Vendettapalooza Linkfest--Updated with Picture

This was a big weekend for V for Vendetta. It topped the box office, but it will be interesting to see how it holds up next weekend. Did all the comics fans sate their curiosity, or will the film have staying power? (My wife and I played a perhaps cruel game in the theater of guessing who had and who hadn't read the original comics--the audience seemed full of fanboys. Of course, if anybody was doing the same to us, they'd've been right in pegging me for rereading the comics over Saturday and Sunday to remind myself what the filmmakers changed, overlooked, or ignored.) Although the Internet Movie Database claimed the movie got "decent reviews," Roger Ebert gave it a middling thumbs up, while Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, Carina Chocano in the LA Times, and David Denby in The New Yorker gave it outright pans. (Whether you're a fan of the movie or not, Chocano's dissection of it is a fun read. And James Wolcott's concerned that Denby's turning into a neocon.) I'm not sure whether J. Hoberman in The Village Voice liked it or not, as his take included lines such as, "Absorbing even in its incoherence." Either way, The Voice features the review as part of a cover package on the film,
which also includes an overview of dystopic film and a discussion with artist David Lloyd that looks back to the graphic novel (you can check out the cover and first three pages in PDF) and even namechecks Rich Johnston. But in case all this Voice coverage makes you wonder if the movie is an allegory targeting George W. Bush, Atrios has a nice comeback:

If a movie about a fascist tyranny has people freaking out because they view it as a critique of the Bush administration I think that says more about their own view of the administration than the filmmakers'.

And what do I think? I'm not going to repost it here, but if you're interested, you can read my review at Howling Curmudgeons--but I’ll warn you right now, it's a weak-kneed, lily-livered, mediocre one--I neither loved the movie nor hated it.

Even though Alan Moore's loudly disassociated himself from all this hoopla in just about every way possible, the media can't resist the temptation to use it as an excuse to put him in the spotlight. The Independent devoted 4,000 words to him yesterday, and he gave a nice interview to MTV (by the way, Kurt Loder says the movie "will kick your ass"). I've been trying to figure out a way to excerpt a passage from that interview in which Moore explains his problems with the film's changes from his original work, but anything I edit out seems to leave it weaker, so I'm just going to quote the last few paragraphs in full.

When I wrote "V," politics were taking a serious turn for the worse over here. We'd had [Conservative Party Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher in for two or three years, we'd had anti-Thatcher riots, we'd got the National Front and the right wing making serious advances. "V for Vendetta" was specifically about things like fascism and anarchy.

Those words, "fascism" and "anarchy," occur nowhere in the film. It's been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country. In my original story there had been a limited nuclear war, which had isolated Britain, caused a lot of chaos and a collapse of government, and a fascist totalitarian dictatorship had sprung up. Now, in the film, you've got a sinister group of right-wing figures — not fascists, but you know that they're bad guys — and what they have done is manufactured a bio-terror weapon in secret, so that they can fake a massive terrorist incident to get everybody on their side, so that they can pursue their right-wing agenda. It's a thwarted and frustrated and perhaps largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values [standing up] against a state run by neo-conservatives — which is not what "V for Vendetta" was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about [England]. The intent of the film is nothing like the intent of the book as I wrote it. And if the Wachowski brothers had felt moved to protest the way things were going in America, then wouldn't it have been more direct to do what I'd done and set a risky political narrative sometime in the near future that was obviously talking about the things going on today?

George Clooney's being attacked for making ["Good Night, and Good Luck"], but he still had the nerve to make it. Presumably it's not illegal — not yet anyway — to express dissenting opinions in the land of free? So perhaps it would have been better for everybody if the Wachowski brothers had done something set in America, and instead of a hero who dresses up as Guy Fawkes, they could have had him dressed as Paul Revere. It could have worked.

Y'know, he's right--it could've.