Slashdot Mirror
V for Vendetta Going to Hollywood
gludington writes "Alan Moore's "other" early masterpiece, V for Vendetta, is in early pre-production. Joel Silver and the Wachowski brothers will produce for Warner Brothers, and Natalie Portman will play Evey Hammond. The rest of the movie is as yet uncast (and unwritten), so release dates on the article and the imdb entry should be taken with a sizable grain of salt."
Is there any nudity and petrification involved?
How about hot grits?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Salted grits! The front of my pants will never be the same.
--
make install -not war
I thought they were the Wachowski siblings now, since one of them got a sex change.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
A little salt is just the thing to liven up a bowl of hot grits.
You know what?
The real challange is to see which sucks more, this or the movie version of Watchman.
- Crow T. Trollbot
Uh. Call me stupid, but what the hell is Vendetta? And why is Slashdot posting blurbs about random movies all the time these days without, you know, offering a sentence explaining what the fuck said movie has to do with anything?
So there will be Calvinist overtones divided into three parts, the first of which will be revolutionary and mind-blowing. The second will be an advancement, more action, have lots of confusing theology, and twins (albino). The third part of the movie will suck...but have the longest "die already!!!" scene ever.
Oh, and due to the whole pandering-to-the-audience thing they seem to be infamous for, there will be a scene with Portman and hot grits.
should it be iodized or any salt will do?
Google Search results for V for Vendetaa.
...and create a subdomain "hotgrits.slashdot.org" so these stories can go about their ignoble-comment-collecting business.
... well, proof that hope springs eternal, I guess, but not much else.
I mean, I'm a Natalie fan, too, but posting anything remotely relating to her *here* and expecting a meaningful discussion is
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
Joel Silver and the Wachowski brothers will produce for Warner Brothers
Don't you mean the Wachowski Siblings?
Hm....
On the one hand, this is one of my all-time favorite graphic novels. I would love it if more people became aware of it.
But on the other hand, I just know it's going to get butchered. The Wachowskis had a chance to tell a subtle and ponderous story in The Matrix and they completely blew it.
I need to read this quick so I'll know what to hate about the movie when it comes out!
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
Did Slashdot just blow up?
Frankly I think it's a cron job.
Trolling is a art,
Life's a vaudeville, and everything else is melodrama.
Mr Jones, are these your [i]knockers[/i]?
Oh dear, your [i]mellons[/i] have spilled out!
Will this one also end with journey through a version of Star Trek I's "V'ger" ending at a version of Tron's MCP made out of digital bugs, only this time the blind Neo is covered in hot grits?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
EARLY PRE-PRODUCTION: "Since only geeks know what 'V for Vendetta' is about, we are raising the money necessary to find a huge star. Without one, we are cooked."
For the non Italian speakers, "vendetta" means "revenge" in Italian.
giandrea
I really hope they don't fuck with the storyline and the politics of this classic. Alan Moore is one of my favorite political writers, and it'd be a shame if this is given the same treatment as "From Hell" was.
If you don't know, V for Vendetta was about an anarchist (in the classical theoretical sense, not the bs modern punk rock sense) revolutionary who uses "terrorist" tactics to save Britain from fascism. It's not something that I see Hollywood understanding, even though I think most people would understand why the tactics were used, and the politics behind them.
In the book, V straddles the line between anarchist and vanguard, taking actions into his own hands, but with the express purpose of encouraging the people to fight back. It's not about an anarcho-socialist utopia, it recognizes the compromises that an anarchist would have to make in dire circumstances.
And ultimately, it's really, really fucking cool. Please, hollywood, please don't fuck it up.
I was just reading through V for Vendetta again yesterday, and fear that they will mess this one up quite bad. "From Hell" didn't go particulary well, but it has a quite complex storyline and many characters, and in the movie some characters were merged in to one, trying to be less confusing.
V might have a simpler story line, but the mood the drawings set is so much more important. Have a look at some of the panels to see what I mean.
But oh, it would be nice if they could pull it off, though.
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
I will be absolutely shocked if this movie gets made by Hollywood with the original story intact. I don't think that they'd ever dare do it, just like they can't do the end of Watchmen as in the comic.
I love Alan Moore's stories. Hate his movies.
Once the Rip-off-ski brothers get their hands on this one, they will most assuredly claim the work is entirely their own.
Just like The Matrix...
