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 Natalie Portman does a nice U-Tube Upskirt Flash in V For Vendetta
Original Book by Alan Moore, David Lloyd *
Screenplay-Novel by Steve Moore *
Soundtrack
|
War is peace and Ignorance is knowledge in 'V For Vendetta'
By Stuart Klawans - The Nation
Ed. note
The Nation magazine would
seem an unlikely place to find a review of movies made for fans of Britney Spears, but rather than wait
for a "second opinion" from The Nation, or a retraction, I'll just go with this excerpt from
The Wild Child by Stuart Klawans, because having seen
V For Vendetta in our local theater, I find no fault with what he said. I haven't yet read the reviews
he wrote in "The Wild Child" for L'Enfant, Shakespeare Behind Bars, Toro Negro, The Devil's Miner and
Mardi Gras: Made in China.
War is peace. Ignorance is knowledge. And the torrent of argle-bargle coursing through V for Vendetta is a transgressive, liberating discourse set loose within the most eye-popping thrill-ride of the year!
Your attention, please, for the latest exercise in double-think by the Wachowski brothers, authors of The Matrix Revolutions and other masterpieces.
The Future! England grovels before a huge televisual image of John Hurt, his unfortunate dentition (even nastier in IMAX) forever issuing spittle-flecked decrees. This is the face of a fascist new order, which rules (as you might have guessed) by the old order's usual methods: propaganda broadcasts, manufactured fears, police violence, shadowy prison camps. Who, or what, can challenge the regime? Not a man, surely, but an idea incarnate; a masked, wigged and caped avenger, with cool knives and karate moves; a living reminder of the spirit of Guy Fawkes and his Gunpowder Plot; in a letter, V.
Or, more prosaically, Hugo Weaving, here done up in a cheap Halloween costume, spouting alliterative nonsense and Shakespearean tags in the voice of Keane the Elder.
Now, into V's hands falls one Evey (Natalie Portman), a lovely but apparently dim-witted young thing who wanders the streets after curfew and accepts invitations from masked men she's only just met. She will hate V. She will love him. She will sigh, in voiceover, about the impossibility of kissing an idea, and yet she will tenderly press her lips to the plastic of V's mask. I don't think she knows what she wants.
But if you want simulated knife-throwing, chaotically edited fight scenes, ponderous musical cliches (the 1812 Overture, Beethoven's Fifth), wholesale borrowings from 1984, strained allusions to the Bush Administration and Fox News, lengthy and yet inconsequential protests against the ostracism of gays and lesbians, a muddled girl-in-peril plot and some gee-whiz production design, V for Vendetta is the movie for you. Never mind that the Wachowskis' characteristically logorrheic script defeats at every turn first-time director James McTeigue, who has been asked to make a comic-book movie but can't possibly keep it going. V for Vendetta is about the idea of a comic-book movie, you see, and the idea of liberation.
Some liberation. By dint of his heroics, V gets England's narcotized citizenry to abandon their television sets, gather in the streets and become--an audience, passively watching a sound-and-light show. The cops, being just ideas of themselves, do nothing. The bombing of the Houses of Parliament--what an excellent target, for someone striking back at a dictator!--is also just an idea, and therefore can be very pretty, for a wanton act of destruction. And should all these big ideas give you a headache, Evey will explain that this blow for freedom has been struck by (I quote) "the Count of Monte Cristo."
Revenge is liberty. I can't recall hearing that particular idea from Tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama or the makers of Batman Begins. But, as the Wachowski brothers would say, that's another paradigm.
Stuart Klawans is The Nation's film critic, and is the author of Film Follies: The Cinema Out of
Order (a finalist for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Awards) and Left in the Dark: Film Reviews
and Essays, 1988-2001. When not on deadline for The Nation, he contributes articles to the New York
Times and other publications.
V for Vendetta - Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition (2006) *
Full Screen *
Wide Screen
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd -
Hardcover * Paperback
V For Vendetta
"One of the most
genuinely subversive films to come out
of Hollywood since the 70s..."
Ed. note: It didn't get front
page (cover) mention
with Teri (desperate housewife) Hatcher's Secret, and Jack Abramoff and Bob Woodward Come Clean, but
buried deep in the pages of the April 2006 edition of Vanity Fair, which I didn't see a copy of 'til
Saturday, is a "review" - for adults, starring Natalie Portman. Great movie. Bright kid.
