One-man reenaction of Star Trek: First Contact scene. (via MeFi)
Category / Film
V for Vendetta
Despite the ridiculous presence of Dell flat-screen monitors and JVC home entertainment centers and the discomfiting fact that every living room in the future, even the fugitive apartments with cinder block bookshelves, looks like a page out of an IKEA catalog, the film adaptation of V for Vendetta is literate and gleefully subversive. Granted, it is not Alan Moore’s comic, as the color schemes alone will reveal. But it is a reimagining and an updating of the narrative. (One can still see the poster for White Heat still in the back of V’s lair.) And it more than atones for previous lackluster Alan Moore adaptations. The film takes about 30 minutes to get its groove and John Hurt’s video presence grows tedious. But this is a film that, unlike the last two Matrix films, is taut and, at times, quite visceral. The two dependable Stephens (Rea and Fry) in the supporting cast are also of great benefit. Joe Bob says check it out.
Flow My Tears, the Karma Policeman Said
Official Trailer
Peter Lorre: Profoundly Misunderstood?
The LRB’s Bee Wilson on Peter Lorre, one of my favorite character actors of all time: “It is tempting to speculate what might have happened to Lorre’s career if the Brownshirts who were playing with stinkbombs in 1929 had not gone on to far nastier forms of thuggery. Might he have ended his days as a pillar of the German theatrical establishment rather than gurning in comedy-horror B-movies with Vincent Price? Might his persona have gained the gravitas it always lacked? Lorre himself seems to have thought so. In his bloated later years, when he presented a rather sad and incongruous figure at the Beverley Hills Tennis Club, he was inclined to harp on his intellectual past. ‘I think he felt,’ one of his friends later said, ‘had Hitler not happened and had he gone on as Bertolt Brecht’s actor . . . he would have been himself and been appreciated for what he really was.’”