Not Music

Saw V for Vendetta last night. Trailer notes first.

A Scanner Darkly-- Was styled so drastically (filmed in live-action, and somehow transmogrified into flat, semi-impressionistic animation--looked kind of like a schizophrenic's art, with all those emanating lines and stuff) that it's hard to think about the content and its package at the same time. Content is yet another Philip K. Dick story, package may or may not be annoying and superfluous.

Silent Hill--By the look of it, just a there's-something-evil-out-there horror movie.

X3--Can't tell how Angel does himself, but it looked good. And there's Magneto! That'll go a long way.

Poseidon--A remake of a 70's movie about a cruise ship flipped by a great big wave. Looks execrable, not to mention unneccessary; dialogue includes Deep Blue Sea-like exclamations of "Ships weren't meant to float--upside down!" Dunn dunn dunn! And what was meant to be a touching, urgent line--"I need you to tell you that you love me" in extremis--got a big laugh, and a good three minutes of mocking imitation from the guy behind me.

And one other that I've forgotten, and suspect I actually liked.

V itself. Brilliantly done, I thought, with a few weak spots and one major weakness (one of which I bet is what--other than general cantankerousness--caused Moore to get his name taken off it).

First weakness: That scene where V comes out of the fire and roars. Unnecessary and silly--kinda like newly Darth'd Vader's howl in the last Star Wars. Intercutting it with Evey in the rain just pointed out how unsubtly both were done.

Second weakness: That fight with Creedy's men. Too much fake-looking blood flying, and too many demonstrations of what a cut throat looks like and does to the person it belongs to.

Third and most important minor weakness: The flood of Fawkes-masked people to Parliament, and Evey's confrontation with Finch at V's exploding-train pyre. Sentimental, not credible, and beside the point. The inclusion of characters already killed in the Fawkes-mask-montage was a particularly mawkish touch.

Major weakness: The whole anarchy thing was pretty much gone; maybe in the interests of making V a sympathetic character? Like they toned down (or didn't show, at the least) Evey's torture. It meant that in the book V was a difficult character to sympathize with, and I guess you can't have that in a movie.

Besides the unfortunate ending, a couple of weak scenes, and the overall weakifying, it was a brilliantly-done movie. Hugo Weaving gets mad props for voicing V so credibly and expressively that the unchanging mask became just what it was supposed to be--a cipher, a stand-in for a complex person. Natalie Portman was a good choice for Evey--the right combination of vulnerable and tenacious, uninitiated into the world she happens upon; Finch also was well-cast, with a bloodhound's look and a bewildered patriot's instincts.

One thing I do wonder, though: with what thought was the art in the Shadow Gallery chosen? Van Eyck's The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini with Giovanna featured prominently behind V in at least one shot, and granted it was radical at the time, but it could hardly look more bourgeouis and unthreatening now. Why that painting?

I'm not sure if this was imaginary or accidental or what, but it seemed to me that Party or Government members had very dilated pupils, while people outside the Government had very constricted pupils; maybe interesting to think of in terms of arousal, but maybe not.

Oh, another thing that didn't please me: the digs about "America's war" and that flag in Dietrich's secret bit with the words "Coalition of the Willing" around the swastika. V's England is supposed to be a little fantastical, not directly connected to the present, even though it was written as a protest.