Blog O’ Leaps

DEATH PROOF (2007)

I was thinking when I was watching the trailers before this * that there are plenty of movies around that, no matter how good they are (or more often, aren’t) are just another movie.

They use the same kind of situations to generate the same kind of suspense. They pull the same reigns on putting their protagonist in the kind of awkward-to-impossible situation that is meant to make the audience think “What would I do in his/her place?”. They have the same kind of big scene/big moment dialogue that nobody would remotely ever say in real life but we accept for this particular pop-culture moment and the price of a ticket, “makes sense”. They all have the same approach to finding a “hook” – a bizarre setting or scenario that sets them apart from the pack.

And you could be forgiven after a while for thinking, they’re all basically the Same Movie.

Every so often, a genuine oddity gets made – one kind of slips through the system – usually before the director and/or writer/s in question get lured into a doorway by a big bag with $$ signs on it, to be blackjacked, hurled onto a conveyor belt, sucked into the gears of the system and thus wind up making the Same Movie as Everyone Else for the remainder of their professional career. Thus the potential crisis is averted.

Also every so often, but less often, some palooka will come along, ignore what everyone else is doing, and just turn out movies the way he/she thinks it should be done. And if they get a release, and find enough paying human beings to come to the box-office party, a magical thing can happen. These movies can change the rules. The Same Movie That Everyone Else is Making starts to look pretty old hat next to the new broom that’s busy a-sweepin’ clean.

The inevitable corollary of all this is that ultimately the Bizness will start aping such elements of the New Broom guy as they can comprehend, and soon it’s all the Same Movie again, but just with some less carbon-dated elements included in it.

Once upon a time, Quentin Tarantino was that guy. He was that guy with Reservoir Dogs, he was that guy with the screenplay for True Romance, and he was that guy with Pulp Fiction, and that’s about the whole penny-section. He changed the viewers’ expectations for what “could happen” in dialogue, in character motivation, and in plot in mainstream movies of that time.

A lot of people don’t want to pay him all that. They say, “He got this from Chinese movies”, “He got this from this Japanese movie”, “He got this from comics”, “He got this from old detective pulps” etc etc until the cows come home and even the ones with glass eyes have tears in them. This is 100% fabric-filled pure bunkum from people who don’t get movies and never will. ++

He changed the game, not with his reference sources, not even with the combination of influences he bought to the table, but with how he made the movies – how he put them together, to an extent, but also how he used this stuff to subvert, give the lie to, and ultimately to completely change the line-to-line, scene-to-scene, expectations of the Same Movie That Everyone Else Was Making.

In creative terms, he changed the Bizness. Check out those movies. Check out the other movies leading up to, and also of that time. Check out the raft of Tarantino-wannabe movies that clogged the $2 video shelves in his wake, not exactly excluding that Mr Madonna guy. This great knowledge can be yours for free, not including copious DVD hire charges.

He was a bolt from the blue, regardless of which James Cain novels or One-Eyed Drunken Frog Prince Swordsman Vs. Caterpillar Kung Fu movie he used as a jump-off point.

Anyhoo, that was a long, long time ago, and a Tarantino far, far adrift. I’ll forgive him the misstep with the Elmore Leonard thing (Foxy Brown) because as near as I’ve ever been able to work out Elmore Leonard stuff is inherently dull, and plenty of other people besides Tarantino have taken far longer than seems necessary to work that out. Foxy Brown was occasional glimpses of Tarantino lightning peaking around a dull pudding of a scenario that took forever to get precisely nowhere.

Since a long, long break working on perfecting his disaster-zone hairstyle, or whatever, Quents has pretty much retired from the previously mentioned kind of film-making and doing anything vaguely revolutionary, and now, in his dotage, he does big colourful comic books somehow magically transposed into movie form. Kill Bill 1. Would Somebody Please Hurry Up and Kill Bill 2. His involvement with Sin City – aka I Think Somebody Must Have Forgot to Kill Bill.

And now Death Proof, which could also have been entitled Sequel Proof. Which despite the plentiful references to ‘70s car/road movies like Vanishing Point, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, and the original Gone in 60 Seconds, actually owes a lot more to ‘60s sado-exploitation movies like Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill, and Herschell G. Lewis’s She-Devils on Wheels.

