This past weekend has found me at the movies.  Twice even!  Last Thursday we caught an evening show for V for Vendetta.  Unfortunately, due to not getting out of work till 10 minutes before it started, we didn’t have the best of seats…  But oh well, as it turns out we didn’t need good seats to enjoy the movie.  It’s been a while since I’ve been so captivated by a movie from start to finish.

I feel I should point out that no matter what the marketing team tries to make us believe, the Wachowski Brothers did not direct this movie.  And it shows.  They did write the screenplay for it, and much like their earlier work they do a good job when they’re just taking someone else’s idea and making it into a movie.  The real director was James McTeigue,  and this was actually his first time as a full director.  He did a lot of work on other movies, including all the Matrix movies,  a Star Wars, and one of my favorites, Dark City.  Suffice it to say, he did a good job.

The movie itself was breathtaking.  I really enjoyed that for the most part it didn’t use a lot of gimmicks to placate the audience.  Yes, there were some scenes with CG, but unlike most movies these days it wasn’t a scene to say “LOOK!! We have CG!!”  It was a scene that said “oh btw, we couldn’t do this in real life so we had to do it with a computer.  But don’t worry, you won’t notice.”  I feel the acting was very well done.  I was afraid that having Hugo Weaving as the main character would bring on nothing but endless Matrix and LotR cliché jokes, or that I’d not be able to separate the voice from the actor (IE Liam Neeson in Narnia), but I was happy to find that while I Knew it was Hugo Weaving, I didn’t feel it detracted from the character at all.

I think another of the points of the movie that I enjoyed was that it made zero attempt to be Politically Correct.  I mean considering the current global thoughts on terrorism they took a movie and made the terrorist the hero!  There is no doubt this wasn’t made for the faint of heart.

So yeah, those are my basic thoughts.  Anyone else seen it?  Have any comments?

Oh, and the second movie we saw this weekend…  V for Vendetta.  We got seats to the IMAX showing of up, and saw it with P.  He enjoyed it quite a bit as well, and I think it was even better the second time through.  Always a good sign! And as we left, I commented on how I’m dying to see the “3 hour extended super massive version” then realized there really isn’t much more I’d want in the show.  I think they did an amazing job of getting everything you needed into the timeframe, and leaving enough un-answered questions to keep it interesting.  Bravo, good work!