movies: v for vendetta

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that tonight's movie, V for Vendetta, is not only brilliant, but it's one movie that EVERY gay man and lesbian should see.

The movie starts out fluffy enough... it has all the prerequisites for a romping good "Imperfect Future" movie (it was about a hundred times better at it than Aeon Flux's rather weak effort)... and shares a lot of territory with The Matrix (not surprisingly, since it's written by Andy and Larry Wachowski)... the world isn't right, here's the damsel in distress, here's the flawed anti-hero... rollicking good time ensues...

Then, somewhere along the way it becomes so very much more...

In between being a mystery and thriller and a popcorn movie, it starts making you think. The scenario it describes could happened, has happened, is happening... governments using people's fear of "The Other" to gain power and to remain that way, taking away people's freedoms one at a time so they don't notice it happening... you only have to look at the elections in America, the UK and Australia in the wake of "The War on Terror" to see that... all the existing governments were re-elected to power despite the fact that they had all lied to their respective people about the "rightness" of the war... and one of the movie's tag lines rings scarily true... "People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."

But where it really hit home for me was the sequence where Natalie Portman's character Evey reads the letter written by the lesbian, Valerie... that just resonated with me so much... bits of it made me think of Eddy and his parental trauma... other bits just connected with me really strongly. I really wish I could find some copy of the words online somewhere... it's definitely the first thing I will have to do when I get the DVD... skip to that sequence and copy down the dialogue.

And who knew Natalie Portman could act the crap out of something like this... she was amazing, and to be honest, I got completely sucked in by her British accent, so much so that I kept having the discussion in my head "She's American though right... well, maybe not, maybe she's actually British and has been turning the American accent on"... turns out (according to IMDB Trivia) she used the same "dialectologist" (is that actually a word?) as Gwyneth Paltrow... Barbara Berkery... remind me if I ever make a movie with people needing a British accent, to hire her!

It was also really amazing to look at her (Natalie) with her long beautiful curls and think how gorgeous she looked, then have her head shaved and think she looked even MORE gorgeous.

Hugo Weaving was similarly amazing... he got such a range of acting and emotion out of his character, and the most you ever see of the character under all the layers is his hands. Plus he actually managed to get emotion out of V's very distinctive mask... not an easy job when it's shaped into a smile for the whole movie.

It was also fun to see the whole host of British actors pop up in supporting roles... Stephen Rea, Stephen Fry, Rupert Graves and the gravely voiced John Hurt.

And the final sequences in the streets of London, culminating at Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament were absolutely amazing... I had this huge dopeyass grin on my face the whole time. Do yourself a favour and just go and see it!

Simply brilliant!

yani's rating: 4 masked assassins out of 5