V for Vendetta *spoilers*

[Malt Refund]

Alan Moore has a terrible comic to film history, he's written some of the greatest comics ever that have unfortunately spawned some of the cheesiest films, such greats as "From Hell" and "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" have come from Moore's diverse roster.

"V" is being made by the Wachowski Bros so I'm not really holding my breath that it'll be any different, but it will be controversial.. as it is a pro-terrorism story set in a totalitarian London. o__O

Oh and this is also aka "that movie Natalie Portman shaved her head for".

http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.com/

[gambit]

Yeah, V is a great graphic novel, and I'm hoping the Wachowski Bros. do it justice. But apparently Moore wants nothing to do with it over some comment one of its producers made about it, so I don't know what to think now.

[grady]

Another crappy comic book adaptation from wonderful source material? I don't know if it's necessarily a good thing that Mr and Ms. Wachowski are involved. They're shooting the second unit on the film and their prescence will liking be felt on the set.

[adam]

God I loved Sin City.

[stimpee]

blimey. V for Vendetta. this is OLD. but gold. alan moore is great. they should make a DR & Quinch movie.

[gambit]

God I loved Sin City.
Sin City and Batman Begins are definitely the best comic book adaptations. I'm hoping V is at least watchable.

[b.miller]

sort of related, has anyone heard anything further on another set of League of Extraordinary Gentleman comics coming out? i'm not connected to the comics world at all anymore but I heard they were working on a volume 3?

[stimpee]

Anyone read Skizz? makes ET look shite. Was disappointed when they did a book 3 tho. letting the artist write it. Alan Moore wrote the original.

[gambit]

Yeah, there's a third volume coming out, but it's being published through Top Shelf (I'm not sure when) instead of through Wildstorm/DC. That was another big thing with Moore who has had a terrible relationship with DC for a while. Apparently, they wouldn't allow a few things in his comics, and he just said "Fuck off" (metaphorically) and left.

[Animal Boything]

Alan Moore absolutely does not give a shit about any movies that are made based on his comics... he claims not to even watch them. I think that's a large part of the reason they tend to suck. He probably just sells the rights to the highest bidder and ignores the ramifications. It's really kind of a shame, if he took a more active role we might get much better films as a result.

[Malt Refund]

Alan is too busy creating awesome comics to do that. I love his America's Best Comics line.. Tom Strong, Top 10 and all that. Wonderful imagination on that man.

[chuck]

Can't say i'm expecting much from the wachowskis - after parts duh and duher of the matrix.

The depth that is in V ( the comic) will be v. difficult to recreate in a movie, particularly one for a film audience used to trite comic book action (ala spiderman/superman). Not bagging those comics/movies - just that V for Vendetta's plot and characters are something entirely different.

I mean - it's not like you're going to see a movie version of Speigelman's Maus anytime soon are we??? And yet it is a wonderful story - very powerful and moving. But I'm pretty sure a movie where WW2 era story has Jews represented by rats and Germans by cats isn't going to go down very well.

Possibly you might be able to do V for Vendetta justice in a TV series or mini-series - on something like HBO, where you wouldn't have as much of an issue with the rating and would have more time to develop the plot and characters.

[stimpee]

Im hoping that this will be a bit darker than superman or spiderman, more along the lines of the new batman.

and to film Maus would take at least a trilogy!

[gambit]

Im hoping that this will be a bit darker than superman or spiderman, more along the lines of the new batman.

and to film Maus would take at least a trilogy!
Oh god, I hope no one ever tries to make a film out of Maus. I love Maus, but it works better as a graphic novel than it would on film.

[EuroZeroZero]

Watchmen would translate into a much better movie than V, imo

[Malt Refund]

Might happen but doubtful..
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0409459/

[stimpee]

Watchmen directed by Paul Greengrass (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0339030/bio)? Not my first choice...

[gambit]

Watchmen has been canned. Ain't going to happen in the near future, apparently.

[Malt Refund]

Trailer is up now.. ^___^

http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.com/trailer.html

[Malt Refund]

And poof, the thread gets resurrected after 7 months! I'm happy about the hype it's getting and the rottentomatoes meter, it's getting me more psyched then I normally would be. Lets see if it holds up, I'll be back tonight. ;)

[grady]

b.miller saw this one a few months back,though I think he refrained from posting anything about the screeningl

[jOHN rODRIGUEZ]

There's a tag line somewhere along the words of:

A people should not be afraid of their government,
government should be afaird of it's people.

I'm planning to see on this phrase alone.

[Malt Refund]

b.miller saw this one a few months back,though I think he refrained from posting anything about the screeningl

That's because he slept thru the movie. >__<

[darktrain]

saw this last night. loved it.
it's of course not as good as the comic (they never are though), but i think the really important bits were recreated wonderfully and the changes, while not all of them necessary, at least made sense. it certainly captures the spirit of the original works.
it'll be interesting to hear from folks who haven't read it first to get their take on it.

it definitely proves how terrible a writer/director George Lucas is by how great Natalie Portman is in this (now that she has something to work with). really, even people who don't enjoy the film should dig her performance.

also, it's a good thing this is set in England, cuz there's no way a movie with terrorist bombings of a DC building would get released over here.

oh, and the "revolution without dancing" line is just begging to be sampled :D

[jOHN rODRIGUEZ]

I don't really remember(hay?) what else I've seen Portman in, but I'm excited most about her when it comes to this film. Not to trash the rest involved. Yet.

