Build Date: Tue Feb 11 21:30:13 2025 UTC
The chance that anyone has a bomb on a plane is very, very small. The chance that TWO people are carrying bombs is infinitessimally small. That's why I always carry a bomb with me when I fly. It improves my odds of surviving the flight without getting blown to bits.
-- enigma
V for Vendetta: Springtime for Revolution
2006-03-17 09:03:52
In the "New Deal" that has had Hollywood engaged in a pornographic submission to the whims of the Bush administration, Warner Brothers pulled V for Vendetta after the London tube bombings last summer. The film was to be relegated to the "loss" column in the annual shareholders report. More collateral damage in the War On Terror.
This is a film I had only the vaguest intention of seeing, until about a month and a half ago. A film that was deemed too dangerous to be released during the last Christmas season, when it would have been sold as a deranged blockbuster. Time displacement has a funny way of derailing irrelevance making its opposite transcendent.
Super Bowl Sunday was when V for Vendetta crossed my wires again. I'd written it off as another doomed Allan Moore bastardization made to capitalize on the omnipresent geek population that never tires of seeing remarkable comic fare cross over to the big screen. Toss in every fanboy's favorite jailbait from The Professional and you can count on at least covering your production costs. Mix in the Wachowski brothers' penchant for social critique and noirish elements, and a profit would be realized at least in the DVD market.
Yet there it was, the third commercial into the first quarter of Super Bowl XL. The audience of 90.7 million Americans, as well as the rest of the world, was watching an advertisement for a movie about a masked protagonist whose aim was to blow up Parliament. I tried to picture all those lard-assed, jelly-bellied, Coors-swilling golf addicts trying to wrap their brains around the visually seductive yet intellectually confusing trailer they had just seen. No Doritos wackiness. No Fed Ex guffaws. Not even the Diet Pepsi Machine rookie-of-the-year giggle. A fucking masked terrorist and his hot little bettie getting off on blowing up government buildings. I really wish I'd had an EEG reading of neurological firings in those pathetic Republican cortices who share my obsession with the gridiron.
The sheer audacity of a single advertisement, so critically placed for maximum impact and exposure struck me as genius. It was PsyWarOps at its finest. If for only a second, culture jammers had cracked the mainline program. People would laugh about Ameriquest and Hummer's comedy at the water cooler the next day. But lurking in the backs of their minds was the image of that mask and the earnest look of conversion in that girl's eyes. Only in the last two weeks has the full-press advertising campaign hit even the City's streets. I'm sure the suburban saturation has been more concentrated and correspondingly less elegant. Regardless, it was set perfectly to trigger the deep memory of Super Bowl excitement and dangerous curiosity planted way back in the first quarter of the ugliest Cinderella story to ever don cleats. Mask... Girl... Bombs...
Cool.
And yet despite all this, I had only a casual curiosity until my daily media scans started to offer their reviews. When the worst thing the Christian Science Science Monitor had to say was "graphic," my antennae tingled. Yes, fellow gonzos, I took a dive into a place I have not been since "Ed Wood": I caught a pre-release showing. At an AMC multiplex, to boot.
At first I was a little put off by what I considered the kind of cheap, flat, unimaginative cinematography and editing that passes for dramatic with people who suck at the teats of American Idol and Sex in the City. Then came the too-much-too-soon introduction to V, the film's main character. Wondering if I'd arrived at the same flick gushed over all across the wires, I recalibrated my standards and reclined into my seat for another disappointing tour through an over-hyped could-have-been. Then came that scene with the pedophiliac deacon and Natalie Portman dressed as a twelve-year-old fetish tart. From there, things got decidedly more interesting.
What transpires all during the film is too much to cover here and I don't want to blow too many cool surprises. However, I will advise that you look carefully at the Prime Minister's pupils as he rails at his cabinet via video conference. The last time I looked into eyes like that, I was dealing with a Hell's Angel who was raging hardcore on enough speed to orbit a school bus full of Weight Watchers washouts. Is it a not-too-subtle suggestion that pharmaceutical manipulations of our highest elected leaders are dreadfully commonplace? After all, what can you really make out about a person's pupils when the camera projecting them to Their Fellow Countrymen is too far back to make out anything other than hair, eye brows, teeth, and a chin?
