V for Vendetta

This was on my list of movies that I really want to see but who am I kidding I never get to movie theatres even to see movies like King Kong that you really should see on the big screen.

After reading Wolcott, I really must see it.

Everyone settled into their seats and as the lights dimmed, I recalled how Pauline Kael would sigh at screenings as the room darkened, "Let us pray...," her way of hoping for the best. I don’t know what she would have made of the movie, but when it was over I knew it was the movie our post 9-11 minds craved and unconsciously had been working towards, a movie that conjured the fear of terrorism and repression and didn’t just tell us how we got into the Orwellian predicament we’re in (terrain already attacked by Fahrenheit 9-11, Syriana, Why We Fight), but made the imaginative leap that would lift us out of the news, out of the political present, and stand up to that fear—face it with fury and compassion. The irony is that to face the fear, a mask was required, a mask with a mocking grin.

“People shouldn’t be afraid of their governments…governments should be afraid of their people.”

V for Vendetta may be--why hedge? is--the most subversive cinematic deed of the Bush-Blair era, a dagger poised in midair. Unlike the other movies dubbed “controversial” (Fahrenheit 9-11, The Passion, Munich, Syriana), it doesn’t play to a particular constituency or polarized culture bloc, it’s working on a deeper, Edger Allen Poe-ish witch’s brew substrata of pop myth.

[...]

And make no mistake V for Vendetta is fun, dangerous fun, percussive with brutality and laced with ironic ambiguity and satirical slapstick (a Benny Hill homage, no less!). But gives the movie its rebel power is the moral seriousness that drives the action, emotion, and allegory. That’s what I didn’t expect from the Wachowski brothers (The Matrix), this angry, summoning Tom Paine moral dispatch that puts our pundits, politicians, and cable news hosts to shame. V for Vendetta instills force into the very essence of four-letter words like hate, love, and (especially) fear, and releases that force like a fist. Off come the masks, and the faces are revealed.

Right after I see Why We Fight.

Ambitious, I know, for someone who goes to see a movie in a theatre about once every 3-6 months.

V for Vendetta