Ray Pride

The movies have changed in the past couple of decades, but what frightens me more in my line of work is how movie reviewing has become a different game, one that seems to have shifted to how a writer can put the reader and potential viewer in their place and discourage any disagreement with the Olympian voice before you.

Longtime New Yorker editor William Shawn supposedly said that a good review offers voice and viewpoint but also enough information that you would feel like you'd learned enough about the movie to feel comfortable participating in a dinner-table conversation about the work at hand. While working to digest "V from Vendetta" from a distance of only twelve hours or so, I pick up the august David Denby's review in the March 20 issue of the New Yorker: "`V for Vendetta,' a dunderheaded pop fantasia that celebrates terrorism and destruction, is perhaps the ultimate example of how a project with modest origins becomes a media monster." Do you want to see a movie after reading a lead like that? Do you want to finish the review or change the subject over drinks?

Turn on cable TV: on MSNBC, the president of the censorious, archconservative Family Research Council named Tony Perkins says that Wisconsin Senator Russell Feingold's call for the censure of President Bush for openly admitting to breaking laws against spying on American citizens is "borderline treasonous behavior." The two forms of discourse--Denby's and the cable-typical Perkins'--seem the same: hectoring, browbeating, superior rants. If you support this movie, as filmmaker Eugene Jarecki told me of Denby's review of his film, "Why We Fight," "the way Mr. Denby would see the world, you're either with him or you're with the terrorists."

"V for Vendetta" is a discursive, morally ambiguous provocation filled with calls to political resistance, adapted by the Wachowski brothers from the 1981 graphic novel written by Alan Moore (who now removes his name from all derivative works he doesn't control); the Chicago-bred Wachowskis produce but their "Matrix" assistant director James McTeigue directs. In 2020 London, after several hundred thousand die from apparent bio-terrorism, and a combination of plagues and civil war wreck the U.S., U.K. power has been consolidated in the military at the hands of an isolated leader with pupils Belladonna-wide (John Hurt). Propaganda is dispensed via television, largely through the government network's shill who looks like Christopher Hitchens and brays like Bill O'Reilly. A man, known as V (Hugo Weaving, bobbing behind an unchanging mask), brutally scarred in the experiments years earlier, bombs historical targets in the now-drab, locked-down London, encouraging the citizenry to react. Rescuing Evie (Natalie Portman), a young woman whose parents were political activists, from the government, V enlists her in his violent cause.

"This is for your protection" is a refrain, as if the populace were being told "Thank you for cowering" for their "silent, obedient consent." The script is dense with terse parodies of authoritarian mollycoddle, kitted out in London's most familiar typeface, Gill Sans. The script also talks about "truncheons used in lieu of conversation," as if anticipating the rancor that "V for Vendetta" has already met. Can movies make metaphor of dangerous subjects? May they, please? Is art the province of social criticism? Can pop burst the edicts of aging panjandrums? Only a couple weeks back, the equally hidebound David Thomson was suggesting that "Good Night, and Good Luck" was worthless for daring to suggest parallels between the 1950s and today, but having the "courage" to come out and be bluntly didactic. Can the old white men make up their minds?

The mullah-like line of reasoning insists that investigating the psychology of terror via art is to be disdained, castigated, belittled. ("Artists use lies to tell the truth" is another blunt refrain in "V.") It's the line of the foils in the movie, ensconced reprobates, adepts at a practiced sort of piety too familiar in twenty-first-century affairs. Yes, "V for Vendetta" alludes to crimes outside the confines of fiction, to the boundless reaches of human mischief, and its terrorist protagonist's invocation that the fictional dystopia "needs more than a building right now--It needs hope" could readily be deciphered as a "defense" of 9/11. Other allusions suggest that governments often perpetrate atrocities against their own citizenry, while "the sanctity of information is paramount in these times." (Plus, among the cross-hatching of reference, there's a Benny Hill homage; a viscous battle of murderous dispatch done up with knives and splatter like Takeshi Kitano's in his "Zatoichi"; a paraphrase of Emma Goldman's scorn toward any "revolution" that disallows dancing; and at one sweet, odd moment of uplift, V is lost in swoon before a jukebox to Cat Power's cover of Lou Reed's "I Found A Reason").

It's only a movie, it's only a movie, it's a popcorn flick, right? Movies are an escape from terrible realities, yes? Please advise. Filmmakers and artists of all stripes are patiently awaiting your instruction before proceeding.

"V for Vendetta" opens Friday.

(2006-03-14)

Also by Ray Pride

Ten Going on Forty
Amid the low ceilings and mirrored walls of Maxim's, a magazine was turning 10 for a room filled largely with clever almost-thirtysomethings
(2006-03-07)

Viva Africa
"Tsotsi," an adaptation of South African writer Athol Fugard's novel, an Academy Award-winner on Sunday night, is a showcase for two other bright talents: actor Presley Chweneyagae and writer-director Gavin Hood
(2006-03-07)

Tip of the Week
The final theatrical release of the brilliant distribution enterprise Wellspring Films, Rupert Murray's "Unknown White Male" is a stimulating essay film, neglecting the particulars that would be found in more traditional documentaries, but suggestive on many intriguing levels about the nature of identity and memory
(2006-03-07)

Union Label
Newspapers have been filled for months with wild and often contradictory surmising about the future of how we watch movies
(2006-02-28)

Tip of the Week
(2006-02-28)

Why "Why We Fight"
(2006-02-21)

Tip of the Week
(2006-02-21)

Tip of the Week
(2006-02-14)

Lonesome Crackhead
(2006-02-14)

Humanism's face
(2006-02-07)

Tip of the Week
(2006-02-07)

Suddenly Sundance
(2006-01-31)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment