After seeing V for Vendetta I wonder if the Wachowski brothers attended the same shitty New Jersey public schools that I did. They seem to have learned about the same topics I did in school. For example, they’ve clearly read the CliffsNotes for Hamlet and familiarized themselves with the concept of foil characters. And they much have watched Strangers on a Train in Intro to Film and learned about parallel editing. And, like any middle school English student, the Wachowski brothers know all about alliteration. Good for them. Knowledge is power, and all that. But sadly, the Wachowski brothers never learned to respect their learned wisdom and instead flaunt their basic comprehension of the most elementary literary principles. It really gets annoying after awhile.
The relentless bludgeoning of simplistic ideas and artistry starts early on, at the beginning of the movie. We see V dressing and watching TV, then it cuts to Natalie Portman dressing and watching the same program. It cuts back and forth as the two perform similar acts of preparation for the evening. This opening, like the opening of Strangers on a Train, uses parallel editing to show the intersecting lives of two characters. In Strangers on a Train, the editing is more spatial in nature, showing Bruno and Guy as they walk towards the same train car, whereas in V the editing is geared more towards establishing a similarity between V and Natalie Portman. It’s never made clear that they are, in fact, dressing and heading out to the same place. What is made clear, painfully clear over the course of the movie, is that V and Natalie Portman are cut from the same cloth. Early in the film, they are made out be foils to one another, similar yet different. Sadly, this won’t be the last time the filmmakers make painfully obvious the relationship between V and Natalie Portman. But more on that later, now it’s on to the alliteration.
When V and Natalie Portman first meet (V rescues Natalie when Fingermen are attempting to rape her(which isn’t nearly as naughty as it sounds)), he introduces himself with the following monologue:
Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van-guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.
V then carves a ‘V’ into the wall. One would think that this would be enough to establish the fact that this character’s name is most likely V. He shows a peculiar, albeit somewhat endearing, fondness for the letter. And, when prompted for his name, he carved a ‘V’ into the wall. If, when asked your name, you carve something into the wall, logic dictates that whatever you just carved into the wall is your name. Even if you carve something ridiculous, like Rusty Mangina (the name I would use if I were a Brazilian transsexual porn star), that’s your name. After all, why else would you carve something into the wall if it weren’t your name?
Sadly, the Wachowskis think less of their audience than I. They think another round of alliteration is needed. Then, for good measure, one more. That’s three distinctly separate alliterative speeches, all preceding V’s announcement Natalie Portman may call him V. No shit. I kinda figured that was his name when he carved it into the fucking wall. Apparently subtlety was not something the Wachowskis learned during the course of their rudimentary education.
But they did learn about music. Oh yes, they know about music. Classical music in fact. More specifically, they’ve listened to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. So naturally, it gets featured in V for Vendetta. Can you guess when it is featured? No, it’s not when Natalie Portman pantomimes the unsuccessful French invasion of Russia, it’s when shit blows up. Isn’t that original? Isn’t that a wonderful example of, as Roger Ebert put it, “ideas that are all the more intriguing because we can’t pin down the message”? Man, I wonder how long it took the Wachowski brothers to come up with the idea of using the 1812 Overture when shit blows up. Truly a troubling vision of a dystopian future.
But enough about music. Music is superficial. Sure, I like music as much as the next guy, but I really only listen to it to drown out the depressing emptiness of my life. And why talk about music when V for Vendetta is clearly of film of ideas. Unfortunately, those ideas are basically a combination of stoner paranoia and derivative Orwellian cliches. You see, idiots, V, wants to overthrow England’s totalitarian governments. He works towards this goal by dressing up in a wig and Guy Fawkes mask, cutting people with knives and blowing shit up. The grandiose “idea” of V for Vendetta is presumably the quandary over the acceptability of violence. Is V a terrorist or freedom fighter? Is he any better than those he’s trying to usurp? Those are the questions the Wachowskis want us to ponder. But they do a terrible job of framing the issue.
V for Vendetta wants to be a movie about the politics of revolution in an oppressive totalitarian state, but it’s really just a stylized Death Wish. Some people torture V and kill his lady friend and he hunts them down and kills them. Coincidentally, these people are also high-ranking government officials. But he’s not after them because they killed 80,000 innocent people. He’s not after them because they limit the freedoms of the populace in the name of security. The only thing he cares about is his own personal revenge. Revolution, like Communism, is just a red herring.