[b.miller]

That's because he slept thru the movie. >__<

hahahaha... well it was a long night!

but i thought i'd rang in on this anyway, in some other thread perhaps.... I'm not the best person to ask about it... but it doesn't surprise me that everyone's liking it. although i have to say that seeing Jennifer Aniston in a hot french maid costume in the upcoming movie Friends with Money beat out Portman's school girl outfit in this.

[Malt Refund]

Okay I saw it and I was officially pleased. They did as good as they could with the material they had. There was applause at the end of the film which I wasn't expecting.

The only thing I didn't like was the subtle changes they made to help viewers better identify "good" or "bad" characters. They made Evey a news reporter instead of a prostitute. They made the dictator type dude much more evil looking with naziesque flags waving in the background. Why did the story need this? Why not let me form my own conclusions?

Natalie Portman is super cute in this though omg.

[chuck]

Very interesting interview with Mr. Moore here (http://www.comicon.com/thebeat/2006/03/a_for_alan_pt_1_the_alan_moore.html#more).

He's a grumpy old bugger at the best of times - not without his faults, but his work is some of the best of the last 20 years. He deserves better methinks.

READ the original. please.


some excerpts:

Moore: This was one of the things I objected to in the recent film, where it seems to be, from the script that I read, sort of recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism. There wasn't a mention of anarchy as far as I could see. The fascism had been completely defanged. I mean, I think that any references to racial purity had been excised, whereas actually, fascists are quite big on racial purity.
The Beat: Yeah, it does seem to be a common element.

Moore: It does seem to rather be a badge they wear. Whereas, what I was trying to do was take these two extremes of the human political spectrum and set them against each other in a kind of little moral drama, just to see what works and what happened. I tried to be as fair about it as possible. I mean, yes, politically I'm an anarchist; at the same time I didn't want to stick to just moral blacks and whites. I wanted a number of the fascists I portrayed to be real rounded characters. They've got reasons for what they do. They're not necessarily cartoon Nazis. Some of them believe in what they do, some don't believe in it but are doing it any way for practical reasons. As for the central character of the anarchist, V himself, he is for the first two or three episodes cheerfully going around murdering people, and the audience is loving it. They are really keyed into this traditional drama of a romantic anarchist who is going around murdering all the Nazi bad guys.


At which point I decided that that wasn't what I wanted to say. I actually don't think it's right to kill people. So I made it very, very morally ambiguous. And the central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think, and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history. I was very pleased with how it came together. And it was a book that was very, very close to my heart.

The Beat: And you are still happy with it?


Moore: Well, this is a bit more complex, Heidi. A couple of weeks ago I did ask DC Comics to take my name off the book. This was after a long, long string of gradually worsening relationships which had been kind of obliviously ignored by DC comics. It's got to the point where I've become very, very distanced emotionally from a lot of the work which I don't own. It's a kind of feeling that sort of…if I don't actually have the moral right to declare myself the author of the work, does that not mean that I should have the moral right to declare myself not the author of the work?


V for Vendetta was about something that was very important to me. It was a book that I was very pleased that David Lloyd and I owned. And I never wanted to be in a position where I didn't own it. We were misled, I think is the probably the gentlest way of putting it, and ended up signing V for Vendetta away more or less in perpetuity.

[chuck]

And Part 2 (http://www.comicon.com/thebeat/2006/03/a_for_alan_pt_2_the_further_ad.html#more) of the interview.


In part one of this interview (http://www.comicon.com/thebeat/2006/03/a_for_alan_pt_1_the_alan_moore.html), Moore talked about his unhappiness with the comics industry. In this part, he finishes up on that topic, and talks about his novel and answers the question: Is V a hero?

[gambit]

Hmm, on one hand, I was overall pleased with the film, but it just seemed...I don't know...a bit neutered from it's original form. One of the things I liked about the head chancellor guy from the book was that he was always at his monitor, and when V sends a verbal message of "I love you" through it, he just gets all weirded out (and sorta falls in love with his montior). Also I was waiting for Evy to take up the role of V at the end, but she never did. Granted the love bit was in the book and the hordes of people in V masks in the movie was cool, I would've liked to seen Evy turn into V and let the idea persist past the body.

And I had an annoying guy in back of me laugh at just about every other line from V throughout the first half of the movie. Ugh.

[dubman]

Granted the love bit was in the book and the hordes of people in V masks in the movie was cool, I would've liked to seen Evy turn into V and let the idea persist past the body.


i'm going to be not-so-daring and say i wasn't a terrible fan of the book. even though the movie remained pretty faithful to it, i didnt get the juvenile teenage fantasy fullfillment blah-ness that the book gave me, so bonus points to that. i was pretty glad evy didnt pick up the mask in the end, because by then everyone was V, weren't they? when you already have the citizenry behind you, the buck doesn't really need to be passed.