The car stuff in this movie is no Bullitt, you might as well know in advance. It’s not even Death Race 2000 (which also gets a subliminal dialogue reference.) It’s actually pretty predictable, one-dimensional and repetitive. That doesn’t bug me in itself, because I’m no rev-head, but it may bug everyone who went for that reason, partly because he makes such a big deal out of comparing it to genuine petrol-head movies.

What this is, is Tarantino, in his movie old-age, having fun trying to do the sort of movie he would have enjoyed seeing at the drive-in or whatever back in his youth. The kind of movie he liked when he was forming his taste for movies. The kind of movie that Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis already made 40+ years ago.

It’s kind of sloppy and draggy at that. The first half’s aaaall right, pretty much. He establishes us with a gang o’ not entirely convincing supermodel/ingénue looking gals who like to party hearty and drive the men wild. (Despite most of them looking like they like to check out comparative real estate prices in between Pilates classes, and drive their Hollywood accountants wild, due to overspending.)

Into one of their haunts steps a greasy, sleazy, cheesy and possibly wheezy old man, Stunt Man Mike (Kurt “Snake Plissken” Russell. Well, also Kurt “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes” Russell, but I think we’re meant to have forgotten all that by now.) He’s not exactly old by conventional standards, but is according to the laws of international box-office and the perverted chronological sense of the young glamazons depicted in the movie.

He kind of menaces them, one of them kind of teases him with an attempt at a classic Tarantino set-piece of a wild lap-dance in front of a jukebox – which doesn’t work out quite right, partially because he’s already done the same thing two or three times earlier on. Then they’re on the road and Crazy Mike comes right after them, and there’s death, mayhem, and a bundle of insurance forms to be filled out later. It all takes a little longer than absolutely necessary to get where it’s going, but it mostly holds the attention on a sleazy, sadistic comic book level.

The problem comes with the second half of the movie, which I’ll save some valuable internet paper by paraphrasing the Ramones and simply indicating, “Second verse, same as the first.”

There’s yet another bunch of four young red carpet attendees masquerading as wild party stud-ettes.

One of them is from New Zealand, complete with accent, which destroys the feel of dialogue meshing with cheeseball characterisation which at least established a sense of atmosphere in the first half’s fantasy wild party girl dialogue scenes. I apologise to the country and the attractive healthy, outdoorsy, jovial, farm-fresh looking woman concerned, but once I hear that accent, particularly as delivered in Death Proof, I could easily accept her as a pizza waitress, bartender or backpacker but absolutely not in the group, setting, scenario, context or planet depicted in this movie.

I know she’s really a stunt person called Zoe Bell from New Zealand, and that she’s “playing herself” but unless they’re saying that in her spare time from falling off buildings and ramming cars into brick walls, that she runs around stealing cars, violating all known road laws of the universe, and homicidally pursuing male strangers, that seems a little less than accurate, and not entirely germane to the situation.

Anyway, so Snake Russell eyeballs the four sexpots, follows them around, tries to mess them up with his non-talking Knight Rider supercar, and doesn’t get the job done, so they turn around and do the same thing to him.

That’s about the complete extent of the epic tale right there, and you’ll marvel at how long Quents and the gang take to get around to telling it, particularly because we’ve already seen it done better once in the first half anyway.

Even in the face of nothing resembling reasonable haste, one character who you’ll be forgiven for wondering why why she was even put in the picture, gets deposited rather callously to one side with some horny mad farmer in the boondocks, is left out of the climax, and we never even go back to find out whether the guy introduces her to the corpse of his dead mother at afternoon tea time, and then gets out the ol’ boning knife, inspiring a welter of deafening suspense music and a later head-shaking visit from the local coroner. Or whatever.

In keeping with the latter-day stages of Tarantino’s career, there’s really nothing mistakable for actual content anywhere in Death Proof. There’s kind of a few half-hearted stabs at a sexual pathology based on women mentally torturing men, but to call it a theme would be putting a grain of wheat on a plate and calling it spaghetti bolognese.

That’s all ok for a sex’n’sadism exploitation movie – nobody exactly went to those in search of a fertile subtext – but for a lot of its relatively short running time, this is a fairly slow, dull, lumpy and repetitive exploitation movie, and that’s not quite so forgivable. **

The best you can say about Death Proof is that it kind of passes the time, most of the time. There are some mildly fun “in” references for folks into exploitation movies. Kurt Russell is really good given what he’s given to do. (The couple of lines he gets to deliver completely out of context using his John Wayne imitation from Big Trouble in Little China are a small knot-headed pleasure.) He has one of those trademark Tarantino show-stoppa crazy philosophy monologue scenes, and it’s not exactly Gary Oldman or Dennis Hopper in True Romance, but he just about puts it over. There is the occasional nostalgic aroma of something truly creepy/distinctive/queasy/befouled sexuality-expressed-as-violence representative of Tarantino’s particular and odd gift as a film-maker in Death Proof. Just not enough of them.

Unlike his other “movie of two halves”, From Dusk Till Dawn, which this movie intermittently seems to want to have half the general coolness of, it achieves the rare Trilogy of the Big T – it’s tired, tiring and tiresome. And just to complete the quadrella, it also comes off as try-hard.

With Death Proof, Tarantino is really starting to remind me of Woody Allen on Husbands and Wives, just endlessly running old Woody Allen riffs according to the law of diminishing returns, and with no apparent point in sight, because he wants to keep making movies, and can’t think of anything better than this stuff to make. You the viewer may not have the same limitations in scope of imagination. By which I mean you the viewer may be able to think of almost any other movie you would have preferred the film-maker to make. In particular when he’s trying to introduce characters with Reservoir Dogs-style off-kilter dialogue, it comes off as such a tragic, tired old knock-off, you feel like donating to a charity.

In other words, while Tarantino never made the Same Movie as Everyone Else, he now keeps making the Same Movie All the Frigging Time. It’s not that much of an improvement by now. I wouldn’t even mention all this if I didn’t think he was capable of doing a lot better, but Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are on the record for all to see, and he IS capable of doing better, if he ever gets over tickling himself lightly with his own bent comic-book fantasies. At this point, the odds are stacking up against this ever happening again. Lightning certainly strikes once, and can even strike twice, but in this case I think it’s struck out.

Quentin Tarantino can thank two of his sidekicks for helping out a fair bit on Death Proof, though. His cinematographer, Quentin Tarantino. And his under-utilised acting buddy, Quentin Tarantino. However, his screenwriter, Quentin Tarantino needs an urgent rebore. Not me though. I’m getting to the point where I’ve probably been bored enough.

(6 out of 11 on the industry-embraced MPHOAH scale.)

* (For the record, the trailer that got my brain wheels spinning in this direction was for the George Cloovey-starring moonie Michael Clayton, which I haven’t seen other than the trailer.)

++ (And you can trust ol’ Unca Leaps on that, unless you disagree with all my opinions about movies, in which case as far as you’re concerned, I don’t get movies either.)

** (The Internet Movie Database website says there are two versions of Death Proof, an international one running at 114 minutes, and the edited US version running at 90 mins. I have to presume this was the longer version. Either way, cutting 24 minutes out of it couldn’t have harmed the enterprise.)

(Just for the record – Death Proof was originally released as part of Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s ill-fated Grindhouse project, which also contained a Rodriguez movie called Planet Terror and a number of fake trailers for non-existent ‘70s-style exploitation movies. It was advertised for release here in that form – I remember the posters – but never came out in Australia that way, after enduring a critical pummelling and paying customer disinterest at a variety of fleeting festival screenings and limited releases overseas. Hard to see how this brilliant conception could have failed given the rampant success of double features at megaplexes all over the world the last thirty years or so. The original format – which doesn’t seem to be currently available on DVD – ran a mere 191 minutes, or a buttock-pulverising 3 hours 11 mins in the old money.)

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CITIZEN KANE (1941)

I watched this again recently, partly because, although I’ve seen it plenty of times, I hadn’t caught it in a while. Also because, in recent years, a late-breaking backdraft of a wearyingly predictable negative aroma has wafted from under the critical doona, no doubt in kind of an annoying adolescent rebellion response to all those years that it was listed as the undisputed, undefeated Greatest Movie of All Time.