If you're looking for all the answers in V for Vendetta, save yourself the ten bucks and spend the money on another couple of drinks. The film's chock full of things that should be considered and discussed. Like how much of a popular showing it takes to override pitiful policies at crucial times, without violence and using the liberties we are all guaranteed as human beings. Laced among those thoughts and notions are several uncomfortable realities about our modern polity and the lowly value placed on easily marginalized human lives when power and profit are at stake. Don't get me wrong -- this is still a comic book movie with comic book action and a mysterious figure who just can't bear to lose his adopted face for even a kiss from his beloved... and who wears a cape. Why does it always have to be a cape?
This isn't going to be the film that jump-starts the hearts or repairs the spinal cords of Democratic politicians who have spent the last five and a half years in a soporific funk usually suffered by lightning strike victims. Nor is it going to spur copycats who go around bombing buildings so they can land hot chicks. As for those decrepit golfers, this will be the film their rebellious teenagers coo about for months to come. It ain't gonna' win any Oscars for anything and it certainly won't convert hardened Right-Wingnuts. But it will push peoples' buttons in ways that will rearrange their scales on some level. Inasmuch, maybe it is the wrench the street fighting man needs to get the motor running. Now, if he can just get a grip on it...
T O P S T O R I E S
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
A Day in the Life of a Beverotologist
It was starting to look like a very boring Saturday, trapped as I was in the suburban wastelands of the outer Bay Area, so I called my Able Assistant (AA) and proposed that we perform some Spocktail field tests. For some time I've been working on creating the quintessential cinematic beverage and even tho' SMRL does most of its testing during nocturnal hours, this seemed an opportune time to roll up the sleeves of our labcoats and get some science done. While the beverotology creation tested this day (The Neurotoxin) must be deemed a success, this article focuses more the journey of the experimenters, rather then the science of beverotology. (More...)
Naked Australian Redhead -- Missing!
She posed naked on the web, fought for pornography online, and even kept an online "Diary of a Virtual Girlfriend." But after earning a place in internet history, Bernadette Taylor vanished without a trace. (More...)
The One I Feel Sorry For Is Joses
We've had a lot of Jesus coverage lately here at the PDJ. But let's face it, we're not exactly cutting-edge in this subject area. Jesus has been making headlines for, oh, I guess it's a couple thousand years now. Jesus is a very strong brand. Jesus has a lot of mindshare. (More...)
Spock Went, Spock Wrote, Spock Kicked Ass
Every Labor Day weekend a large portion of the PDJ staff joins 30,000 other freaks at one of the biggest and strangest art festivals in the world - Burning Man - somewhere on the edge of the Black Rock Desert. Our base of operations is always the ultra swank Spock Mountain Research Labs - the World Leaders in Beverage Science and Leisure Technology. This year, we hauled up our computers, printers and a massive digital duplicator, determined to become Black Rock City's third daily newspaper. Even Spock was surprised by our success - news will never be viewed the same on the playa. Read all seven issues of the 2002 Spock Science Monitor for yourself and see why. (More...)
Three Days and 25 Spocktails: A Cautionary Tale
Johnnie Royale picked me up from the dental surgery. I felt warm, safe, cradled in the anathesia's loving embrace. The pharmacy downstairs gave me a bottle of Vicodin and a few instructions: take it with food, don't mix with alcohol, don't operate heavy machinery. I put it in my pocket and we left. "Do you want to go home, or do you want to go to a bar?" asked Johnnie. (More...)
Australian Troops Set for Days of Debauchery to the Tunes of Kylie Minogue
This weekend Australian troops in East Timor will be able to put their feet up and push all the images of mass graves and charred remains from their minds as they relax to the giddy melodies of Kylie Minogue - including exclusive unplugged performances in the militia-ravaged and blood-spattered border towns of Balibo and Suai. (More...)