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V For Vendetta Trailer
An anonymous reader writes "The V For Vendetta trailer has been posted on the film's official site. The film is written by Matrix creators Andy and Larry Wachowski and stars Hugo Weaving and fan favorite Star Wars star Natalie Portman."
They just had to add bullettime (er, sword time?) for nastalgia.
The Wachowski brothers had better not fuck this one up. V for Vendetta is a stellar graphic novel and a must read for anyone who enjoyed either 1984 or A Clockwork Orange. I'd hate to see something with such a wonderful story cheapened by hollywood gimmicks.
Steal This Sig
I see a lot of people on here that bash the brothers for their poor work after the Matrix. IMHO, it's really hard for anyone to live up to the Matrix, even it's own creators. I think we expect a movie coming from these two guys to be as original and amazing as the Matrix all over again, and that's not easy.
Not if they want the terrorists to win.
Personally, I like what the Wachowski brothers have done so far and I can't wait to see this film.
Parallels to the US and Britain ? You can't be further from the truth.
If you said Saddam Hussein's Iraq, China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, etc... as real examples in the world today, you would be far closer to the truth.
The problem for me was that I needed to upgrade to Quicktime 7. That done, my problems went away. I have an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro with 128MB on a laptop, so nothing *too* big.
How many more times...? Orwell was not afraid of the Left. You are talking about a man who fought as a volunteer in the Spanish civil war. He was always however afraid of authoritarianism resulting in totalitarianism. Liberalism and authoritarianism are orthognal dimensions to Left and Right, you can choose one from each category. 1984 is a vision of an authoritarian future, not a Left wing one per se (I fail to see where the semi-autonomous trading collectives are mentioned for example).
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
V for Vendetta is not just about dictatorship, but the way that democracies become dictatorships, and how "leaders" can not only take away people's freedoms, but convince them to beg for their freedoms to be taken away.
China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia all have serious problems (and Iraq too, of course), but V for Vendetta was not written about those countries.
V for Vendetta was written for people who live in liberal democracies, so they could understand what happens when things go really bad.
Grow up?
One of the W brothers wants to be a woman. Don't you find that a little odd/disgusting/unstable? If you don't, maybe you should grow up!
Wrong. One of the Wachowski's is a woman, and her name is Linda. Despite what you've seen on Jerry Springer, genuine intersexed and transgendered conditions do in fact exist, and they have nothing to do with "wants".
Some keywords for your Google searches: Gender Identity Disorder, Klinefelter's Syndrome, Intersexed, and probably many others.
Perhaps, AC, you should grow up and realize modern science and medicine has long past the point where gender is a binary designation. I thought about trying to explain the genetic information, but chances are you aren't reading and anyone that is going to mod me up is already aware of the distinction.
~Rebecca
She's in a prison, not a beauty salon.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Think that they'll be adjusting any of that due to the recent bombings in London?
I actually also wondered about that.
In the graphic novel the hero, V, is a terrorist and a psycho. He blows things up, killing the guilty and the innocent. He not the leader of a popular uprising, he's a loner. The closest thing he has to an ally is Evey - a girl he keeps imprisoned and tortures until she comes around to his way of thinking. The brilliance of the graphic novel stems from the fact that the reader identifies with the main character, even though he's cruel and clearly totally out of his mind.
Then again, the Wachowskis wrote the script, so it was probably nicely sanatised to remove all the controversial content. I fully expect to find that they changed the main character to be some sort of populist freedom fighter and Evey to be his willing side-kick.
siener's youtube channel
Nice of the left to claim him half a century after his death. Orwell also ranted endlessly against the socialism of the day, how devoid of common sense it was and how completely unappealing it was to the masses it purported to champion.
Which, of course, is pretty much 'the Left' of today as well (in the US).
The left of the US today is the right everywhere else.
KFG
I guess I won't be watching it then.
I can't stand watching movies/reading books where the villain is the hero (and being someone who murders innocent people makes him a villain).
If I wanted to immerse myself in a world where the evil and malicious win time after time, I'd just walk out the front door.
Afraid.
KFG
The right of the US today is the left of the US 50 years ago.
So where does that leave the left of the rest of the world then?
It leaves them watching two ever more blandly populist parties, with an ever diminishing amount of meaningful policy, throw turds at each other in a pointless but desperate struggle for "the middle ground".
In another 50 years they'll probably have achieved they're goal of being nothing more than a well marketed image of two opposing points of view while both parties continue to expand upon their only remaining policy: Feeding at the public trough via an ever expanding Federal government. In the meantime I'm sure they'll continue to argue bitterly and promote divsion in every media form available so that no one will notice that it's mostly bluster without substance, and that enriching themselves and their contributors is about the only action they ever really take.
Which is to say, it will leave the left (and right) of the rest of the world looking on in a strange mix of amusement and fascinated horror.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
If I wanted to immerse myself in a world where the evil and malicious win time after time, I'd just walk out the front door.