(There must be at least a slight degree of healthy suspicion that the carved-in-granite #1 ranking status of CK derived mainly from the keen desire to save a lot of time and dull committee meetings thinking too hard about the question.)

I’d always previously gone with the consensus view that it was pretty hot-cha-cha type moviemaking stuff (pardon the use of complicated technical jargon there) so I thought I’d have a little squizz to see if age – rather than wisdom in the case of yer old Unc Leapster – had kicked earlier perspectives square into the proverbial floor ashtray provided. Well, I can give you the answer in three words – Not so, Daddy-o.

In case anyone was wondering what all the hubbub was about in the first place, Bub – and that seemed exactly the problem with the latter-day knot-headed hipster types and megaplex casualties who apparently just didn’t “get it” – it was probably about the first dramatic movie of the Hollywood studio era that skipped over all the stuff about familiar genres and expectations (and character/plot/dialogue conventions that come with that package), and analysed (satirised/implicitly criticised) the media in a way that was anything but commonplace at the time, and did it all in about as frank, adult and unpatronising a way as it was possible to do at the time without the movie getting banned and only being shown at Hollywood producer stag nights. If you want the most bare-bones version possible of why Citizen Kane did – and for some folks still does – make such an impact and inspired such big ker-boing style resonations down the decades, the crayon-sketch version above is probably not too far from it, if I say so myself and I just did.

Still, that would all be a matter of dusty historical record if everything in the movie wasn’t done with such amazing alacrity, but it is, and the film is still as galvanising an experience as testing out a car battery by squatting on it while grasping a plugged-in boiling water jug by the element and dangling your tootsies in liquid mercury.

For those who tuned in real late, Citizen Kane is basically a somewhat fictionalised biography of the early media baron William Randolph Hearst, who becomes Charles Foster Kane for purposes of storytelling magic here. This wasn’t quite enough of an alteration for the Hearst folks, who spent a fair amount of time, money and influence unsuccessfully trying to fit the movie for cement shoes and an appointment with the fishies at the bottom of the nearest ocean convenient to all parties concerned.

In storytelling terms, it’s a pinball machine – it flashes forward, back, sideways and I think there’s one or two example of the rare inside-out double whoopsie manoeuvre as well – but what’s astonishing about it is how user-friendly the structure is, and how each little section is essential in informing the next one, and the whole enchilada, and how it ends up feeling that this is the only way it could have been put together to reap such a massive impact. I guess that’s what you look for in a great movie – or a great anything for that matter – and I double-guess that’s why so many people have made such a big smorgasbord out of Orson Welles’ accomplishment as a film-maker here.

On one level, he uses the contemporary – as far as the viewer is concerned – sub-plot device of a reporter trying to research Kane for a current piece, and tracking down various people who were once close to him. Some of that is done in interview form. Then there’s the more conventional scenes, what you would call “dramatic recreations” in a documentary or extended current affairs piece. Also, there are the glimpses of Kane’s public life shown via faked newsreels, done with an uncanny – and slyly parodic, though straight-faced – eye and ear for the presentation style of the real thing during that period.

And I’m probably not even scratching the surface, particularly on the visual side of things, and this is an incredibly well-shot and carefully prepared movie, that has the decency to still be dynamic as all heckfire throughout and let you forget about how much planning must have gone into the thing if you want to.

Of course a lot of what’s done in Citizen Kane has become the conventional now, and you don’t look at a 66 year old movie and expect to see The Sopranos or Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, or whatever the chosen measuring stick would be now.

In saying that, I’m still scratching around the borders of the underpants of my mind trying to work out what those recent naysayers and nose-probers could have possibly missed in Citizen Kane, that they could have dismissed it as last century’s blob of oatmeal. To be honest, having just watched it again recently, I find myself drawn to the inevitable conclusion that they were (a) all drunk and sleepy when they saw it, (b) they were teen goth-type personalities of any age who were determined not to like it because so many other people did, or (c) they were just thicker than a cross-section of the average bank vault wall. *

I know it’s all the contemporary Australian rage to pretend that everyone has an equal right to express an opinion on everything in spite of all viable evidence to the contrary. But elsewhere around here I once said something to the effect that those who come away from Citizen Kane full of ennui and salmon dip, professing proudly that they’ve seen nothing special, are effectively tone-deaf to movies, and I’m sticking to it. They are. No shame in it. Just because folks are tone deaf to music, for example, doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy a full rich life. I’d just prefer they didn’t spend it writing album reviews for newspapers and magazines.