In the review, Vanity Fair gives a run down on Brothers Wachowski of The Matrix fame, producer
Joel Silver, and some mention of
the authors, Alan Moore and David Lloyd, who wrote what finally became V For Vendetta. But they gave
away one part of the
story line that if you haven't seen the movie yet, don't read their article yet. The
Vanity Fair piece is more about Natalie Portman than about the movie, although the 1965 film The Battle
of Algiers is
mentioned.
Portman says, "People are asking, 'Does this movie justify violence?' I think it takes you
to look at
terrorism from a new perspective. It puts it in new shoes so that you can see reasons where the methods
of terrorism might be justified... I think when you make any kind of art you're trying to open a
conversation - you're not trying to tell someone what to think." I should mention, as was mentioned
in the Vanity Fair article, Portman was a student of Alan "torture is ok" Dershowitz, at Harvard.
The Vanity Fair article is mostly movie star magazine fluff stuff; about other movies she was in -
the only one I saw was The Professional, so from there to V For Vendetta, I have no guilt pangs about
my time being wasted on wasted movies, although some were very popular, and except for one topless
sunbathing incident and "picking a wedgie" (whatever that is), the tabloids don't find Natalie Portman
interesting, and neither do the paparazzi - some of whom call her "cunt" for her lack of interest in
them.
Beyond the actress as actress, Vanity Fair tells about some of her post graduate studies;
Hebrew University, in Jerusalem.
Hebrew. Arabic.
History of Israel. History of Islam. Anthropology of Violence. Uh? Also, they
mention her charitable work with Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA), that
provides micro-loans to poor women in developing countries that are starting businesses, and on V For
Vendetta again, Vanity Fair wrote:
The film takes place in a post-World War III totalitarian Britain. Its hero is V, a masked vigilante
who blows up London landmarks, takes over the airwaves, and urges citizens to overthrow their
tyrannical government. Although the original was written in response to Maggie Thatcher's England - with
V an updated version of Guy Fawkes, who attempted to blow up Parliament in 1605 - the film plays as a
commentary on the George W Bush administration and its police state tactics. It is one of the most
genuinely subversive films to come out of Hollywood since the 70s.
Vanity Fair is quite an institution, and they have a jillion ad revenue dollars to publish a work
of modern (graphics) art every month. Editorially, it is a mix of quasi-hip pop (not hip-hop) culture,
politics,
and it-doesn't-matter journalism as to rival the National Inquirer.
In the April 2006 edition, not
mentioned above is "Lies and Consequences - Sixteen Words that Changed the World", Christopher
Hitchins, Steve Jobs, and a bit about how the FBI as domestic spy agency treated Martin Luther
King in such a chickenshit and unlawful manner. Also, the unfortunately chinned (JFK) conspiracy
theorist Dorothy Kilgallen makes a Vanity Fair appearance because there was talk that the CIA
had "silenced" her after an interview she had conducted with Jack Ruby - who killed Lee Harvey Oswald,
who killed JFK - as the "official" story goes according to the Warren Report, but not according to
Oliver Stone of JFK fame. So who do you want to believe? The CIA or a Hollywood movie maker?
Hated by Frank Sinatra, Dorothy Kilgallen was about to break her Jack Ruby story when she
was found dead in her bed from an overdose of sleeping pills and vodka. Witnesses say she wasn't
drunk. The sleeping pills had not
dissolved in her stomach. When she died she was still fully made-up. She even had her fake
eye-lashes on, and supposedly having died reading a book in bed, her glasses were nowhere to
be found, and neither were her Jack Ruby interview notes or tapes.
The Guy Fawkes Show aka V for Vendetta
"'V for Vendetta' is less of a message and more of a question which is 'when if ever is violence
justified'? And you can say that there are certain situations when it is justified."
-
Natalie Portman - eTalk
Ed. note: According to
Barry Koltnow, "'V for Vendetta' is the feel-good movie of the year."
The big news over the
weekend about V For Vendetta was
boxoffice, as they say.