The real issue of V for Vendetta is the choice all free people face: totalitarian rule or Halloween. That might seem odd, but if you have the misfortune of watching this movie, you’ll see the closest thing to a revolution is when everyone puts on a mask and goes out to watch shit blow up. Like Halloween, but without the candy. A shitty Halloween, in other words. When faced with the choice of totalitarianism or a shitty Halloween, people are going to choose shitty Halloween all the time. It’s really not much of a choice.
Now this Awesome Movie Review has gone on for too long and it lacks the focus that it had when I first started thinking about it, so I just want to highlight one sequence that I think sums up the mind-numbing incompetence of the Wachowski brothers. The sequence begins when Natalie Portman saves V before being knocked unconscious. V pauses during his escape, clearly faced with the decision of saving Natalie Portman or making a clean getaway. Then we see the police officers watching the security camera feed of the incident. One of them points out that V, as he pauses during his escape, is clearly faced with the decision of saving Natalie Portman or making a clean getaway. Then there’s a scene where V, after spiriting Natalie Portman away to his secret lair, explains that he, during his escape, was clearly faced with the decision of saving Natalie Portman or making a clean getaway. That’s three scenes–two that are flat-out explanations of the first–do convey what was plainly obvious in the first place. All of V for Vendetta is like that. Every twenty minutes it’s a fucking Scooby-Doo ending, where motivations are revealed, plots are explained and duplicitous carnies are unmasked. It’s insulting, really.
As I said before, I’ve gone on too long. I have no idea what I’m trying to say anymore. So, I’ll just end this as I should have began it, with two quotes from my boy Vlad:
There are few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction. The purpose of this foreword is not to show that Bend Sinister belongs or does not belong to “serious literature” (which is a euphemism for the hollow profundity and the ever-wholesome commonplace). I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment (in journalistic and commercial parlance: the “great books”). I am not “sincere,” I am not “provocative,” I am not “satirical.” I am neither didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics, economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of “thaw” in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent. As in the case of my Invitation to a Beheading–with which this book has obvious affinities–automatic comparisons between Bend Sinister and Kafka’s creations or Orwell’s clichés would go merely to prove that the automaton could not have read either the great German writer or the mediocre English one.
and
The study of the sociological or political impact of literature has to be devised mainly for those who are by temperament or education immune to the aesthetic vibrancy of authentic literature, for those who do not experience the telltale tingle between the shoulder-blades.
V for Vendetta does not merit serious discussion. Whatever uninspired thoughts the Wachowski brothers throw against the wall are irrelevant. The film is repetitive, unoriginal and, at times, insulting. Just like every other action blockbuster that does not star Vin Diesel. V for Vendetta would normally receive the dread evil tiny head of Sergei Eisenstein, but there is one scene that features the Benny Hill music and a person dressed in a gorilla suit running around in fast-motion. That alone merits one tiny head of Sergei Eisenstein. If only I had spent two hours watching Benny Hill instead of V for Vendetta. On my scale of one to five tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein, I give V for Vendetta one tiny head of Sergei Eisenstein. Read some Nabokov instead.
That doesn’t mean I was looking for any message in it. I learned when watching Matrix 2 and 3 that the Wachowski brothers have no skill at conveying messages, so I just watched it for the entertainment value. Not half bad if you do that.
You, sir, are a far braver man than I. You honestly made it through both Matrix sequels? That’s hardcore. By the end of Matrix 2, I was convulsing on the floor in a pool of my own vomit and feces. If I tried to watch the third, I’m positive my head would explode.
I originally attempted to block out everything from both sequels, but the realisation that both are worse than In God’s Hands meant I had a new low benchmark of bad and disappointed to set other movies against. If only the Matrix had been in Morrissey’s hands…
Never trust a movie written and directed by the man behind Red Shoe Diaries.
Thank you. I’ll put that in my campaign commercials if I ever run for president. In my defense, Google paid for all of its employees to see both movies. Looking back, I’m not sure whether working or going to the movie would have been more enjoyable.
That doesn’t surprise me one bit. Google pays for its employees to watch shitty movies, while I spend hours sifting through worthless search results, just so I can find the one damn pipe menu I want to download.
You are missing a word in your first sentence that should read that the wachowski bros. went TO the same shitty public schools that you did. You cannot attempt to make them look bad by assuming they read cliffsnotes and knew as much as any middle school student about alliteration with an opening sentence like that. You should proofread work that attempts to insult writers richer than you. Also, Google the name Alan Moore, who wrote the graphic novel V for Vendetta and you will discover that you are accusing the wrong people of crappy ideas, because most of the ideas are Moore’s, not Wachowski’s.