Old or not, Citizen Kane holds up just Jim Dandy by itself right now. As the great cinematic theorist and pro wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin would rightly say, “That’s the bottom line.” Unlike a lot of other dust-caked relics I mention around here, you don’t even have to make a whole lot of allowances for the time passed and putting yourself in the mind-frame of audiences of that time. If you don’t get your head knocked around like a boxing gym’s speedball by all the media resonances floating out of Welles’ head down the years that come off as eerily contemporary now, you’re either not paying attention or you might as well be the padded cinema seat with the regulation gum attached to the underside, rather than the woodblock who happens to be sitting in it.

Of course, the Big E. Rat of all King Leonardo and his Short Subjects-flavoured questions is: OK, hot stuff, is Citizen Kane the Greatest Movie of All Time?

To which my Itchy Brother answer is: Sure, why the heck not? It’s a great movie. It was as innovative as all Hades and surrounding postcodes. It paved the way for aeons of technique and great movies and TV (and no doubt plenty of highly honourable stinkers) to follow.

But, you know, when they say “The answer’s in the question” about something, that doesn’t imply that either the answer or the question were anything more than beef luncheon to start with. Let me shock and amaze ya, Joe Frazier – the burning issue of Greatest Movie of All Time is a big divot in a crockpot to start with. The whole Santa Claus investigation may still be wide open but there is no Greatest Movie of All Time, Virginia.

But people like lists, and they like them to have numbers and a start and a finish attached, and you end up going with something that scratches most of the parameter itches and causes the most howling and swearing when you introduce the mallet to the consensus funny-bone.

Exile on Main Street by the Rolling Stones isn’t REALLY the greatest rock’n’roll (or post-Elvis contemporary music album, or whatever mows your crab-grass) in the history of forever. It could easily be Beggars Banquet by the same geezers, or one of the Ramones first three historic non-sellers, or even Blue Cheer’s fascinating sludge-epic calamity of a debut record, if your tastes veer towards the esoteric, and your talents and inclinations extend to a hell of a lot of fanciful critical tapdancing in the face of general derision.

But Exile is a viable consensus choice, the content can back up any amount of cruelly harvested forests worth of blather written on the subject, and it saves thinking about another one.

Thus Citizen Kane is the Greatest Movie of All Time, on exactly the same parameters, with a sly finger to the (outside of the) nose, and the tacit general acknowledgement that this is inherently all so much bull biscuits in the first place.

In 60 years time, when thankfully, I’ll be installed horizontally in the ground, supplying vital nutrients to enable all those Exile/Kane ravaged forests to spring forth into new regrowth, possibly some dimwit delite like Fight Club or Seven or The Matrix will have been officially installed as The Greatest Movie of All Time, and Citizen Kane may be as forgotten then as Chester Conklin, Snub Pollard and Chaplin impersonator Billy West are right now. ** And Kylie Minogue – The Butt Cheek Remixes will be the All-Time Greatest Album. Posterity can be goofy like that. If nothing else this makes it possible to use the words “cheery” and “mortality” in the one sentence.

(11 out of 11 Margaret Pomerantz heads on a hubcap)

* (I sometimes wonder if the real problem with the latter-years anti-Kane poptarts wasn’t simply that the movie was old and in black and white. Also, if you’re used to movies with explosions every five minutes, containing nothing so complicated that a Golden Retriever couldn’t be lab-trained to achieve full perception, and with everything presented to the audience on a platter in the firm belief of current movie producers that everybody is dumber than they are, given that they’re not necessarily smarter than lawn furniture to start with, Citizen Kane might conceivably present the odd difficulty.)

** (For the record, I have my doubts.)

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V FOR VENDETTA (2006)

In the future, as the plot spins, Britain has become a fascist state in effect if not in name. Everyone is fed the party line via the omnipresent TV screens, the people are downtrodden, the police are a government tool of oppression and a law unto themselves, and anyone vaguely representing a dissident element are visited by folks dressed up as Darth Vader’s troops who give them a free black sports bag, which is unfortunately then zipped around their heads before they permanently disappear, much like many winning performers in reality TV talent shows.