You would be hard pressed to find that kind of world in your personal experience. Walk out the door and you'll find the majority of people you meet are getting on with their lives just fine.
Its only the "news" and conservative talk radio where "the evil and malicious win time after time." You, my anonymous friend, have bought into the American culture of fear, hook, line and sinker.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Nice try, but Orwells works are anti totalitarian. Totalitarism is pretty much the same on the left spectrum of politics as on the right one.
The road is just different. Animal farm is the perfect example for being anti stalinistic (although you might also interprete it as being a satire on revolutions and the outcomes) and 1984 is a clear book against an extreme form of fascism. But in the end, it does not matter if you have a stalinistic regime (which is the dead end for communism) or a fascistic (which is the dead end of capitalism), or some religiously imposed totalitaristic regime, you end up with pretty much the same a handful of people united under one big leader, controlling the masses by fear against some kind of non graspable enemy, and masses who follow like sheep, in poverty while the handful of people get richer and richer.
(It was the same under Stalin as it was under Hitler, even the parades and big events held by the NSDAP and the Communist party had similar faces. It was only the protagonists which were different, under Hitler it was a handful of people surrounding him and a bunch of german Industry leaders (which were able to weasel itself out after the Nuernberg trials). Under Stalin it was the bureaucrats surrounding him. The main difference was that under Stalin you had a higher chance to be killed if you were close to him, than you had under Hitler.
But back to Orwell, his books are timeless philosophical analysis of such regimes, and they fit basically into every spectrum of politics, because he described the mechanisms which work on every spectrum of politics. The supression of people always works the same.
My guess is they might delay the release until things in London get a little more back to normal.
If they did that, they'd have released it last week. The attacks had nothing like the severity of the WTC attacks, and London is much more robust against this sort of thing. 5 years of German bombers followed by a few decades of the IRA has that effect.
But the film has to come out on the 5th of November. It's the anniversary of the most famous attempted terrorist attack of all time (at least in Britain).
On the other hand, if you are looking for help at some forum and you describe the problem *without* giving your full specs (down to ram speed and power supply fan color), then guess what the first (and probably only) reply will most likely be? What are your specs?
As does the British news every day now, it seems. People die when republics slide (inevitably, given the ease with which they are corrupted) into dictatorship. We've not quite reached the point of the elections being canceled due to "the emergency situation" but we're long past the point where the result of the election reflects the way people voted, which is the point where reform is urgent.
As it is, coming on to 60 people in the UK and more overseas have died to protect the interests of a tiny number of very rich people in America. Tens of thousands of foreigners have also died, but they're very poor indeed so they don't matter.
V for Vendetta or any other comic or movie isn't written for people to understand what can go really bad, they are written to make money and soothe the ego of the authors.
You're confusing the reason why comics, books, movies, etc get written with why they get a publisher/distributer. They can be the same reasons but it is possible to write something like this, or 1984 or Oliver Twist, because you want people to look at what's going on and do something about it.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
He was a libertarian Marxist
Libertarian Marxist? What is that supposed to be?
Libertarianism is a philosophy that places the rights of the individual as paramount. Marxism & Socialism are philosophies that state that the rights of the individual are subordinate to the needs of the society.
A libertarian-marxist is like a sterile-pregnant woman. Cold-heat. Honest-politicians. Microsoft-Works.
This is not a flame. I'm genuinely curious how someone can wrap one brain around two such diametrically opposed philosophies.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
You should read The Lion and the Unicorn before you make any more stupid comments about "left-wing people [who] have hijacked the book 1984." It is you on the right who have hijacked Orwell: the man was a dedicated leftist. The problem is that you are so poorly educated you can't distinguish between the Left and Communism (which is to the Left as Wahabbism is to Islam, or the KKK is to Conservatism - a badly distorted variant).
Orwell's attacks on the Communist Party were motivated by his belief that they were anti-revolutionary: that they were Facists in sheeps' clothing: for him, democracy was a necessity for socialism. The joke to "English Socialism" that you obviously don't understand is that it is the same sort of duck speak as "Ministry of Love" - it calls itself socialism, but is actually totalitarian - just like Stalinism.
If you actually read 1984 or Animal Farm with any literary sensitivity, you'd see how in both cases Orwell imagines socialism becoming perverted by the actions of power-hungry Communists - the very same thing he saw happening in the Spanish Civil War (and described in Homage to Catalonia, where he sees the Communist Party as second only to Franco's Facists as agents of injustice). Orwell saw real danger in socialism, true - but the danger he saw was not to a healthy capitalism (which Orwell says bluntly in The Lion and the Unicorn "does not work") but to democracy - Orwell saw democracy as always unstable, as something that had to be supported by the exertions of those dedicated to justice.
Orwell made a lot of mistakes: I think he doesn't understand that all economic systems, capitalist and socialist, are corrosive to democracy because they require either competition (which naturally leads to economic disparities, which give more power to the wealthy, and which therefore undermine democracy) or control (which suppress individual initiative and submits the individual to mass control). For democracy to work, you need to create an unstable equilibrium between planned and open economy that is sufficiently bounded to prevent either repressive sociailism or unfetterred capitalism from gaining the upper hand and suppressing individual freedoms, jolting back and forth like the pistons of a machine. But then Orwell didn't have the benefit we have of having seen what happens to a planned economy.