I have never proofread a post for this blog and I never will. But thank you for pointing out that mistake for me. People like you make my dynamic, open-source model of blogging possible.
I am not insulting the Wachowski brothers because they are richer than me. I have a net value of about $250. Seriously. I had some work done on my car this weekend, my power bill was $100 and now I’m essentially broke until Thursday. So basically, any person who writes any amount of words is probably a richer writer than I.
Now, to address a point that comes up a lot in comments and emails: I am not smart. I do not pretend to be smarter than other people. I do not think myself better than other people. I am worth $250 and I spend a large portion of my day picking up empty malt liquor bottles with a mechanical reaching stick. I am worthless. But, more to the point, I aspire to nothing. I don’t want people to think that anything I do, including this blog, is of any real merit. That’s why I refer to the idiots who read this blog as idiots. Only an idiot would waste time reading through the poorly-structured grammatical disasters that constitute the bulk of the posts on this stupid-ass blog.
I’ll gladly admit that I am no better than Alan Moore or the Wachowski’s. In fact, there’s a good chance that they are far more intelligent and talented than I could ever dream of being. However, I at least have the decency to realistically assess my own failings. I don’t go around promoting my work as an Uncompromising Vision of the Future, when it is really an unnecessarily repetitive pro-Halloween propaganda piece. When I sat down to watch V for Vendetta, I fully expected an uncompromising vision. I expected a thought-provoking film of both ideas and kickass explosions. Instead, I got some dude in a mask quoting Shakespeare. That wasn’t in the movie posters or trailers. Now I don’t enjoy being lied to, so if the Wachowski’s or anyone else try to pass off a steaming heap of rubbish as a shiny stack of brand-new space Legos, then they had better expect a poorly-written diatribe to be posted on this blog.
First of all, the film is amazing.
I am a harsh critic and never even thought it would be that good, despite the amazing graphic novel it came form being much much mroe of a unique work of literature and art.
This brings me to the point….Alan Moore, a gnius of a write, wrote the Graphic Novel, and is considered the worlds best Graphic novel writer, and certainly a genius of words.
His ideas are those you are criticising, so you may hate the Wachowski Brothers, but the reaosn V carved his name into a wall and so on, etc, is because Alan Moore wrote this. Also with the music too….
You show your lack of through and understanding whilst trying to sound learned, but the way you complain that ‘V’ carved his name into the wall.
We may guess his name by now for his love of the letter ‘v’, but he carves his name into a wall not because anyone would, as you put it, but because he is carving ‘V’ into a government propaganda poster on a wall, to show defiance, and show what his business is all about, …about defiance and vendetta, or victory over this tyranical regime…..infact you are wrong to assume he also talks so many ‘v’s because his anme is ‘v’….no , he does this because he is showing his purpose or V for vendetta…vengeance, victory…, but because he also has no intention of revealing his name which he has long since forgot, he tells Evey to call him ‘V’…
The reason for the 1812 overture is also because it’s in the script, and it wouldn’t matter if he use this or handel’s firework music, it’s all to stage a grand demolition of the failure of justice.
You also claim V is doing all this because he and his lady friend were tortured etc….well that other lady actress was not his friend but a famous actress who inspire him to survive whilst captive.
You fail to see the very English humour and dark comedic tragedy in this film, which was possibly the best film along with the first Matrix, which the W Brothers have made. It is not plastered with much action but alot of philosophical ideas and psychology etc, and I agree violence is not an option, but this film is all about questioning violence, and showing how it is never good even in the hands of the ‘heros’….but this filmmakes us all question indeed. The part in the end where he doesn’t set off the train, but lets Evey decide is another strong moment.
I guess maybe you ought to read the graphci novel, as it is far superior a work….
Actually, I have paged through Moore’s comic book, although I read it after I saw V for Vendetta and after I wrote this awesome movie review. Reading the comic book has not changed my opinion, although I could see shifting some of the blame from the brothers Wachowski to Alan Moore and his trite, straight outta Orwell political musings. As for the “very English humour” that I fail to see, well I’ve seen every episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and I’m pretty damn sure there’s no English humour to be found in V for Vendetta. English humour is a naked man playing an organ. That sounds dirtier than it should.