Oh, I'm sure it'll be the same thing, only it'll be set in a post-9/11 American suburbia, with a plot twist at the ends, wherein our protagonist will end up tortured in a Gitmo-like detention center, only to have the whole thing exposed by some enterprising young journalist with connections to the mob. Portman will have a homosexually charged encounter with Tilly, and the special effects will kick ass (except for Jar-Jar Binks, who'll show up and ruin it all)!
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
... I'd love to defend Hollywood. But I know it's shit, so what's the point.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Constantine.
It has natalie portman in it! Holla!
When someone is fighting for a just cause we don't refer to them as terrorists, we call them freedom fighers or such. Terrorist is a word we use when they fight for a cause in which we do not agree. We do not refer to the people who placed a bomb in Hitlers meeting room as terrorists, do we?
The belief in a biblical god is an ignorant one
Natalie Portman is Evey is unexpected but perfect casting.
She actually played a similar role in her first movie, the brilliant Leon (aka The Professional). Both Evey in V and Mathilda in Leon are young girls forced to grow up before their time by the harsh world they live in, and who form an intimate relationship with a cold blooded but sympathetic killer.
a world in progress...
Ideally we should never be told...
...You may remember me from such movies as "M is for Murderousness"...
don't give hollywood too much credit. from the studio's point of view, its all about the benjamins. and the best way to do that is to cater to a wider, more mainstream audience. the thing i hate the most is the fact that hollywood oftentimes mess up the 'origin stories', thereby completely changing the mythos of the characters or the series. spiderman, x-men, hulk, heck, even smallville all mess up the characters so they attract broader audiences. as ardent fans, i think we do need to understand that part of the business...
I wonder if it will be released before Bush gets out of office.
On a similar thread, I wonder if the political/philosophical background will be changed to suit mass audience demographics. Telling the public they are responsible for their own problems usually doesn't go over too well with them.
A terrorist is someone who uses terror to influence others. The plot to blow up Hitler wasn't a terrorist thing, they just wanted Hitler dead. Lee Harvery Oswald wasn't a terrorist.
By the strict definition V isn't a terrorist as he aims to destroy the regime not terrorise it until it gives up. He does, however, use terrorist techniques and does scare the people in power, but his main aim is to pull the common people out of their complacency by using shock tactics.
You're forgetting Bound.
The movie will prominently feature a marginalized group, like homosexuals or people of color. The movie will have an obvious color theme. The movie will exhibit a solid understanding of cultural theory and/or philosophy, although that understanding will not be crucial to enjoyment of the film.
Based on the material in V for Vendetta, the Wachowskis may also bring some politics into the mix. I'd love it.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
A terrorist is someone who uses terror to influence others.
You're not serious right? By that definition everyone who fought in any war ever was a terrorist. Oh maybe you are on to something....
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Use the Wikipedia, Luke!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Everything you wanted to know about Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder plot:
http://www.bonefire.org/guy
This year is the 400th aniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, so it would be a nice tie in for a movie...you know, for the international audience.
What were you expecting?
Here's an excerpt from an interview with Moore on salon.com: (the 'it' he refers to is comparing V to today's political landscape)
"I heard someone recently talking to David Lloyd [the artist who illustrated "V for Vendetta"] about it, because there's still occasional talk about a film. And he said, probably accurately, that the world is not quite ready for a terrorist hero at the moment. But yeah, "V for Vendetta" has had an annoying way of coming true ever since I wrote it in the early '80s. Back then, I wanted something to communicate the idea of a police state quickly and efficiently, so I thought of the novel fascist idea of monitor cameras on every street corner. And the book was, of course, set in the future of 1997. But by that year -- and I don't know if Tony Blair and Jack Straw were big fans, but evidently they thought its design for future Britain was a really good one -- we had cameras on every street corner along the length and breadth of the country. My general thought is that yes, it's depressing, but not unexpected, when this stuff happens. And I do tend to think that, given the upsurge of the religious right over the last couple of decades, these are the last spasms of those dinosaur organisms."
So Alan doesn't mind referring to him as a terrorist.
And who gets this reference other than me?
The problem I see with this movie is that the original storyline may not seem particularly amusing for the current political and moral environment.
Right now the preview says: "a mysterious man in a white porcelain mask who fights political oppressors through terrorism and seemingly absurd acts", but this description doesn't fit the darker spirit of the original.
While the description does mention terrorism, V is much more complex than that, as described in several reviews and analysis, like this one. Thus I'm expecting that along the road, V will be transformed into some kind of "masked avenger" or Batman-like superhero, better suited for the post-9/11 era.
I don't expect the movie to portrait V blowing up government buildings, killing policemen and a priest, questioning Justice and promoting Anarchy, like in the original. So, what's the point of adapting it? If these Wachowski guys want some story about oppression, they'd be better off adapting Cinderella for that matter.
