Wednesday, March 15, 2006

"V for Vicious"

We saw this coming back in August 2005 - "V for Vendetta" arrives in theaters shortly, and what a twisted, hateful look at America it appears to be... Daimnation! links us to Libertas, with some pre-reviews giving us the scoop:

....the movie plays like a clumsy assault on post-9/11 paranoia. It references “America’s war,” uses imagery direct from Abu Ghraib and contains dialogue likely to offend anyone who’s not, say, a suicide bomber. Buildings are symbols, V tells a haunted young woman named Evey (Natalie Portman), after saving her from some vile, rampaging cops: “Blowing up a building can change the world.”

How do you think this will play to friends and relatives of the victims of 9/11? Doesn't matter, Hollywood folk don't know many of them, and besides, any enlightened person knows who the real victims are, right? Another review, from Debbie Schlussel at FrontPage Magazine:

“V” comes complete with all the bogeymen the far left loves to hate: NSA spying and wiretaps; government renditions and torture complete with Abu Ghraib hood fashions; lecherous, elderly Christian clerics in collars raping young girls; Islam, gay rights, and free speech under attack; and even a Bill O’Reilly-esque evil cable talk show host/wicked pharmaceutical billionaire/heinous military officer combo rolled into one character.
Oh, and by the way, the hero of the movie: He’s a terrorist in a Guy Fawkes mask, who blows up important government buildings. Sound familiar? His mask might as well be a kefiyeh wrapped around his head in a Nick Berg video.


Now to finish the Hollywood wet dream:

...“the United States of America” doesn’t exist anymore. America is in the midst of a civil war.
And America and the war on Iraq are the enemies–along with Christians and the right–in this movie. We are treated to newscasts about how “America’s War [on terror] spread to England.”
One character–a gay, British Jay Leno type who hosts a latenight show–keeps a secret vault of prohibited items, including a giant poster of “the Coalition of the Willing,” depicting the American and British flags surrounding a swastika …

...Also in the secret vault of sacred prohibited items: a Koran. Portman, whose Evie is the “heroine” of “V,” asks, why the Koran? “Are you a Muslim?” she asks the late-night host. “No, but its [the Koran’s] images are beautiful.”

Un-flippin'-believable.

Hollywood has become nothing more than a niche entertainment provider. Their target audience is the American Left; the angry Democrat, the Cindy Sheehan fan, the "Bush lied!" crowd. They make movies for them such as Syriana, V for Vendetta, Munich, and Brokeback Mountain, and earn what monies they can. There is undoubtly a market for these films, as a place the angry and disaffected liberal can slip for two hours into escapist dreams, of America turning out to be the evil place they always knew it was! A place they can openly root against America, guilt-free! However, there is no potential for a "blockbuster" movie in this genre; Hollywood is intentionally making movies that disgust a large swarth of the population, and in doing so forfeits their reciepts.

It is a questionable strategy at a time when moviegoers are a lot harder to come by, preferring to watch flicks in our home-theater heavens. Instead of luring them back with broader-based entertainment, the choice to target only one segment of the audience (while marginally profitable), may turn off an even larger portion of the audience, leading these disaffected customers to seek out, via alternative entertainment vehicles, films that are more to their liking.

To serve their own intellectual vanity and to reap the profits of the conspiritorial left, Hollywood may be dealing themselves a blow from which they may never recover. No tears will be shed in this corner of Jersey, however...

We'll follow this one at the box office, and see which critics rewarded this leftist dreck with high praise...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very True, Take a look @ this,
Why Hollywood doesn't need the heartland.
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/JasonApuzzo/2006/03/14/189683.html

Jake said...

For what it's worth, didn't blowing up (knocking down) the World Trade Center "change the world"? V's statement is true because it's simply a statement without a positive or negative aspect.

While some of the imagery is modernized and given a more Bush-era spin (i.e. the Koran), most of your complaints about the movie are directly from the source material, a 25 year old comic. If it hits a little too close to home, realize it was originally written with the idea that "things will never be this extreme in real life," and maybe we should be more concerned that the current administration has achieved the level of comic book villainry.

The JerseyNut said...

OK, first, Scott M.:
Some totals via boxofficemojo.com:

"Munich" $47 million take/$70 million budget
"Syriana" $50 million take/$50 million budget
"Brokeback" $82 million take /$14 million budget

Munich will wind up losing close to $20 million; Syriana will make a tiny profit, and while Brokeback retains a nice profit margin,less than $85 million for an Oscar nominee and "most-talked about" movie is a relative pittance.

So like I said in the post, Hollywood has decided to entertain a niche, and make monies where it can. Yes there are people willing to see these flicks; but not enough to rationalize producing them to the extent we have seen.

As for Jake, my search for comic-book villainry took me to al-Qaeda, which, while engaging in wanton destruction, killed thousands of innocent people (including many rescue personel) in an attempt to promote a barbaric ideology. "The current administration", while by no means angelic, decided to fight back to the best of their abilities. The heroes are those men and women in uniform looking these killers in the eyes every day and fighting them to the death.

And since I am not the only one who believes that, why does Hollywood refuse to consider making a movie that depicts such Americans in a positive light? Would certainly make them more cash than Munich; but alas, I am not in their niche market...