So I saw the ICA preview of V for Vendetta in London on Tuesday night. In fact, Paul and I had a drink with the original series artist, David Lloyd, before his Q&A session preceding the film showing. In my typical style of irony, I failed to enjoy the experience or be very sociable due to feeling rather crappy. This flu’s hung on a bit, and after a long train journey and much walking around London with a moderately heavy bag, wearing clothes not especially suitable to the current weather (don’t ask me: my mind was eschewing all logic) and shoes that wouldn’t be noted for comfort, I was pretty burnt out. Hope I get to see David again one of the days, if only to say, ‘But I’m not always like that.’ :-/
As to the film, I think I’ll be lazy and steal some of the stuff I’ve already written in mailing list/message board postings, okay…
I’m going to go along with Paul (who had already seen it about a week earlier) and give it a thumbs-up, even though the reception at the ICA appeared to be somewhat mixed.
I thought the message of the story was even more forceful than the book, if anything, to the point of heavy-handedness, but for all that, I still liked it. Many changes, but some of the best/most memorable bits of the original survive almost verbatim, notably the bishop and Valerie sequences.
I think, if nothing else, for its thematic concerns it seems a quite important film. The trouble with taking the kind of position this film does means a lot of potential punters are going to hate you for it, which is quite brave, whatever you think of the actual work. I don’t believe it’ll make a difference, but I wish it would.
I want one of those masks.
Re. Moore’s gripes about the picture (detailed at length here, amongst numerous other places): why doesn’t he forget trying to reason this issue out and just say (more honestly), ‘I hate it because they dared to change something!’ Because, much as I love Moore, his problem is that he thinks he’s smarter than everyone else alive, and he isn’t. In fact, before he starts making political remarks he might get a basic understanding of politics first—he still sees things through the eyes of an anti-establishment teenager who labels everything he doesn’t like as Fascist*. The film doesn’t need a mis-applied word like fascism to work; it doesn’t need the word anarchy because it’s self-evident. (Having said that, I’m pretty sure V uses the word anarchy at least once…)
(*Been there, done that. And I’m still anti-establishment.)
I was more surprised than I should be, actually, to read in the latest Mustard that Moore freely admits to being stoned 24/7. I mean literally. Go read it. And he has all the marks of it—the slightly off-base but unvarying perceptions and general slant toward groundless paranoia. He may be a brilliant writer but his judgement is inherently suspect.
(This is not an anti-drugs position. I admit to having smoked dope more than once in the past, though I can’t say I found the experience particularly rewarding…)
The biggest bogus lead is Moore’s idea that setting it in the UK is a cowardly move. I don’t think the setting matters much in that sense: it is so damning of the religious right and its potential that it would piss a lot of people off even if it were set on Mars. And isn’t it, in fact, more disturbing to float such an idea in light of a phoney terrorist stunt rather than the purple device of this happening after a nuclear war? The closer something seems, the more scary it gets. We all preferred to believe the Big War was never gonna happen anyway, and anything set in light of it, we had a desire to see as pure fantasy. But this… almost seems like it might be round the corner.
I’m not saying the film’s a masterpiece (nor is the comic, exactly), but conceptually it’s on pretty solid ground. The point is, if cowardice is an issue (it isn’t; quite the opposite), why didn’t Alan take a bolder stand with V and show the real situation in early ’80s Britain leading naturally to such things? He dropped a bomb on the landscape instead. He added a moderately comfortable level of separation between then and the premise… it might happen tomorrow but it felt like a thousand years away.
Of course, even without dope I can say that I share some of Moore’s paranoia, and I’d have exactly the same attitude toward people altering my ideas. So I’m a hypocrite. But it’s not my idea, so I don’t feel the need to share his annoyance. ;-)
…I’d add to the above a list of good and bad points…
GOOD
* Finch and his sidekick, a cop team dynamic that Moore, in his version, intended to be one of several Dr. Phibes echoes; the similarities seem even more obvious on screen.
* Hugo Weaving, on the precipice of hammery and bathos but just narrowly missing the many obvious pitfalls.
* Stephen Fry, because… hey, Stephen Fry!
* John Hurt: ditto.
* The bishop sequence. Man, that scene literally crawled off the page back in 1983. It’s lost some power as we’ve all lost a lot of innocence, but still… many of us thought it’d be cut out.
* The Valerie sequence. Some of Moore’s best writing and almost all of it’s here.
* The dominoes thing.
BAD
* The bonkers, seemingly endless stream of ‘V’ themed alliteration during V’s first speech. Like Stan Lee on heavy-duty crack.
* Mistimed opening scenes, perhaps the first 15 minutes, which I’m sure has the potential to confuse the hell out of a lot of viewers who never saw the book.
* The word ‘bollocks’ popping up a couple of times too often; the decidedly American authors used it like a new toy.
* Slo-mo action scene with V toward the climax. Thankfully the only one, so we’re mercifully spared an excess of Matrix-isms. The faux motion-blur effect looked completely rubbish.
* The missing explanation of V’s interest in growing roses and how this relates to the explosive events of some years earlier.
If I were one for marking, it’d be 8/10, all right?