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V For Vendetta Delayed until March 2006
datemenatalie writes "According to Sci Fi Wire, V for Vendetta, originally slated to open on Nov. 4, has been pushed back to next March. The film stars Natalie Portman and was written by Matrix creators Andy and Larry Wachowski. This delay comes as quite a blow not only to expectant fans, but also to the marketing campaign of the film, as the clever tagline tie-in 'Remember, remember the 5th of November' is decidedly weaker when you attempt to rhyme it with March 17th."
And just pull it back 2 days for release.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Uh... where can I get tickets?
My expectations for anything done by them are decidedly weaker anyways.
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
It was the third of september That day I'll always remember, yes I will 'cause that was the day that my daddy died... whoops, wrong lyric!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
March 17th also has a little less historical significance for vigilantes trying to overthrow the British government than, say, November 5th.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
How about:
Watch, Watch the 17th of March.
Colour me V for vexed!
Why would anyone remember the 5th of November if it would've opened on the 4th?
It's not just a tagline. It's a bit of terrorism related doggerel known to every British schoolkid.
Remember remember the 5th of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
The V comic book was great -- this film will suck because the Wachowskis are hacks, living it large off one good film (albeit one with an obvious and portentious, pretentious dialofue carried by its special effects).
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The spokesperson, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, denied that the delay had anything to do with the movie's subject matter or the current political climate.
I'm not buying it that a movie about terrorism in London just happens to get delayed at this time.
-Colin
"Hey all you /.'s, hot grits have starch, come and see Natalie this 17th of March!"
Although - If they are doing this to maintain the integrity of the film, so as to not remove any of those scenes - more power to them.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
Natalie Portman, naked and petrified...
the Wachowski brothers...
this geeks head asplode.
The lead character in V for Vendetta, V, is basically Guy Fawkes, albeit in a contemporary dystopian setting. Now, you may not know it, but Guy Fawkes was one of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament, on November 5th, 1605.
So, a November 5th release is very appropriate for V for Vendetta, especially as this year is the 400th anniversary of the plot. Releasing the film in March 2006 doesn't have quite the same marketing effect or poignancy.
I've commented on V for Vendetta in its original comic book form on Slashdot many times. I won't bother to drudge up what I've written elsewhere but I will summarise it all here: V for Vendetta is one of if not the greatest comic ever written, and there is no way that any film adaptation will ever do it justice.
My advice to anyone who will go to watch the film is read the original first and let that blow you away before you watch whatever butchery the story has to undergo to suit the media of film and the tastes of Hollywood execs.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Bullshit. Post-production is "scheduled" to the day. It has to be. You don't suddenly go "whups, let's take another 4 or more months".
The spokesperson, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, denied that the delay had anything to do with the movie's subject matter or the current political climate.
Are we really as stupid as we look? What the fuck is with an "anonymous spokesperson"? If you can't quote them, don't print the story. Oh wait, it's not a story, it's a clever press release.
V for Vendetta has come under scrutiny for the coincidence of its subject matter and the recent terrorist bombings in London.
It has? Could have fooled me. Most everyone in the (US) theaters I've seen the preview have murmered "looks good" etc. Since a few hours after the train bombings, a lot of Londoners were saying "look, could you all get over it? We have." Especially given the typical audience for this film, I doubt any of the said audience will give a crap.
"It's that horrible word: intellectual. I mean, you have to think about the movie"
What? They laid out the entire plot in the trailers (or so we're led to believe). Facist, authoritarian government. Agents of whom attempt to rape Portman. "Good" guy rescues/befriends her. He's doing the whole "government is evil, I'm gonna blow it up, yo" and she's doing the "I'll die for you, yo. I am stretched on your grave, I'll lie here forever, yo." The government is all "Your ass is ours, yo."
What part of that requires any "thought"? The fact that it's blatantly playing off how fascist US/UK government has become?
Appropriate quote: "Ah, MIND taxing time again, now is it?"