At our local quad-plex, only a half dozen people in the whole place. Never mind that Sunday was the first day in the past two weeks when it wasn't
raining. "Who in their right mind would go to a movie on such a beautiful day?" Who would ask such a question of a guy who saw
The Matrix 40 times before
Matrix Reloaded and
Matrix Revolutions came out? So, needless to say, I thought
V For Vendetta was great, even as the logical extension of The Matrix. More so than
extensions of Reloaded and Revolutions, which drifted away dimensionally from where The Matrix started
and ended.
Amazon has some great
reviews of V For Vendetta. One was written by a guy who says he "loves movies" and
gave V five stars. Beginning, middle and end; that's my "movie review" story too. I mean, why bother
to write a review unless you care about what you're writing about? By contrast, some jerk writing in
all capital (uppercase) letters, wrote a scathing anti-V review - not about the movie, but about some
perceived anti-Americanism. Never mind the movie takes place in Jolly Olde England... Here are some
excerpts from some of the online reviews I thought got parts of it just about right.
CLICK on KEYWORDS in the text below to
more reviewer links.
Vendetta's V: Villain or Vindicating Vigilante?
By
Kristen Brown
If you had to choose, would you choose life or liberty?
For most, life comes before liberty, because without life what is liberty? But what kind of life can be
had if there isn't individual freedom?
Is life without liberty no life at all?
Restoring civil liberties through acts of terrorism.
This trade off between individual freedoms and security has been a hot topic of late in the United States.
The debate was revived recently after U.S. President George Bush's adamant defence of his decision to approve secret wire-tapping. What many critics are calling an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, the Bush Administration calls a necessary sacrifice for security.
But are freedom and security truly mutually exclusive? Or is that just the current perception?
Although present day America may be a far cry from the fear-mongering dictatorship depicted in Vendetta, the film at times resembles real life more than science fiction.
A U.S. court ruled Wednesday that the search engine Google must share some of its records with the U.S. Justice Department -- just days before Vendetta will be released in North America.
While Google will not have to provide data on specific individuals, many argue that this ruling will form a precedent which could lead to more invasive government probes into personal information.
As well, the release of the film, which contains scenes of terrorist attacks on iconic London
buildings, was delayed after real-life terrorists struck London's underground shortly after the crew
wrapped shooting in the city. MORE
Is this movie a parable about
2006?
Can you say,
Dick Cheney? Or,
Abu Ghraib, anyone? V For Vendetta answers what you get if you cross a
Nixon with a
Bill O'Reilly. So where does
Julie London singing "Cry Me a River" fit into this movie, as Evey (Natalie Portman) remains a
bystander, wholesome and believable in V For Vendetta?
Unlike
George Orwell's 1984 and
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 one of the nagging problems with V for Vendetta is it verges on
glorifying terrorism...
Guy Fawkes, the Catholic fanatic who tried to topple the Protestant regime of King James 1 in 1605 by
blowing up the Houses of Parliament, was a dangerous man.
On Nov. 4, the eve of
Guy Fawkes Day, British schoolchildren for centuries have started bonfires to burn Fawkes in effigy.
The hero of the story is a murderous anarchist, fighting a police-state government that controls its
citizens through iron-fist fear and terror. Minorities are jailed. Dissent, free expression and
religious beliefs are crushed. Censorship is the order of the day. Torture is commonplace. Biological
attacks kill thousands of people.
V for Vendetta is an
allegorical tale about all societies where governments are no longer a voice of
the people, and a
social critique of the direction today's policy makers are heading; an
allegory we need to hear.
V for Vendetta is an
Orwellian Matrix. V's villains are Conservatives and
fundamentalist Christians whose teachings assign women to quiet, child-rearing husband-obeying
duties. They are portrayed as xenophobic, unfeeling, crooked, murderous, and the purveyors of genocide; the true
threats to freedom of gays and Muslims. See
Iraq: 3 Years Later; Interview With Kevin Phillips, author of
American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century
What If Government Was Responsible for (Fill in the Blank - Suggestions: the
Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11 and the Anthrax attacks, the
war on terror, the Iraq War, the Katrina levy break in New Orleans,
the
USA Patriot Act,
warrantless wire tapping and/or the recent
Google ruling)?
