to pay the price for violating the city curfew when a mysterious masked stranger saves her from the authorities with an array of flying swords. Evey's savior is V, an erudite, Shakespeare-quoting burn victim who has literally adopted both the mask and the mission of long-ago subversive Guy Fawkes, who in 1605 plotted to destroy Parliament with 36 barrels of gunpowder. With the help of the young, pretty Evey (the daughter of "activist" parents abducted and killed by the government), V plans to carry out Fawkes' dreams of violent insurrection. "Blowing up a building," he tells her, "can change the world."

If there's any question about the film's political targets, "Vendetta" opens with a ridiculously racist and homophobic screed by Prothero, the Bill O'Reilly-like "Voice of London" who speaks on what appears to be the country's only television channel. "The former United States is the world's biggest leper colony," he spits. "And it wasn't because of the immigrants, the Muslims or the homosexuals, or the war that they started. No," he says. "It's because they're Godless!"

In contrast to Edward R. Murrow's famous signoff of "Good night and good luck," the nasty Prothero ends his ultraconservative broadcasts with the jingoistic "England prevails."

This isn't subtle stuff. In a blatant nod to George Orwell's "1984," "Vendetta's" U.K. is ruled by Chancellor Sutler, a vituperative, "deeply religious conservative" seen Big Brother-like on a large television screen (and played by John Hurt, "1984's" ill-fated everyman). Sutler's ruling philosophy is the politics of fear. "We will show him what terror really looks like," he screams after V's arrival onto the scene.

Sutler's reign also involves media spin and propaganda, a la the Newspeak of "1984." When events begin to spiral out of control, Sutler declares that the government must make the people realize "why they need us," followed by panic-inducing reports of everything from civil war to avian flu. Sound familiar?

Like any classic comic superhero myth, "Vendetta" also provides an origin story for V, which is gradually glimpsed in flashbacks and a police investigation into his past. And not unlike the secret nuclear-testing that spawned Godzilla, or the class oppression that cultivated so many angry inner-city zombies (see "Land of the Dead"), V's transformation into a vengeful killer was the result of a crass abuse of state power involving (spoiler alert) a government plan to create a biological weapon with the help of a nefarious pharmaceutical company. If the political notion of "blowback" ever needed a poster child, V would be it.

And "V for Vendetta" isn't just about political revolt -- it's also about sexual revolution. After being captured and placed in an interrogation cell, Evey reads letters from a fellow prisoner, Valerie, a young woman who came out of the closet and embraced a forbidden lesbian love affair that landed her and her lover in similarly brutal confines. Another sympathetic character conceals his homosexual identity. And however ruthless V may be, he too is sexually ambiguous -- an effete hero who hides behind a mask, loves "The Count of Monte Cristo," melancholy music, cooking and dancing ("A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having," he tells Evey, paraphrasing the slogan of anarchist Emma Goldman as he yearns for a whirl).

The movie's sexual politics are also brought to the fore in a quotation heard over the end-credit music: "This is no simple reform," a woman says. "It really is a revolution. Sex and race, because they are easy and visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor in which this system still depends." The voice belongs to feminist powerhouse Gloria Steinem.

Above all, "Vendetta" should be enjoyed as the first true anarchist movie Hollywood has ever made. Film historians speak fondly of the paranoid cycle of American cinema in the 1960s and '70s ("The Manchurian Candidate," "Three Days of the Condor," "The Parallax View") or the countercultural anti-heroic outlaws of "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Badlands," but nowhere in mainstream U.S. cinema -- and certainly not post-9/11 -- has there been a pop-culture phenomenon that advocates not only overthrowing a corrupt government, but blowing it up. As the film's tagline states, "People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."

Anthony Kaufman has written about films and the film industry for the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and Utne magazine.

reposted from www.alternet.org

 

We saw this movie on March 19th. I am a huge fan of Orwells 1984.


Totalitarian Britian is a reoccuring theme in literature and the arts, perhaps it is because Britian knew a totalarian goverment during the Interregum when Parliment and Oliver Cromwell ruled instead of The Monarchary for the period 1645 approx to 1660.

I was hoping that Americans are not off-put by the un-familar Britishisms of the film. We do not celebrate The Guy Stateside. Trafalgar Square is a bit of a mystery to Yanks.

Neat that John Hurt played the Dictator, he did a great Winston Smith in 1984.

The portrait of Totalirian Britian is overblown.
Our Goverment does not hassle gays.

The propoganda line about the U.S. Goverments creation of deadly deaseases is frankly, shopworn. its pulled right from Pravda.

The scene where the Houses of Parliment is bombed is simply dumb; at that point in The Movie, The Dictator and his henchmen have all been killed.
Blowing up Parliment seemed pointless.

