And one more thing.

I should just let the haiku speak for itself, but I want to add a few things about V for Vendetta.

Politics aside, I couldn't believe how incoherently the film unravels; it's all muddled backstory, bogged-down rhetoric, and inert action sequences. The sad thing is, there's something there. An undercurrent, that x-factor, that whatever that makes Alan Moore's graphic novel so legendary. In nearly every scene I thought "God, I bet this works really well as a comic." (Forgive me, I haven't read it.)

Now, as for film's much-hyped revolutionary politics... puh-lease. How anyone* can claim this as an important/progressive film, when Michael Haneke's Caché is only two months out of the theater, is beyond me. What's that? Haneke's film is an art-house film that no one would go see? Okay. Fine. Steven Spielberg's Munich was a pop-political MultiPlexer that aesthetically and philosophically shames V. (Manohla summed it up perfectly: "The more valid question is how anyone who isn't 14 or under could possibly mistake a corporate bread-and-circus entertainment like this for something subversive. You want radical? Wait for the next Claire Denis film.")

On an unrelated note, since we see V rock out to Cat Power and Antony and the Johnsons, I was hoping that we'd get a flashback sequence that showed V as a young music-blogger circa 2005. Tell me that wouldn't've made the film a little better. You know it would.

*Like, say, Dave Poland: "Some audiences will be sure that there is a direct attack on George W Bush. Others will make no connection at all. But the truth is, until we are all wide awake most of the time, this film will be relevant forever. Like the Brothers Grimm, Shakespeare, and the Bible, V for Vendetta is a work of parable."

(Emphasis mine.)