Friday, March 24, 2006

Vendetta

Ada masalah dengan V for Vendetta, masalah dengan penulis novel grafiknya Alan Moore, penulis yang mengilhami idea utama filem ini.

(Filem ini dilakonkan oleh seorang aktres manis, Natalie Portman si gadis Yahudi yang pernah berkata beliau tidak akan berlakon kecuali untuk filem yang serasi dengan nilai perjuangannya, nilainya juga political. Oh ya! Jangan takut klik di atas foto ini untuk mengenali Nat dengan lebih 'jelas', hehehe)

Moore mahu namanya digugurkan daripada kredit filem tersebut, dan enggan dikaitkan dengannya.

Di satu laman peminat Moore, ada satu petikan artikel yang diambil dari New York Times ('The Vendetta behind V for Vendetta', 12 Mac 2006, catatan Dave Itzkoff):

On consulting for the V for Vendetta film:

"I explained to [Larry Wachowski] that I'd had some bad experiences in Hollywood," Mr. Moore said. "I didn't want any input in it, didn't want to see it and didn't want to meet him to have coffee and talk about ideas for the film."

But at a press conference on March 4, 2005, to announce the start of production on the V for Vendetta film, the producer Joel Silver said Mr. Moore was "very excited about what Larry had to say and Larry sent the script, so we hope to see him sometime before we're in the U.K."

This, Mr. Moore said, "was a flat lie."

"Given that I'd already published statements saying I wasn't interested in the film, it actually made me look duplicitous," he said.

Through his editors at DC Comics (like Warner Brothers, a subsidiary of Time Warner), Mr. Moore insisted that the studio publicly retract Mr. Silver's remarks.

When no retraction was made, Mr. Moore once again quit his association with DC (and Wildstorm along with it), and demanded that his name be removed from the V for Vendetta film, as well as from any of his work that DC might reprint in the future.

The producers of V for Vendetta reluctantly agreed to strip Mr. Moore's name from the film's credits, a move that saddened Mr. Lloyd, who still endorses the film.

"Alan and I were like Laurel and Hardy when we worked on that," Mr. Lloyd said. "We clicked. I felt bad about not seeing a credit for that team preserved, but there you go."


Dan semalam, akhbar tersohor itu (yang memenangi lebih 90 Hadiah Pulitzer) menerbitkan satu artikel menarik 'Bring 'Em Home Now' Concert: Music's Power of Protest (New York Times, 23 Mac 2006, catatan Kelefa Sanneh).

> Bimbang artikel tersebut akan diarkibkan dan tidak sempat dibaca, saya akan lampirkan di bahagian ulasan catatan ini, di bawah!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Critic's Notebook
'Bring 'Em Home Now' Concert: Music's Power of Protest

By KELEFA SANNEH
Published: March 23, 2006

Do you enjoy music? Do you like music? In the film "V for Vendetta," those two rather ordinary questions are an incitement to revolutionary violence. The first comes near the beginning: the masked man named V, played by Hugo Weaving, has just met Evey Hammond, played by Natalie Portman, and this is evidently his idea of a pick-up line. "Do you enjoy music, Evey?," he asks, continuing, "I am a musician, of sorts." And soon Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" blasts out of London's loudspeakers, accompanied by an impressive rhythm section: an exploding building. This is protest music at its most spectacular — sound as action.

Luckily for the Hammerstein Ballroom, the protest music filling that building on Monday night wasn't quite so incendiary. Still, the performers did their best to blur the line between sound and action. The event was "Bring 'Em Home Now," a night of music dedicated to an antiwar demand that could be summed up in four words. (This is no small thing: every protest needs a clear objective.) The performers included Michael Stipe, Bright Eyes, Peaches, Fischerspooner, Rufus Wainwright and Steve Earle. And together, in sorrow and in anger, they insisted that the third anniversary of the Iraq war should be the last one.

A year and a half ago, some of these musicians were playing sober concerts for Senator John Kerry, trying to seem respectable, like regular folks. But at Monday's show, the musicians were supporting a message that few leading Democrats would endorse. The repeated demands for immediate withdrawal went further than Representative John Murtha's famous resolution. (Mr. Murtha has called for withdrawal "at the earliest practicable date," along with marines to be "deployed in the region.") As antiwar concerts go, this one was pretty radical.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the heavy hitters of the pro-Kerry movement, including Bruce Springsteen and Dave Matthews, were nowhere in sight. Instead, the crowd heard opulent ballads from Mr. Wainwright and raunchy, playful raps from Peaches, a white rapper from Canada. Mr. Stipe, the only true rock star onstage, didn't even sing any R.E.M. songs. This was a night of weird music for weird people. Did that mean the ideas were weird, too?