The whole thing reminds me of Gilbert Godfried's joke at Hugh Heffner's roast, a couple says after the WTC attacks. "I'm kinda concerned, my flight has a layover at the Empire State building". Most everyone laughed. One or two people yelled "too soon, too soon." So he told the Aristocrats joke, and boy did those two people wish they had kept their mouths shut :-)
Please help metamoderate.
You know, nothing rhymes with month.
isn't it Linda Wachowski now?
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Say the trailer at Batman a couple weeks back. Looks like a bunch of crap to me. Of course, most movies look like crap these days.
Meh. I'll either be modded down as a troll or ignored. Can't express dissent around here.
It's somehow hard to imagine that this will be a faithful version of a story in which the protagonist is essentially a terrorist.
Remember, remember, Natalie Portman.
Rhymes perfectly.
"Prepeare for the spin, on march seventeen"
"Where have you been, on march seventeen?"
etc
I wonder whose script they ripped off this time.
Not that I'm comparing the Washowski Bros. to George Orwell, but this is equivalent to releasing 1984 in 1985. It's a matter of course that the 'anonymous spokeperson' denied any political implications -- just like people under scrutiny in Washington D.C. resign "to spend more time with their families". It's a bullshit excuse but they can't admit it as such.
*sigh* I guess we should just be happy the movie's being released at all. However, I wonder how heavily it will have been edited for content?
Come on, where is the classic troll? No Hot Grits?!? Sheesh, what has Slashdot come to?
When movie release get pushed back, that means it's going to suck so badly that the next 70's sitcom remake is expected to murder it at the box office. The trouble with movie trailers now is that they can't edit them well enough to fool people into thinking that the movie is worth the ticket price anymore.
V for Vendetta was written by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. The Wachowski siblings adapted it for the screen.
sig
n/t
"It isn't just a teen slasher movie"
Certain statements seem to scream that Truth resides in their exact opposite ...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
No, you didn't have to think to understand the plotline. You had to be the kind of smarmy pseudo-intellectual assmunch who thinks his views are "challenged" by Gnosticism wrapped up in explosions and gun fights.
Did you know kids in regular schools study and write essays about Yu-Gi-Oh? It's just that fucking stupid.
In the last two days, the stock has dropped from 70 to 50, with no bottom in sight. Sadly, I'm invested 50,000 shares in it, so it's hurt me/the market quite a bit.
For those of you who wonder why it hurts the stock, V for Vendetta first was scheduled for November, which is a good month for movies. March is typically much weaker. Secondly, people don't want to hold onto it for 7 months as opposed to 3.
An astute observation about the origins of the movie's tag line. The actual quote "...Remember, Remember, the fifth of November" is from an obscure song by John Lennon called Remember.
This song is one of the centerpieces of Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album released in late 1970. Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, had just completed an extended session of Primal Scream therapy under Dr. Arthur Janov which cured him of heroin addiction and post-Beatle-breakup depression.
The album is simple, beautiful, and haunting. This song is just John (on piano) and Ringo (on drums) with lots of echo.
Lennon was at that time the world's biggest rock star and could get away with releasing an album for the sole reason of exorcising deeply personal demons. The record sold poorly, However, his next recording, Imagine, was an instant worldwide success and is still played on rock radio stations worldwide. This song Imagine led directly to Lennon's murder by a young man who had spent three weeks prior to the murder in a fundamentalist Christian commune/retreat in North Carolina. In a manner that preshadowed the Salman Rushdie affair in the late 1980s, the fundamentalists believed that Lennon needed to be assassinated because he had released a hit record with the lyrics "Imagine there's no heaven..." and other contra-religious expressions. When the young assassin showed up at the commune with a fanatical obsession with Lennon and end-of-the-world fantasies, it was a straight-forward task to convince him that Lennon's death would hasten the second coming. They cult-brainwashed him for three weeks, procured for him a powerful handgun, trained him on it, bought him a ticket to NYC, and set him off.
Ten days later, Lennon was dead.
Best Natalie Portman rhyme this week.
