V for Vendetta *spoilers*

[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]

Originally Posted by grady

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

[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]

Originally Posted by Malt Refund

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.

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 of the interview.


In part one of this interview, 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.