If it's changed in such a way, it will be ironic that a story that shows a world of totalitarianism and lack of freedom won't be translated verbatim into another medium because of issues with "political correctness".
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
I've been waiting for a pro-terrorism movie.
"Technology.....the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Max Firsch
GRITS!
I love Alan Moore's stories. Hate his movies.
Alan Moore's movies? He was not involved in any of them. When he doesn't ignore them, he deeply despises them. Who can see how From Hell and LXG were butchered, and blame him for his hate? He has gone as far as to refuse any payments he might be eligible to from any movie versions of his graphic novels!
Not that this would be the case in V for Vendetta. He did not even receive royalties for the graphic novel version of it! Now the cretins that screwed him over before and a bunch of subhuman Hollywood bastards are out to make millions using his ideas, and in their first press release, they call V a "superhero".
Alan Moore is the most ripped off person on this planet.
The jury is still out, but the Wachowski brothers have been accused of plagiarizing a woman's material for the Matrix series.
Article Link
Seriously I hope they start to interrupt their own movies with several minutes long commercials to make up for Fat Manny The Stuntman's Piracy Problem. I also hope they charge $11 per ticket.
That'l teach US!
He knows the score, though.
I see Andy and Larry "Lana" Wachowski are continuing to present other people's works, it's been a successful model so far.
j/k.
OK so have they written the 2 bad sequels yet? I cannot see this ever being any good. It is almost certainly going to be relocated to the US and probably set in current day- instead of using the cold war 80s setting. Instead of cheery cockney chaps beating the foreign scum it'll be Smiling beautiful people from LA defending their country against Arab Muslin Terrorimists or something. Is Keanu playing V then? And in what act will we find out who V is? To those who write V for Vendetta off because it is 'a comic'... have you read it? This is one of the best novels I have ever read.
kin242.net
There was a time when these movies had not been made. There was just you and the comics. And life was good.
After these movies are made, there will still be you and the comics. Life will still be good.
There was a time when there was a bad movie in the theaters, but you did not go see it, and you did not suffer. Life was good.
There was also a time when there was a bad movie, and you did go see it, and you did suffer. But then the movie was over, and life was good again.
These movies can't "ruin" anything, since the comic still exists, and your enjoment of it was uninformed by the yet-unmade movie you fear so much.
Try not to get too worked up over a problem you simply do not have.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
It's only meaningful if self-inflicted. You're new here aren't you?
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
I agree; a Wikipedia link would have been more than adequate in the opening blurb, for those who never got to read the work.
Words are, in the form of the novel, accepted as being serious works. Pictures are, in the form of the single framed image in the museum, accepted as being serious works. But when you combine the two, somehow it sets off a blaring need to insult the medium in some people. The medium---this would be like saying "because it is a novel, it sucks---I need no other information".
The answer to your assertion of "80 pages at 20 words a page" is that, first, artwork largely takes the places of description. Many works are much, much longer than eighty pages. V for Vendetta is (according to a quick check on Amazon which you could have done yourself) 286 pages. I seem to have misplaced my copy, but pulling Cerebus: High Society off my shelf (512 pages) and flipping to a random page (260), I count eighty words of dialogue.
I remember reading King's The Stand. (That's a pretty canonical example of a novel, right?) And I remember reading Ennis and Dillon's Preacher (2047 pages if you add it all up), and how they provided such a different view of God and the reasons for suffering in the world. (This bit makes more sense if you've read the books, but I'll do my best to make myself understoof.)
The plot of The Stand: God, for reasons never quite explained, wipes out nearly all of humanity with a plague so that the remaining few can be polarized into two camps, half on His side, half following the Dark Man, Randall Flagg. There then follows a post-apocalyptic battle between the factions, in which all of the Dark Man's followers are vaporized in an atomic blast. The moral of the story is, God is a really good fellow and aren't we lucky that he looks out for us? (The enormous mound of corpses created by the plague is rather conveniently forgotten.)
I can't really summarize Preacher in short form; it's structured more like a series of shorter books, but the overarching theme is that an anomalous combination of good and evil possibly as powerful as God himself has escaped heaven and embedded itself in a small-town preacher, who goes on a quest to find out why God has abandoned heaven, and why He created such suffering in the world.
Am I just wasting my time pointing out that while the stories of Sin City are hard-core retro noir tits-and-bullets pastiche, the art is rather exquisitely impressionistic? You don't even bother to mention the artwork, implying that it's all the same. But look at the wonderfully-rendered backgrounds and simple, expressive protagonist of Cerebus. Or the use of cinematic devices such as segues in Watchmen.
