"V for Vendetta" is one of the best movies I've seen in years, maybe not so much in terms of technical skill (direction, acting, and cinematography), though this movie is quite good in all the above categories, but more because it moved me like few movies I've ever seen. "V for Vendetta" was the type of movie that transcended it's medium and became something altogether different to me; as I watched it, it made me excited to be alive.

For the past few years, world and national events have left me feeling very indifferent as to where the world is headed. The first site I visit everyday is CNN.com's homepage, so everyday seems to bring a new disaster. One day it's global warming melting massive ice sheets in the artic, the next it's another car bomb going off in some Iraqi city that nobody's heard of. One day it's a tsunami, the next it's Hurricane Katrina. Then there's our own government spying on its own citizens, exporting captured combatants to be tortured in distant lands, taking us into massive debt that will affect our children's children, and holding staged "town hall meetings" on MSNBC..to name just a few. To put it mildly, it sometimes seems like a hard time to be alive.

"V for Vendetta" is interesting because as a movie, it serves a dual purpose. On one hand, it seeks to bring up and answer many important questions about the nature of government and the people governed, while on the other hand, it has to work on some level of escapist theater. Sure we go to movies to find out something about our personal and national identities, but people wouldn't go if they were not entertained. But what makes "V for Vendetta" interesting to me is that it uses it's escapism to answer these questions. The screenwriters and director let their incredible storytelling and inspired set pieces be the vehicle that drove home the social points it brought up. Since "V's" screenwriters were the same screenwriters that wrote and directed the Matrix trilogy, this didn't surprise me in the least.

I'm not sure if I would have loved this movie as much if my political and social mindset had been different than the one I wrote in the paragraphs above. If I had been a little more apathetic towards the direction our country was headed, I'm not quite sure how this movie would have worked. But because I'm not apathetic about how things are headed, and because I do think that a person and people can make a significant difference, this movie means the world to me.

The Wachowski Brothers did a fantastic job at adapting Alan Moore and David Lloyd's graphic novel of the same name. Both the graphic novel and the movie follow pretty much the same identical story and come to pretty much identical conclusions.

If I have one complaint about the script, it's that it sometimes reads as a manifesto, instead of a point A to point B to point C narrative. That being said, and I can't stress this enough, I really enjoyed hearing dialogues (and in some cases monologues) that took what the governments been feeding us and flushed it down the toilet. For me, this movie was a brilliantly written 2-hour rage against the machine.

The direction by James McTeigue was pretty top notch, especially considering it was his first feature length movie to helm. There were parts of the movie that seemed pedestrian, but overall, the movie flowed well. The movie also had a very distinct style, without feeling weighed down by it's visual flair.

The acting was good all around. I can't really think of a weak performance in the whole movie. Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman were particularly good. Hugo Weaving, acting behind a mask, had to rely on his impeccable line delivery to really advance the story along. If he wasn't up to the task, this movie would have sunken fast. What was truly magnificent about his performance is that he really took the opportunity to take his character to the wide ranges of human emotions. It's rare to see an actor go from funny in one scene, to dark and dangerous the next, to charming the scene after that, to manifesto deliverer the next...and that all this was done behind a mask, taking away all eye, mouth, and facial movements, makes it all the more incredible.

Natalie Portman was good as well, but she did have a little bit of the Kevin Costner case of the missing accent every now and then. I was really surprised by her physicality in this movie, not so much in that she had any fight scenes, but in that she really had to do some pretty hard core things in this movie. From lying nearly naked on a prison cell floor, to having her head shaved, to being shoved around by government goons, I really felt that she "went for it." Although I don't think she's the best actress around, she's vastly improving from film to film.

I don't know. For me, this movie really equaled more than the sum of it's parts. It's really a case of 2+2+2=10 types of things. For people of my political persuasion, the past 6 years have been really trying. In some ways, I feel that the Bush administration can be a bit of a bully. So it was nice to see a movie, a mainstream movie made by a mainstream corporation at that, stand up and take a stand. That's all I have to say for now. At some point really soon, I'm probably going to write a post about the larger themes that the movie brought up. But until then, "Remember, Remember the 5th of November."

matt out