[gambit]

In the book, the citizenry didn't all turn into V at the end, nor do I recall that citizenry was at all behind V, so the extension of V via Evey was, imo, great. And I would be hard pressed to call anything Alan Moore has written (and I have read a lot of that man's work) as "juvenile teenage fantasy fulfillment." I think you're confusing that with the mainstream superhero comic book world.

[jOHN rODRIGUEZ]

eerrr, don't want to spoil the show for anyone, but I'm really not giving anything away.

V's line containing "idea" struck me wrong, it's delivery just came across a bit cheese corn. Trivial I know, but I annoyingly giggled when I heard it.

I do feel the film succeeded most by it's subtle message that needs to be heard. I'm convinced Katrina has bought me some time.

Finally, were I in the director's chair, ending credits would have been scored to Gabriel's "Fourteen Black Paintings". :D

[myrrh]

I never read the books. I saw this on Imax over the weekend. I liked it, but was mad the she didn't become V at the end because the story seemed to make it seem like she would. Both me and the person I saw this with thought she was going to become V at the end.

[Kennrr]

i never read the book, but i don't know why evy should become V? I mean V spent all this time planning and doing things to make a change in society and the govt, he did that in the end. He had moved the people, so the point of having evy being V isn't really necessary. I thought the whole point of V is that him as an ideal or whatever become everyone, not just one particular character? the mask was just a mask

I really liked Natalie Portman's performance, in star wars i'm just left dumbstrucked by her wooden acting, but i dig this even w/ the fake british accent.

[myrrh]

I thought she was going to become V because V put her through all the same stuff he went through. Then when she was on the roof with her arms in the air, the flashed between him come out of the fire and screaming just like she was.

I dunno, I just felt like the whole thing was setting her up to become V.

[gambit]

First off, my apologies if I've spoiled some parts about the movie to anyone. Didn't really cross my mind when I made my posts.

Next, yeah Evey was turned into the V in the book because that's how V was training her. The movie strayed away from the book when V started sending out masks and costumes to everyone, and personally, I found that premise to be rather unlikely. Sure, he may've changed some minds in London, but I'm sure most people would still be scared to move on their own, and to have that many people stream through the streets of London at the same time seems unlikely to me. Now when I look back through the book, the movie took many liberties with the plot. For instance, there was never a sense of a revolt in the book, so a changing of the guard, so to speak, makes perfect sense. Also it helps show that the idea lives on past the body, which was something V in the movie said ("Ideas are bulletproof"). V was the person in the mask, wig, and cape, not the person.

[GforGroove]

i supposed that this is one of this movies that you should read the story to like it and understand it and don't go out like "whatever" of this film.

[Malt Refund]

Right, go read it yo. ;)

[grady]

Or you could pick up the book intending to read it before seeing the film and just go see the film first anyways on a whim like I ended up doing.

I really did want to read the book before the film because this seemed to be an example of a complex, detailed story is produced by a major Hollywood studio and the end product is heavily diluted to the point where it bears little to no resemblance of the original piece/story.

Despite not reading the book prior to the film I enjoyed it quite a bit. I was a bit concerned about the Wachowski factor but didn't seem to notice it much. I guess it came from their names being splashed all over the film as the author's of the screenplay and producers as well as it being directed by their First A.D. on the Matrix films, James McTeigue.

(Spoiler bits ahead for those who haven't seen the film)



There were a couple points in the film where I found myself chuckle a bit at the abusurdity of what was happening. The most blatant scene was the use of quick cross cutting when V takes Evey up to the roof of the building after he's 'freed' her from prison.

With rain pouring Evey steps out onto the roof raising her arms in the ever popular christ-like film pose of one's arm extended outward and upward to the sky looking up as the character's eyes usually are closed and the camera is perched up high looking down on the character. (For reference points see The Shawshank Redemption, Plesantville, Forrest Gump etc. etc.) At this point there are some quick cuts to V's freedom from his own imprisonment that felt jarring and laughable. It seemed to be pretty fucking obvious what was going on in the scene as a sort of duality to V's scene.

But, I can imagine there are people out there who might not have been able to make this connection or see it. Did anyone else have this same feeling of laughter at the editing during this scene? I should PM b.miller to see if this was in the cut of the film he saw last December or whether he was sleeping during this scene.(just joking around brian, after a day of films, I'd probably fall asleep too :p) I'd imagine the scene was probably already there as the film was pretty much set for it's November 5th release date.


Regarding the discussion Evey becoming V, I like how the film left it. I really liked the idea of V using an old, more or less forgotten holiday as a pulpit for his attack as well as the foundation for some of his belief/idelogy. As I'm not british and don't live in the UK I don't know if this holiday is as I described it, but the sense I got from the little bit in the film was that it is one of those older holidays that pop up every year yet you still don't entirely know the explanation for why said day is a holiday.

As the book ended with Evey carrying on V's work I'm even more curious now to get into the book and see how it all plays out. I do like the idea of V passing things onto Evey but I also really like how the film played it out, as his work throughout the past year was revenge for himself, but also served as a wake up call to the English society to pay attention to what has been occurring in their country in the past 10-20 years.