The one tyre-iron in the breakfast cereal is a mysterious yet cornball cloaked figure with an old-fangled theatrical mask pasted to his kisser, who for the next two hours and change is Our Hee-Ro, despite looking like he’s moonlighting from his normal duties of vaguely molesting the lily-white heroine in an early 1930s haunted house movie. That would be the “V” of the title, who just to clear this up before confusion reigns, is neither one of those “energy drinks” for drugged, dancing idiots, nor a brand of vegetable juice sometimes erroneously installed by careless bar-tenders in a Bloody Mary.

OK, so what we’ve got here is another movie muck-around in the George Orwell 1984 theme-park, with pretty well-handled updates for political developments and technological upgrades; the exception being the insertion of an ‘Exceptional Hero’ archetype – and I’m using an ill-disguised code expression for comic book superhero, albeit one deployed in an unconventional fashion – which Georgie O apparently found a concept surplus to requirements in the original version.

If, understandably, you’re figuring you’ve already read the book 1984, and there’s already been two official movie versions not even counting Brazil, and haven’t we all suffered enough for one Whitney Britny lifetime, I’m here to try and talk you off the ledge. Though very few people seemed keen on passing the message on, this is one of those minor miracle movies where everything works, and it creates its own little world that holds you in place without an extended snooze being involved, and, under the camouflage of entertainment, creates a bizarre funhouse mirror distortion of something nonetheless instantly recognisable as aspects of real life.

In other words, it does what movies are meant to do, a quality not quite as uncommon as finding a dinosaur scratching around your backyard, but still worthy of attention, at least until you find brontosaurus poop has obliterated your petunia patch.

What’s unusual about this as a superhero movie is that it’s not purely an elementary run-through of the usual polar components of tension/release, good/evil, choc-top/trouser stains, it’s also specifically a movie of ideas, and they’re political ideas. Come to drink about it, this is also what makes it unusual as any kind of mainstream movie post-around 1979.

I’m not trying to disguise that there is both swash and buckle in V For Vendetta, not to mention heroic panache and moustache and aplomb and a bomb, but all of those are intrinsically tied in with the political beliefs and ideals of the respective characters. It’s not impossible you could watch it as a pure heroic action movie, but you’d have to wilfully miss half the picture, not to mention end up mildly depressed and wondering why you didn’t just re-watch one of the frankly pudding-like 80s/90s Batman movies instead, if cack-handed Braindeath Lite was the flavour of entertainment you were chasing.

Knit-browed broadsheet-reader folks who feel the superhero concept, even in a modishly toned-down version sublimated to a genuine structure of ideas, is beneath them in their elevated lawn-tennis umpire view of life will be missing out by not loosening the brain-girdle enough to roll around the floor a few serious rounds with V For Vendetta, but it’s only to be expected. I leave them to their special hell of haunting the art-houses, where for every quirky winner that hits the bingo board, there are 75 nerf-movies containing any combination of no structure, no intelligible characters or dialogue, no momentum, no clue, no point and no viable way to suing for two hours of your life back.

I’m not going to go further into describing or analysing the content of V For Vendetta, because there’s enough in it that we’ll be here all year, because the movie does a better and more entertaining job than I could anyway, and besides that’s what human people are issued two eyes, two ears and a brain for. If you haven’t got around to seeing V For Vendetta, I think you should give it a burl, and I don’t want to spoil it for you.

I will say that in part it’s an essay – in Tarzan’s Grip strength fictional form admittedly, but still an essay – on the fineness of the line between an authoritative government and an authoritarian one, and on the value of anarchy and civil disobedience to the continuation of a genuinely civilised society. That should give you enough of an idea that this isn’t the usual megaplex hoedown featuring [insert names of any two currently bankable lead actors, one of each toilet-door preference] plus Malcolm McDowell (or latest equivalent) as the villain, and a number of strategically deployed explosions, with a dough-lump of a ballad whining over the closing credits.