The mythical Londontowners of 2020, have allowed a dictator to rule in the hope of
reestablishing a sense of national security. Television commentary blasts proper thoughts, suggests
correct spins, and delivers unbelievable explanations, which no one verbally challenges.
Jennifer Vineyard wrote in Rebels Without Pause:
"The term 'terrorist' is the kind of label we stick on people when we don't want to understand why
they're doing things," Hugo Weaving says.
"One man's terrorist," adds Joel Silver, "is another man's freedom fighter."
According to director James McTeigue, "It depends on the regime you're fighting against. It depends on whether you consider the founding fathers of America terrorists. Or Nelson Mandela. Or Che Guevara."
"If somebody had assassinated Hitler, that government would have called him a terrorist," says Natalie Portman, who plays Evey, V's young confidante and, perhaps more importantly, his protg. "It's so contextual."
Stalin's Russia, or Hitler's Germany, or Franco's Spain, or America under George W. Bush. See
rendition and a protracted war on terror.
Chancellor (fill in the blank) says, communicating with his minions via a giant video monitor, has
censored music, books and art that have been deemed "objectionable materials." His thugs "detain"
political activists and "relocate" what have been determined to be "degenerates": Muslims, Jews,
communists, immigrants, homosexuals.
V says, "All of the war, terror, disease and food and water shortages they've known, have
merely been opportunities for Chancellor (fill in the blank) and his thuggish cronies to rise to and
retain absolute power." MORE
A COMIC BOOK ANTI-HERO FOR AN ORWELLIAN WORLD
"'V' For Vendetta" justifies terrorism. How do you like it so far?
Terrorist or freedom fighter?
By Bruce Newman - San Jose Mercury News
"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." - Thomas Jefferson
In V for Vendetta a masked man blows up a building that is one of his country's principal symbols of power, and vows to topple another as the endgame in a yearlong terror campaign. He says his violent insurgency is directed against the government, whose leaders he means to kill one by one.
Is he a terrorist? A freedom fighter? Or just a guy having a really bad hair day?
Until graphic novels began to overtake literature as the primary source material for big-budget studio movies, Hollywood treated rebellious outsiders willing to challenge political orthodoxies -- such as Robin Hood and Jimmy Stewart's Mr. Smith -- as heroes. But graphic novels, which really are just comic books with stiffened spines, exalted complexity. They transformed the hero of ``Batman & Robin'' from a kitschy crime fighter, whose nipples were more prominent than his politics, to the tormented revolutionary of ``Batman Begins.''
``V for Vendetta'' was published as a graphic novel in 1989, and after it was adapted for the screen by ``Matrix'' writer-directors Andy and Larry Wachowski, it has experienced an insurgency campaign of its own by the comic's writer, Alan Moore, who demanded that his name be taken off the movie.
Moore and the comic book's die-hard fans may be the only ones who mind what the Wachowski brothers have done with it, however. The film is an intriguing thriller that asks questions likely to have a powerful effect on conscripts in the current war on terror. Which is pretty much all of us. Without getting preachy about it, the picture makes you wonder about slogans like ``war on terror'' and the motivations of the people behind them.
V, the man in the ironic mask, issues threats from behind the hideous rictus of a 400-year-old grin. (Considering that it's the face of Guy Fawkes, whose attempt to blow up England's Parliament in 1605 ended with his being hanged, then drawn and quartered, that smile may not be totally sincere.) The goatee on V's mask is shaped like a crucifix, and the nose a dagger. He doesn't just project menace, he is the threat incarnate.
The movie is set just far enough into the future that newscasters reflect sadly upon ``the former United States,'' whose downfall began with ``the war'' -- presumably a reference to the current conflict in Iraq. And though the story is set squarely in Britain, which has become a totalitarian police state, the picture's time and place remain purposefully mutable.
The fascist government is led by a fire-breathing Chancellor, fearsomely played by John Hurt, who conducts video conferences with his henchmen from a screen the size of a barn. The imagery is meant to evoke George Orwell's ``1984,'' in the film version of which Hurt played a man slowly awakening to how passive he and the rest of the country has become.