This is the crass one liner thread! You should've added:
:).
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
That said, +5 Insightful
In future news: Wachowski Brothers rip off SlashDot post for their next film!
But seriously...
The future you describe is the reality today. The US looks very twisted to observers. I've travelled in the US and know there are many, many good people there, living principled, thoughtful lives. It's a big country... but a relative few are changing it into something that the soldier-philosophers of the War Of Independence would have detested.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Let me see if I can make this clearer without resorting to name calling again.
1. Orwell was obviously an anti-communist. He was a left-wing anti-communist. The first anti-communists were on the left; the dingbat Stalinist ingelligentsia in Britain and America would have disgusted him, but so would American and British conservatism. The problem here is that you've been taught to associate liberalism, the left, communism, and socialism together as though they are all the same thing. They're not: communism is a perversion of left-liberal thinking; Marx took some sound economic ideas and ran with them right off the edge of the earth. The reality is that a healthy economy is a mixed economy (as a healthy government is a mixed government, something that the great intellectual figures who founded the US understood).
2. Orwell might have supported the war in Iraq; hell, Tony Blair is supporting it, and though he's not on the left by any meaningful measurement, he's certainly not on the right, either. Orwell was in favor of opposing facism and totalitarianism wherever it was found, and would have recognized in Saddam Hussein a potential Franco or Mussolini (Saddam lacked the national base to become a real Hitler, and was motivated by pure will to power, not by the weirder psychological perversions that motivated Hitler). However, he might not have favored the current war in Iraq given some of the context (for instance, if China were suddenly to decide it's time to occupy Taiwan, Orwell would have been screaming about our wasting time in Iraq while the real threat was building in Asia).
However, I can guarantee you that Orwell would have been disgusted by the attacks on Social Security and "trickle-down economics" (he would have had quite a bit to say about the fantasy math and sophistic language used to support both positions), and he would have been disgusted by the self-serving language tricks the past two administrations have engaged in (the whole "well, he said Joe Wilson's wife, but he didn't name her, so he didn't violate the law" routine is the only thing that approaches Clinton's "it depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is" in sophistical hypocrisy). On the other hand, I don't think he would have been surprised.
Until you have read "Down and Out in Paris and London," "The Lion and the Unicorn," and "Homage to Catalonia," don't try to talk about Orwell's politics. And don't believe ANYONE who tries to tell you that Orwell was a conservative.
Are you mad man!, BouncingBoobies should be ON!
"What about Animal Farm? That was obviously aimed at the faults of the Soviet Union.
Someone should talk about Animal Farm."
Hey, let's not engage in crimethink. If Big Brother tells you GO was a committed commie, he certainly was.
Maybe thats because Russia turned in to a totalitarian state not a worker's paradise. There wasn't anything socialist, Communist or left, left in it, except empty rhetoric, pretty much from the point Stalin siezed power after Lenin's death. Same goes for China.
.... a wealthy Yale Skull and Bonesman.
The problem with most governments, no matter how idealistic they start out, no matter the supposed idealogy, they turn in to a small group of people, like 1%, bent on acquring power and wealth at the expense of the other 99%. In China and Russia it was the upper echelon's of the Communist party. In China most of its big companies are controlled by the upper echelon's of the Communist party. They don't care about workers at all now, if they ever did. They are exploiting Chinese workers so ruthlessly, to get rich, its the envy of the Capitalist West.
In western democracies its wealthy businessmen, executives of big companies, working hand in hand with the politicians they buy and get elected with the purchase of TV ads (just like selling soap). They maintain a facade of democracy by running candidates from two parties both of which are in their pockets, vividly exemplified by the 2004 election when a wealthy Yale Skull and Bonesman ran against
@de_machina
Well, I wouldn't hope for much. Alan Moore (the guy who actually wrote V For Vendetta, not the Wachowski brothers) has completely distanced himself from the project. Even going so far as to pull all his future work from DC/Warner Bros. owned comic imprint Wildstorm simply for stating that he approved of the film. He demanded a retraction, when they wouldn't he took his ball and went home.
It should be noted that Alan has a long history of distancing himself from the Hollywood adaptions of his books. He even requested that the royalties due him for the Constantine & V For Vendetta movies be taken and distributed among the artists involved, he was unwilling to even take financial compensation for the movies.
It also should be noted that there has never been a good movie made from one of Moore's books. League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Great comic, terrible movie. From Hell? Great book, average movie. Constantine wasn't directly based off of one of Moore's stories, but it was a character he created. Great character, great comics... Okay, I haven't seen the film so I can't judge it. But Keanu Reeves as John Constantine is such horrible casting that I have little hope.
So, yeah... if history is any indication, V For Vendetta won't be very good.