What's with this sudden standard of "high art or literature"? Why are pulpy, popular novels (Grisham, Clancy, King, Steele...) perfectly acceptable to read and even make into films, but comics can never be good enough because... well, no real reason, but they're comics, get it? *nudge* *nudge*... Give me a break, or at least a real reason.
And, if you're to be consistent, you really should demand that Art Spiegelman return that Pulitzer he got for Maus.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
it's been in a lot more places than rumor sites and tabloids.
Hence all those informative and reliable links you've posted.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Well, Transmetropolitan incorporated a lot of hard SF---nanotech Makers, Moravec transfers and so forth. That's pretty dorky.
And, hell, I'm a geek. I read Vernor Vinge, have a couple thousand edits on Wikipedia and work as a sysadmin. (Well, did. I'm slightly between jobs. But I get interviewed tomorrow...) And I have a wall full of comics. You're saying that Cerebus, with its Marx Brothers allusions and thousand-page political intrigues, isn't just the slightest bit geeky?
Please distinguish between superhero comics and comics as a whole.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
That's "Norsefire", not "Norsemen". If we're being pedantic.
You know, Americans can pronounce "Fawkes" if we've seen "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets". (Remember Dumbledore's pet phoenix?)
I do agree that the worst part of it all is that they'll have to show V's face. Damn it, that was one of the key elements of the book---that Evey decided not to take off V's mask, because, and I'm paraphrasing here, "who you are could never be as big as all thosepeople you could have been".
If they include Valerie's letter, and change a single word of it, I'm driving to Hollywood with the express intention of stabbing someone in the face. Damn scriptwriters who think they have half a brain---same twits who gave us the "Borg Queen".
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It could be worse. The fuckers responsible for turning "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" into a completely different and utterly horrible movie called "LXG"---the ornate title was very fucking nineteenth-century British, you fucks!---could be involved.
Whoever decided to "refactor" Moore's take on Britain should be barred from touching a keyboard, typewriter or inkwell ever, ever again.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Sorry. not credible.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Being a fringe movie geek, I often get a chance to read unproduced screenplays. Sometimes, it is possible to see the train hurtling towards the bridge that is out way before they ever turn on a camera. "League of Extraordinary Gentleman" was like that. There have been two screenplays for "V" that have floated around Hollywood in the last ten years. One of them, completely ghastly, turned "V" into a superhero fighting an evil world dictatorship. The surprise twist was that "V" turned out, in that version, to be the evil world dictator, himself. I don't know who wrote it, but it was truly awful. His acts of terrorism were very carefully done so as to kill no innocents. That was NOT what Moore wrote. The other version, while not as completely putrid, suffered by trying to bring genetic engineering and super-science into the mix, and make it a more science-fictiony sorta story. It also watered down the terrorism and V's utter, insane ruthlessness. The movie already exists, in my mind if no where else. Buy the graphic novel and read it. If Hollywood was smart (always an open proposition) they would use it as storyboards and shoot it, as written by Alan Moore. But remember, Hollywood is the place that gave us the Will Smith "I, Robot" rather than the Harlan Ellison version.
Make a man a fire, and he's warm for a day. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Anyway, my personal answers:
Are comics/grahic novels art?
Yes, absolutely.
Are they literature?
No, if by literature you mean that specific art form (prose) since comics are a specific art form on their own, but yes, if by literature you mean the capability for the author to express himself, his views and his experience through comics.
I'll treacherously use argumentum ad verecundiam and justify them by bibliographic reference
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud, Reinventing Comics
it isn't like Grafton is a complete unknown...
It will be pretty brave, under the current political climate, if they keep the political and social messages intact. Considering how badly the league of extraordinary gentlemen was raped, i hope mr moore retains more creative control over this film.
I though From Hell was done well... but it didn't have any controversial content.
Did you actually see what I linked to? It was a discussion on a talk page, much like this one, in which the issue of Larry Wachowski's alleged intersexuality is debated, and pretty solidly dismissed as unconfirmable rumor.
Would it have been more credible if I'd just pasted it in?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Heck if I know anymore... I remember when that became the "correct term" in grade school, FWIW. Personally, I just say "blacks" in conversation and "negroes" when speaking in a paper. I figure the first is common enough and the second is properly recognizing the defined physiology terms.
To bring this (sort of) on topic, do we refer to the X-men as "mutants" or "differently abled people" these days?
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.