What I will say is that it looks great, and the acting work is almost universally as solid as a cement car-park. When I say “almost”, Natalie Portman is extremely appealing as the hero’s unwilling sidekick, but also conveys something of an air of the extremely plucky and mustard-keen, if nervous, new employee joining a crack telemarketing group, when what we’re apparently meant to see in her is some iron-willed young harbinger of a future generation. It’s not a fatal flaw when surrounded by cast-iron performances, and she’s really actressing away nineteen to the dozen with grim determination and everything, but if you watch it a couple of times, you might get the stray unworthy thought that they could have cast that part a little better.

Incidentally, that’s no mere reflection on her famous trick accent in this picture, which covers more geography than Phineas Fogg and the Harlem Globetrotters combined and seems to wind up lodged in a peculiar and blurry Bermuda Triangle bounded by the Penrith Panthers, West Ham United, and Queen Elizabeth II. Not since Robert Downey Jr’s history-making collection of variations on an Australian accent (or was it South African?) in the movie Natural Born Killers has one human voice earned so many frequent flyer miles in the one performance.

Anyway, John Hurt is off the phone and in the studio pounding out homers as the British leader-demagogue, Stephen Fry submits a dramatic performance of such gentle dignity that you’ll forget what a foppish flatulent flibbertigibbet he usually comes off as, and I could pretty much festoon the remainder of the entire cast with similar decorative bunting and plastic mistletoe - and Stephen Rea as the conscience-haunted cop who suspects the country might have just run off the rails a little is responsible for carrying large chunks of the movie - but we want to leave some internet left over for everybody else.

One point of amazement has to be made though. Both the scriptwriters (the Wachowski brothers) and the nominal though facially obscured star (Hugo Weaving) were both involved with one of life’s most oppressive bathroom chores masquerading as another superhero movie, The Mattress – err, that is The Matrix, sorry, easy mistake – and everything they (Wachowski Boys) sci-fu’d and digitally doodled in place of story content and (Hugo Boy) mouth-breathed in lieu of acting in that one, they ignored and get right in this one.

For starters, you can’t see Hugo’s face or hairline this time and he’s not wearing a suit, so he doesn’t look like a gay accountant’s idea of the world’s hunkiest superhero. Secondly, he’s incredible in this, effectively reduced (although it doesn’t feel like a reduction) to subtle pantomime inside the costume, combined with what I presume must be pinpoint voice-over work on the soundtrack.

(My guess is that everything he said with the mask on in real life came out something like,“Musafeffer, hoobada hoobiddy nifnofnarf viss a rhubarb sandwich.”)

With a character that’s (by design) not especially easy to integrate with the fictional setting, and not at all easy to bring to even suspense-of-disbelief-able life, not for one second of running time did I brain-twitch for even a moment that anyone else could have done a better job; in fact I was too busy buying the character, which I guess is what this acting racket is all about, give or take a pay-cheque.

With the Wachowski Kidz it’s initially probably even easier to pinpoint the reason for improvement – source material. V For Vendetta began life as a novella in comics form, written by English writer Alan Moore and drawn in stark black and white by David Lloyd. As much of an oddity as it is in a movie context – and in terms of its patently estranged relationship to its mainstream contemporaries it compares to such historical screwball pitches as Harvey and Nightmare Alley – it was pretty much a complete bombshell in narrative comics back in the 80s when it came out, and remains one of the greatest, most remarkable smallgoods in the storytelling deli section of that medium. (Later reprinted by DC Comics in the States in a colourised version albeit with participation from the original artist.)

However, Alan Moore’s vision in the original version was specifically inspired by and drawn from Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. That was undeniably an essential part of its genesis – it informed every aspect of the muted heroics and fatalistic story-line.

The Flying Wachowskis were faced with a dilemma there, and given where they were trying to head – to mainstream screens and your friendly neighbourhood DVD store – it probably wasn’t that much of a dilemma at the end of the day. If you weren’t English, or maybe Australian, or at least into the original wave of English punk rock, due to being detained elsewhere in the world or Mummy’s tummy, or as a mere Saturday night post-football glint in Pop’s eye at the time, there was a decent chance you didn’t know that much about Thatcher’s Britain.

