Gunpowder Treason
Nov. 6th, 2021 01:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressIt is the fifth of November, and as I am wont to do (when circumstances align) I watched V for Vendetta. Tuesday had never seen it, so that was a nice excuse, even though I don't _really_ need excuses for this one.
As I told her just now, it's probably the second best of the movies I list among my favourites, in terms of sheer cinematography and artistry. Beat out by Mad Max: Fury Road, of course, because that movie is a fucking masterpiece, but most of the other movies I list among my favourites are only varying degrees of "actually good".
Because I was watching it with someone, I didn't commentate, but if you read my twitter threads from 2018 or 2019 you get a pretty good idea of what I'd say. (Quite literally --I reread them just now and pointed out the bits I said aloud to Tuesday). Spoilers throughout, and in the rest of this post.
I hadn't watched it since 2019, which means that the stunning headline of "80,000 dead! [due to a terrible virus]" hit, uh. Differently. I wish we still cared about 80,000 dead. I wish we didn't have an order of magnitude more than that.
I told Tues in the middle that after we finished, I would want to go back and show her a specific thing. Pleasingly, that thing turned out to be the part they wanted to rewatch as well, because it's my favourite moment in the entire movie, and honestly one of my favourite moments in all of film. It's when Finch is doing his montage monologue and saying he could see the connections between everything that had happened and everything that was going to happen.
And you get a split second shot of Eevy, tending roses, smiling and happy in a beautiful home, and as she turns we spot Finch in the mirror, living with her presumably and sharing her happily ever after. Unlike nearly every other shot in the sequence, it's not a shot that appears anywhere else in the movie. It makes me dearly happy to know that they can find peace.
That they can grow roses, and apologize to no one.
Unsurprisingly, I cried through Valerie's Letter. I always do of course, because some days I feel like I do have roses and some days I'm deadly scared of how close I am to losing them. I'd like to hope I can hold on to that inch within myself and protect the world I love, but I hope never to find myself tested.
Perhaps also unsurprisingly, but definitely _frustratingly_ I no longer have V's monologue flawlessly memorized. I stumbled a bunch more than hoped and I _haaaaaate_ that. I will have to practice because it's such a stupid little party trick to pull out, but it's one I'm fond of.
It hurts to think about how much Trumpian bullshit you can see in this movie that hasn't actually gone away now that ~the democrats won~. We have so far to go. Maybe we can make it if we all work together.
Maybe community, and looking out for and loving thus, is all that's actually important in this world.
Remember remember.
~Sor
MOOP!
As I told her just now, it's probably the second best of the movies I list among my favourites, in terms of sheer cinematography and artistry. Beat out by Mad Max: Fury Road, of course, because that movie is a fucking masterpiece, but most of the other movies I list among my favourites are only varying degrees of "actually good".
Because I was watching it with someone, I didn't commentate, but if you read my twitter threads from 2018 or 2019 you get a pretty good idea of what I'd say. (Quite literally --I reread them just now and pointed out the bits I said aloud to Tuesday). Spoilers throughout, and in the rest of this post.
I hadn't watched it since 2019, which means that the stunning headline of "80,000 dead! [due to a terrible virus]" hit, uh. Differently. I wish we still cared about 80,000 dead. I wish we didn't have an order of magnitude more than that.
I told Tues in the middle that after we finished, I would want to go back and show her a specific thing. Pleasingly, that thing turned out to be the part they wanted to rewatch as well, because it's my favourite moment in the entire movie, and honestly one of my favourite moments in all of film. It's when Finch is doing his montage monologue and saying he could see the connections between everything that had happened and everything that was going to happen.
And you get a split second shot of Eevy, tending roses, smiling and happy in a beautiful home, and as she turns we spot Finch in the mirror, living with her presumably and sharing her happily ever after. Unlike nearly every other shot in the sequence, it's not a shot that appears anywhere else in the movie. It makes me dearly happy to know that they can find peace.
That they can grow roses, and apologize to no one.
Unsurprisingly, I cried through Valerie's Letter. I always do of course, because some days I feel like I do have roses and some days I'm deadly scared of how close I am to losing them. I'd like to hope I can hold on to that inch within myself and protect the world I love, but I hope never to find myself tested.
Perhaps also unsurprisingly, but definitely _frustratingly_ I no longer have V's monologue flawlessly memorized. I stumbled a bunch more than hoped and I _haaaaaate_ that. I will have to practice because it's such a stupid little party trick to pull out, but it's one I'm fond of.
It hurts to think about how much Trumpian bullshit you can see in this movie that hasn't actually gone away now that ~the democrats won~. We have so far to go. Maybe we can make it if we all work together.
Maybe community, and looking out for and loving thus, is all that's actually important in this world.
Remember remember.
~Sor
MOOP!
no subject
on 2021-11-10 02:16 am (UTC)no subject
on 2021-11-16 06:50 pm (UTC)Yeah, it's been conspicuous how many pandemic stories were already in-process before late 2019. Anyone who claims that none of this could have been foreseen is way, way off-base -- an awful lot of people did see it coming, often with unsettling precision.
no subject
on 2021-11-16 07:17 pm (UTC)I have slightly mixed feelings about the V For Vendetta movie. The graphic novel was for many years my favorite of all time (although my feelings have become more nuanced over time), so I was very aware of how they related to each other.
On the one hand, I was overjoyed and astonished that they didn't screw up the sections I totally expected them to. The Valerie sequence (and Evey's imprisonment in general) is the emotional heart of the story (still on my list of the ten best issues in the history of comics), and seeing them get it right brought me to tears.
OTOH, I'm still bugged that they changed two key scenes (V's speech to the nation, and the ending), and in doing so significantly changed the political message of the story. The movie is very much about "We are being abused by bad leaders, and it is time to be led in a better direction" -- a largely good and very au courant message, but not the point of the graphic novel. The original is much darker and sharper: that society as a whole, and the individuals who make it up, are responsible for that bad leadership, and deserve what they get if they don't prevent that. In the book, V is there to punish and end a broken society, not save it. The movie emotionally lets the populace (at least, the decent ones) off the hook in a way that the far-bleaker original, with its explicitly anarchist viewpoint, does not.
It's still very good, and still very worthwhile, and considerably more palatable than the book. But I always try to keep in mind the scarier message of the original, which is basically that if you allow the fascists to seize power in the first place and hold onto it, it's probably already too late for your society, and it's your own damned fault for allowing it. That may be too pessimistic, but it's a good motivator to stay aware and stay loud.
(And I'm still disappointed that they didn't manage to release the movie on the 400th anniversary of The November Plot as originally planned, but business realities are a sad thing...)