This review of V for Vendetta originally appeared in Sequential Tart on November 1, 2006. If you’ve not yet seen the movie, you may not want to read it, because it contains spoilers.

Studio
Warner Bros. Pictures
http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.com/

Credits
Director: James McTeigue
Starring: Hugo Weaving, Natalie Portman
Rating: R

Grade: 9

The movie V for Vendetta is based upon the eighties comic book series written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd. The Wachowski Brothers wrote the screenplay. Hugo Weaving plays V, the larger-than-life revolutionary behind the Guy Fawkes mask. His character is a master of guerilla theatre as much as he is of one-man guerilla warfare. He has been compared to Batman, but unlike Batman, he does not protect the status quo. His largest mission is to inspire rebellion against the extreme right-wing, totalitarian Norsefire regime that has come to power in a future United Kingdom. When watching this movie, the audience is immediately confronted with both V’s subversiveness and the movie’s political relevance. continue reading »

By way of if:book:

This Spartan Life, our favorite talk show in Halo space, just posted a hilarious video blog entry making the case for network neutrality. In some ways, this is the perfect medium for illustrating a threat to virtual spaces, conveying more in a couple of minutes than several weeks worth of op-eds. Enjoy it now before the party’s over.

Christy Dena writes in Cross-Media Entertainment that internet scavenger hunts are becoming a popular means of movie promotion on the internet, as well as a potential art form in themselves. One recent example is the Da Vinci Code Quest on Google.

From blog maverick: Think the Internet will replace TV ? Think again. The gist of this post is that TV will continue to be delivered like TV for a long time, because it will take a long time for there to be enough bandwidth to deliver TV to computers across the nation.

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On the i-Anya blog, Angela Thomas writes that Second Life has spawned a mini Western filmed in the Second Life world, called Bells and Spurs. It’s always fun to watch movies that people make of game world events. My husband, Ken, an avid player of World of Warcraft, has shown me quite a few movies made by World of Warcraft players. World of Warcrafters often make elaborate short movies, many of them set to music, like music videos. Most of them show guilds’ victories in challenging instances like Blackwing Lair. The action is nearly always synchronized to the beat of a song, which must take some work on the part of the movie-makers. Some of them are even more sophisticated, like one I saw last year that spliced together a variety of cuts to create a storyline about love, death and the resurrection of the beloved. This one was set to several songs, and it included flashbacks and cuts to a variety of different scenes. It only adds to the amusement and entertainment factor to imagine all the trouble somebody took to make one of these amateur movies. In the case of the Second Life western, this factor is diminished (at least for me) by the knowledge that Linden Labs had a hand in the making of the movie. I wonder why that is?