Also, in that inconvenient way that it does, a lot of that history stuff had happened between the 80s and 2006, and the Wachowskis or the producer, or the studio accountant’s idiot son-in-law, or somebody, clearly felt this was still a story of relevance outside Baroness Dame Big-Chief-Rain-In-The-Face Thatcher’s era of power and prominence (and oppression and depression) and that it was flexible enough to incorporate more contemporary events, and indeed that it should do so. Indeed.

That they were right conceptually is not such a big deal. The essence of the story, not to mention a lot of what Moore had to say in the original comic, is timeless and perennially relevant, even if it was born as a specific reaction to Thatcher-ite times and government.

What is a big deal is that, in stark contrast to every recognisable trend in Hollywood history, they respected and maintained the essence of the original work, (and David Lloyd’s component of that gets that treatment too – you could make a case that his artwork for the comic is effectively the movie’s storyboards), while doing a strikingly cunning and clever job of incorporating later and more contemporary political references. It’s such a contrast to the sketchy, way-hey-hey over-stretched plop, thud and blunder of The Matrix story and screenplay that you wonder whether there are actually four Wachowski Brothers who all wear identical masks, and the Matrix ones secretly tagged in Wachowskis III and IV to write this one.

A curious, and to me inexplicable, consequence of this is that only David Lloyd is credited as creator of the original “graphic novel” (they mean comics, kids) in the movie credits, not to mention all promotional and marketing graphics, DVD boxes, souvenir lunch-pails, commemorative golf balls etc.

Clearly Alan Moore insisted on his name being left out of the credits. Having read and being wowed (in a severely depressive sense of the psychological term ‘wowed’) by the original comic and having re-read it many times over in both original English and reprinted US editions, and having seen the movie twice now and being impressed all to five flavours of heck by it on both occasions, I can’t for the life of me think of why he would have got his nose out of joint.

If he had his heart set on writing the movie version, on an “It’s MY baby” basis, well at least that would stumble across the loose power cord of comprehensibility. Otherwise, to me, this is one of the few documented cases in cinema history when a writer of source material took his name off the credits in a snit, in direct response to the movie guys patently taking gall-stone-level pains to truly represent the essence, the underlying concepts and the vast majority of the particulars of the original work in movie form. Basically, I suspect Alan might need a 50 foot apiary to hold the bee in his bonnet, is what I’m telling you.

(It’s so faithful to the tone of Moore’s work that the one time it tries to be flat-out funny, it isn’t really at all, which is a characteristic and reliable minor foible of Al-baby’s best comics work. Passing mordant observations provoking a satisfyingly sour grin he can do. Bitter black humour not a million miles away from a Sopranos approach he can do. Flat-out funny – almost never.)

This is as good a superhero movie as has ever been adapted from a comics source, not that either the superhero element or the comics source are especially recognisable for large portions of the running time. V For Vendetta is also – really, I ain’t fooling – one of the most politically provocative mainstream movies you’ll probably ever see, of any era. Also as the great collective social commentator Cold Chisel once observed: “It’s entertainment baby – it explodes.”

Another collective philosopher of another era of trouser fashion, Jethro Tull, once mused in the vicinity of an extended flute solo and concept-saturated album packaging: “I may make you feel/But I can’t make you think.” That’s arguably still one of the more honest, cogent and accurate observations about the rickety brainline between artist and audience-member, but for old Unc Leapster’s money, V For Vendetta comes pretty close to breaking this traditional deadlock.

Unlike 98.9% of moviedom’s popcorn chunderers, you’ll need to approach this with a half-open mind and a warmed-up brain – as opposed to the normal formula of a half-open fly and leaving your brain on the dashboard with the parking stub – but for anyone not utterly horrified by that prospect, see the darn thing, already. It’s not perfect, it won’t be as big a deal to all tastes, and I’m not saying the odd moment doesn’t ring false, and the odd other moment doesn’t ring dumb, but that’s odd moments in that rarest of all modern day motion picture commodities – a two-hour-plus picture that actually deserves the running time. This slice of heroic eccentricity is at very least worth a scan, and tipping my Sherlock Holmes investigative hat at a rakish angle and dropping it into the ashtray, I suspect it’s worth a fair bit more than that.

(10 out of 11, on the industry standard MPHOAH scale)