I Thought of Winston Churchill, when Parliment had been bombed out in WWII,
he resisted calls for construction of a larger hall stating," The drama of important moments in Parliment is reflected in the tense, close-packed house.
They rebuilt Parliment as it was, undersized.

In real life; London was bombed many times by The IRA. Irish people were ashamed of The IRA, stopped donating and the bombing ceased.

If it was evil and thoughtless for The IRA to bomb innocents, why is it not universaly evil and thoughtless?

We have elections so often, Presidents are changed way more than Senators or Congressmen. Why bomb a historic treasure when change is right around the corner?

It is always interesting to think and speculate about these matters. The movie was a good mental exercise. A bit over-cynical though.

 

go to west ealing in london and you will see the surveillance towers that house the cameras and search lights that always epitomise modern tyranny.

 

i just saw the movie last night. i had read about it before i went and saw it so i knew what the plot was but that still didn't keep me from being surprised at how far they went with it and all of the parallels that they drew to our gov't and the tactics that they use. when the chancellor said we need to make them (the people) realize how much they need us (gov't), and then they started showing all of the news clips about the war and bird flu i just started busting up laughing. it was really good. i loved that movie. it is so good to actually see movies like that being made. (spoiler) at the end of the movie i thought that they might ruin it and have her decide not to blow up parlimemt, but she did. and that made the movie the whole thing would have been a waste if she didn't. i hate when movies do that. and piney you said what is the point of blowing up parliment if all of the people were already dead? because it is a symbol. even if the people are already dead they building was still there as a mounment to there gov't. and like the movie said the people needed hope.

 

It's amazing how all these anti-establishment films are getting out at this most crucial point in time. I'd give "V" an 8 out of 10.

Next we need a movie about AMERICAN tyranny and AMERICAN people rising up against it. It needs to hit home for Americans, who are easily the most brainwashed and mislead people in the world today.

 

well the themes there are basically the same whether it is happening in britan or america. everything in that movie could be applied to either the british or u.s. gov't. but yes i agree as dumbed down as most of the people in this country are i think it would have a more profound effect if they were blowing up the white house instead of parliment. (starts laughing) ha! they would hell of a time trying to get that made though. getting permision to shoot that around the white house after you tell them what the movie is about.

 

I was listening when The Dictator said " We need to make the people realize how much they need us"
In this instance the example is an external security threat. But goverments have been inserting themselves in our lives because of "Our Need" for a long time.

This is so old hat and so very typical of New Deal Politics where goverments create huge welfare programs and agencies in order to purchase thier votes.

In reality, these Gvmt. Agencies are staffed with the most un-helpful time servers and political cronies and patronage jobs.

Theese agencies promise the world but in the moment of truth, fall flat on thier face. Yet their power to coherce and punish remains fine tuned.
All of it paid for by an ever more expensive taxation regime.

Hundreds of years after the fall of Rome, it remains Bread, Wine and Circuses.

I say: Beware of the free lunch, beyond it lies tyrany.

 

I saw this movie last night. It was amazing!

 

Blowing up the whitehouse wouldn't be necessary or wise either in real life or the movie...obviously due to the risk to innocent life. instead all that would be needed would be to just storm it, take it over, and literally "set up shop" there. Now THAT would be Revolutionary. Fuck bombs and big explosions...leave that to the rightwing (before they're defeated that is).

 

i saw it today. i thought it was going to suck because of all the alliteration in the begining but once i caught on to the message i loved it. action packed.

i disagree though, i think it was perfect to set it in england around fox rather then america. i thought it was kinda cool how they explained that america was wasted because of all the misdeeds it had done. this movie was a keeper.

 

I was advised never to go see that movie.

 

*Piney---I believe the WPA(works progress administration) and the CCC were created in response to the great depression and the socialist -communist movement,that was gaining speed as a result of inequities in wealth and the huge amount of people out of work here.Also ,there could have been some altruism there,but it's difficult for a cynic such as myself to think so.There were thousands upon thousands travelling the country ,mostly by rail,looking for work-food.The social programs I mentioned were probably devised by the rich to preclude a revolution,thereby hanging on until WW2 created work for almost anyone that wanted.And here we are.

 

I loved the movie. Very entertaining and it did have a message, although not very original. I haven't read the comic work. I heard that if you've read the comic, it was a big let down. Does anyone share that opinion? What I liked a looot more than I expected is the soundtrack to the film. It's so good.

 

i heard people say who read the comics and the book that the movie was different and they put things in a different order and changed some stuff but that it was still good.

yeah just seizing control of the whitehouse would be better, it you blew it up it would just remind people of independence day.

 

Saw the movie the other night... I thought it was awesome.. I almost cheered at the end! lol

 

Of course it wasn't original, the battle of good vs. evil has been raging since the beginning of humankind! This movie just reflects a possible version of the worst case scenario. The fact that it's not original and has been done before, if anything, adds even more credibility to it.