In ``Vendetta,'' that role falls to Natalie Portman as Evey, who has traded the political pacifism of her parents for a sort of passivism that the movie seems to suggest is at large on the political landscape today. Evey is out after curfew one evening when she is accosted and threatened with rape by three members of a secret police agency called the Fingermen. From out of the shadows, V appears in a black peaked hat, black Vampira wig and a black cowl filled with knives. Before disemboweling Evey's tormentors, he delivers a speech in which almost every other word begins with the letter V.
``Are you, like, a crazy person?'' Evey inquires when he's through.
V invites Evey to join him on a nearby rooftop, where he uses the government's network of loudspeakers -- a reminder of the surveillance cameras that now blanket central London -- to broadcast his own message to the country as he blows up the Old Bailey.
Evey works at the British Television Network, the state-run channel on which a demagogue known as the Voice of London whips up feelings against immigrants, homosexuals and other groups considered undesirable. To counter this, V commandeers the airwaves. ``The truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country,'' he tells the people. ``Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the Chancellor.'' He asks the nation to stand with him against the government on the next Guy Fawkes Day, when he promises to finish the job that Fawkes started and dissolve Parliament. Literally.
The Wachowskis and their handpicked director, James McTeigue, have cleverly intertwined the
stories of how V came to be what he is, and of how susceptible even a democracy is to a strongman
when the lie is big enough. V enacts his vendetta against those who have harmed him, not as an agent
of democratic reform.
As a disengaged everywoman, Evey is buffeted about by the government on one side and V on the other.
Portman makes little attempt to enliven her character, which can be maddening at times, but it's the
right performance for the movie. -- After playing the equally frozen-faced Agent Smith in the "Matrix"
trilogy, Hugo Weaving uses his sonorous voice and just the right amount of body language to turn what
could have been a bomb-throwing scarecrow into a vibrant anti-hero. "People should not be afraid of
their government," V says. "Governments should be afraid of their people." Of course, he was smiling when he said it.
Natalie Portman Upskirt Flash
youtube.com
Natalie Portman, dressed as a schoolgirl in V for Vendetta shows
some
nice upskirt flash as she rolls off the bed in
her escape from the Bishop.
V for Vendetta - Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition (2006) *
Full Screen *
Wide Screen
Original Book by Alan Moore, David Lloyd *
Screenplay-Novel by Steve Moore *
Soundtrack
Soundtrack*: 1. Remember Remember the 5th of November 2. Cry Me A River - Julie London
3. '...Governments Should Be Afraid Of Their People...' 4. Evey's Story 5. Lust At The Abbey
6. The Red Diary 7. Valerie 8. Evey Reborn 9. I Found A Reason - Cat Power 10. England Prevails
11. The Dominoes Fall 12. Bird Gerhl - Antony & The Johnson - 13. Knives And Bullets (And Cannons Too) LISTEN
*Ed. note: Missing from the CD are The 1812 Overture, which plays during V's blowing up of Parliament and
the Old Bailey;
Street Fighting Man by The Rolling Stones; Ethan Stoller's
Bed, Kitchen, Attic, Basement! (BKAB), which includes samples of speeches by Gloria Steinem and Malcolm X, and which plays
right after Street Fighting Man. Also, both
Out of Sight by Spiritualized, and
Girl from Ipanema by Stan Getz are excluded from the CD.
   
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Like Algiers before, it's Fallujah Still
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Updated 20DEC2004
Ed. note: Included are links (below) to Battle of Algiers, Z, and Godfather II. All three are
telling the same story about Algiers, Greece, Cuba, and, uh, downtown Fallujah or Baghdad.
In this game, the most committed wins. For the Bush White House to ask American soldiers to die for Iraq, is socially and morally irresponsible if not flat-out insane. Doesn't anyone inside the Beltway remember Vietnam anymore?
A new DVD version has just
been released. See
Amazon for details and "reviews" of the original 1967 movie.
Like Algiers before, it's Fallujah now
By George S. Hishmeh
Ground Zero Nation From 28AUG2003 edition
By Tom Engelhardt
Dying to Win : The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism * Battle of Algiers - DVD
Z (1969) - English subtitles * The Godfather, Part II (1974)
The Godfather VHS - (Widescreen Edition) * VHS - Spanish subtitles * The Godfather DVD Collection (2001)
 
The Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria 1955-1957
by Paul Aussaressess and Robert L. Miller
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