Oh, I can certainly believe that derivation occured - that happens all the time - however the claim itself is questionable. (I'd both read and written plenty of short stories along similar lines by the early 1980s, and the earliest cyberspace novel was written by H.G.Wells)
I think it would have been fair for the parties to have settled for some MODERATE amount, on the basis that some ideas probably were borrowed, with the condition that she then formally accepted that any such borrowings were incidental and accidental with no malice in principle or fact.
My suspicion is that both parties got greedy - a billion is a lot of money - and nothing short of absolute victory (as opposed to mutual recognition) being acceptable. This is no surprise to me - the US is about competition, not cooperation, so all-out victory IS going to matter more than truth or even common decency.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...I don't think that a holiday that is not celebrated in the United States (IE Guy Fawkes Day) is going to make any difference as far as the majority of V For Vendetta's potential take. What I think might be going on with this film, however, is Warner Bros. losing their collective nerve over a movie that has as its hero a person whose actions can be interpreted as being "terrorist."
The only time Guy Fawkes Day has figured in a work of art aimed at an American audience is in the "Depth Takes A Holiday" episode of the MTV animated series "Daria." Guy Fawkes Day is portrayed as a surly British punk rocker who looks like Sid Vicious and sings like Johnny Rotten. Since British obscenities barely register in American English, he gets to swear like a British sailor. Of course, when the show aired on English MTV it had to be edited something fierce. Note to the Brits: you didn't miss much. One of the least enjoyable "Daria" episodes, one of the two from the series that almost sent it hurling over the shark tank. Almost doesn't count, though.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
From TFA: "V for Vendetta ... is set in an alternate universe in which the United Kingdom has a fascistic government"
In this universe Tony Blair has banned protesting within 1000m of the Houses of Parliament, he is trying to introduce trials without jury for many crimes, he now strongly influences what the BBC broadcasts, he is trying to ban criticism of any religion and he is forcing a mandatory ID card scheme on the public and that isn't a facist government??!?
After all, there is no spoon.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
as a guy that does editing and compositing in post-production, i was astounded that the film could be finished between june (when i heard they were still shooting) and november. Special effects work does tend to be elastic about time, and editing much more so - Adaptation, as a recent example, took over a year to edit after principal photography had finished.
So i'm not surprised at all that the post will take longer than they had hoped.
It will probably still be available on P2P networks by November 5th ;)
They were sued, and lost bigtime.
/public service announcement.
kulakovich
So, basically the three most recent film adaptations of comics? Yeah. Ok. Have you ever read a comic?
This delay comes as quite a blow not only to expectant fans, but also to the marketing campaign of the film, as the clever tagline tie-in 'Remember, remember the 5th of November' is decidedly weaker when you attempt to rhyme it with March 17th."
Well... "if they used Beware the Ides of March" with an onimous fadeout to black they would get everyone to the theater and in their seats only two days early.
The twits behind Matrix 2 and Matrix 3 are writing the screenplay?
Damn, I never saw a movie go from "Intersting" to "Avoid at all costs" so damn fast. I'd almost rather watch another Star Wars from Lucas.
Almost.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Actually, I rather enjoyed that episode.
It may not have been a great episode, but it was just so surreal I couldn't help but love it.
for..
previous V post
I remember November Fifth because it's my birthday, there goes a fun movie to go see.
I think he's pretty much given up on Hollywood now.
Which I guess doesn't help a Watchmen movie get made, dammit. But really, it would suck too. There's just no way it could be done.
--
$tar -xvf
I read somewhere that he was going to undergo a sex change. I'm not sure if he ever did though.
I think Moore's dialogue in some spots was definitely better. From the trailer, Portman's dialogue seems to be:
Evey: [bumping into Agent] I'm sorry.
Finger Agent: Not yet, you're not.
The original dialogue from the comic (or at least what I have from memory) was
Evey: I'll do whatever you want, just don't kill me.
Finger Agent: No, you don't get it. We're going to do whatever we want... and then we're going to kill you.
Definitely spookier.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
That was the best comment I've read on slashdot in a looong time:) Thanks!:)
originally slated to open on Nov. 4 ... 'Remember, remember the 5th of November'
Uh... am I missing something here?
sig.
