(no subject)

[lollardfish]

I often find the New Yorker Magazine a little ahead of the curve. It's where Seymour Hirsch wrote the Abu Ghraib story. A few weeks before the recent anti-intelligent-design decision was handed down in Pennsylvania, the New Yorker wrote a long discussion of the trial (all other national news media that I read only really wrote about it after the decision was handed down). I also find that you can trust New Yorker film reviewers more than any other. Even when I don't fully agree with the reviews, I always see their point. Denby and Lane, the two reviewers, are much more film snobs than I, but I love the way they write about cinema.

With that said, here's Denby on V for Vendetta. And I see his points, though I enjoyed it immensly.

I think he did too, if you read past the first line.

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Not the sort of sentence you're going to find in the newspaper advertisements for the movie.

B

[jadiana.livejournal.com]

I was annoyed by the review, if only because of the whole 'omg, you are irresponsible making a hero out of a terrorist' thing, though these reviewers weren't as direct as many of the others I had read.

[jbru.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed it, though not immensely due to the pacing difficulties I thought it had, and the whole "glorification of a terrorist" bit just shows the hypersensitivity of the reviewer. Perhaps he can be forgiven if he lives in NY, as one might guess from being published in The New Yorker, or London, but honestly, did he miss how fascist the government was? The film villified the government far more than it glorified the terrorist. Indeed, it was pretty ambiguous on the morality of the main character (though not as much as the source material I'm given to understand).

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

I do think (and y'all know my politics) that discussing, at least, the issues of a terrorist-protagonist who blows up buildings in the light of real terrorists blowing up buildings is interesting.

I don't think it invalidates the movie or anything (I agree with the pacing issues though), but ... it's worth thinking about critically.