The big genre film around that time is the next Harry Potter movie. But that's not the reason. The reason is almost certainly that the film sucks.
March is a terrible time to release movies, at least according to Hollywood wisdom; people are huddled at home rather than watching movies. March is a good time to dump big movies that didn't turn out well.
New tagline, "It, you will watch; It, you will watch; on the 17th on March". Reportedly, Yoda was seen snooping around the marketing division of the studio when the new slogan was created.
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
Yet it at times runs over.
Just because something is all scheduled out doesn't mean it can't run over schedule.
Ask Terry Gilliam.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
but I'd pay to watch her if she... somehow couldn't speak.
Quite simply, it's stuck in the 1980s. Moore's comic was good for it's time, but doesn't really work (neither does Watchmen) outside the atmosphere of the 1980's. No Cold War, no Reagan, Thatcher, and various geriatric Soviet rulers. No endless series of ruthless governments stretching out to the horizon to oppress the people as far as the imagination can take you.
... seem inept and incapable of finding their rears in the dark with a flashlight and a map. "Freedom Fighters" bring images of Beslan, or 9/11, or London, or some new atrocity just waiting to happen.
... why not give the audience what they want?
Instead, most governments, from Bush to Putin's to China's
Simply put the Portman character is a terrorist, and that's about as popular as Kevin Bacon playing a child molester in the Woodsman after the BTK killer sentencing.
This film is a dud. Probably only Oliver Stoned 9/11 Movie will stink more and lose more money.
Nobody WANTS controversy or stuff like that. With $3.00 gas and war and impending terror, we just want simple entertainment, comedies to make us feel better or good guys winning. The nineties are over, controversy just tells people the movie isn't entertaining and they look for the DVD of the Wedding Crashers or Four Brothers (which is a remake basically of the John Wayne movie "Sons of Katie Elder").
Fun comedies and hip-hop updates of Westerns seem to be what people want. Here's a thought
I believed the ending, when Neo is taken away, actually represented the "great vessel" of Mayahana Buddhists. Of course I see where that part has a crucified feel to it, as did the "birth" scene to me in the first movie (when they pick Neo up from the sewers with a "claw" and his silhouette again appears crucified).
...used to be a library...now it's just a mind-cemetary
Well March 17th is St.Patricks day - what new dlogans could they come up with for that one?
I was expecting a revival of the cult (pulp) V series of the 80s (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(TV_series)/)..
I'm not waiting for the other V so there's no delay
Scott Tipton has done an excellent write up of it in his Comics 101 article series at Movie Poop Shoot. Its a bit spoiler laden though, so read with caution if you're planning on reading the graphic novel for yourself.
Movie Poop Shoot- Comics 101: V for Vendetta
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
...Not that you're bitter or anything.
Beware! Beware the Ides of March Plus Two!!
But can we discuss this without getting modded to hell?
"all being unhappy with the government together (which is always funny, anarchists being anarchists together). "
Can we discuss anarchism? Were those awful G8 protestors really anarchists? How do they think this works? We have a global economy with roughly 3 bil people organized economically and politically, and it's going to be overthrown by some young guys who won't even work together? Isn't an anarchy movement an oxymoron?
Does everyone read, 'V for Vendetta' and then curse Bush as fascist and stop voting, using credit cards, buying manufactured stuff? Can someone younger than me explain this? I'm like 30 and took political science, and this has never made sense to me.
the Seventeenth of March.
Huh.
I shall not soon forget the injustice done to me and mine.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
The reason that V for Vendetta has been pushed back is due to the Star Wars DVD coming out around November 1st. George Lucas feels that it is not good publicity for the Queen in his movie to have a neo nazi haircut. Therefore the people involved in V for Vendetta have graciously pushed it back till the Star Wars DVD sales will die down.
In all seriousness, the first Sin City comic was entertaining as a one-off, but since then it's all been the same silly pre-adolescent formula. I found the movie boring and a little embarrassing to watch, given how much it pandered to the cravings of 14-year-old boys to the omission of pretty much all else.
Breakfast served all day!