This tension between music and ideas also hovers over "V for Vendetta." V's lair is equipped with an 872-song jukebox, although we hear only three songs from it: Julie London's version of Arthur Hamilton's "Cry Me a River," Cat Power's version of Lou Reed's "I Found a Reason," and "Bird Gurhl," an original by Antony and the Johnsons. V proudly explains that much of his stash comes from "the vaults of the Ministry of Objectionable Material." If these seemingly innocuous songs are illegal, then listening to them is an act of civil disobedience. Isn't that the fantasy of politically minded pop fans everywhere? Taking a stand is as easy as dialing up a record on the jukebox.

For all his talk about inspiring the masses, V — like so many real-life revolutionaries — doesn't really seem to enjoy hanging out with them. In fact, he seems happiest in his gilded cave, watching the 1934 film version of "The Count of Monte Cristo"; it's hard to imagine him feeling the same joy in liberated London. He wants people to share his ideas, but he doesn't want to be normal.

The revolutionary V is also a small-c conservative. His hideout is a repository of 20th-century culture; he hoards old books and movies and records. At one point, he impresses Evey with some unusually delicious toast: real butter has apparently been banned, but it turns out V has been conserving that, too.

It's easy to laugh at the revolutionary aesthete V, hamming it up in his rococo bunker. But there's also something appealing about the film's insinuative vision of protest music: the idea that a rabble-rousing song can sound like "Bird Gurhl" instead of, say, "Street Fighting Man." (Although that Rolling Stones song does play, rather tiresomely, over the closing credits.)

Similarly, the best parts of Monday night's concert were also the hammiest. The members of the performance-oriented neodisco act Fischerspooner did their best to challenge tired old ideas about what protest music is supposed to sound and look like. As the costumed dancers pranced, the glittery frontman, Casey Spooner, declared, "This war is ridiculous!" And while he may not be an expert on war, he's certainly an expert on ridiculous. There's no reason why folk-rock has to be the dominant form of antiwar music.

Still, protest music is easy to hate, by definition: what song could possibly satisfy an activist? In December, The New Republic published a curious essay about how Conor Oberst, from Bright Eyes, failed to live up to the protest-music legacy of Bob Dylan. The writer, Jason Zengerle, said that Mr. Oberst's voice was "ill-suited for stopping a war." (That's true, in one sense: Mr. Oberst's best political songs are full of ambivalence and confusion, not unshakable defiance.) And he lamented that even if President Bush had heard one of Mr. Oberst's songs, he "would have paid the singer absolutely no mind." In response, Mr. Oberst sang one of Monday's songs "with apologies" to the magazine.

No doubt the evil High Chancellor in "V for Vendetta" wouldn't have paid much mind to Antony and the Johnsons, either; Antony's lovely, fluttery voice seems scarcely up to the task of taking down a hem, let alone a regime. But V needed his music just as badly as he needed his butter and his old movies. All those things made his bunker feel more like home; they helped bind his grand ideas to his day-to-day life.

Like wars themselves, antiwar movements require not just the firmly committed and the impeccably well-informed. They require some of the rest of us, too: people motivated by a vague sense of duty or an old grudge or even peer pressure; people who want to find out precisely what their country can do for them; people whose imaginations can be sparked by a flashy advertisement or a catchy song or a contraband stick of butter.

There's a difference between songs and butter but it has nothing to do with the mythical power of songs, or with some sentimental old idea that music can change the world. The difference between songs and butter is that songs are sneakier. Songs affix themselves to events, until they come to seem not just inextricable from what's going on but responsible for it, too. All these years later, if people think that the Vietnam War really did end because of Mr. Dylan's music — well, how can anyone prove or disprove that?

This is the kind of sneaky musical power celebrated in "V for Vendetta." As the film hurtles toward its inevitable conclusion, that question returns, only this time we know exactly what it means: "Do you like music?" Soon the familiar strains of Tchaikovsky fill the theater, and for a few moments, protest music once again takes a spectacular physical form. You can't tell if the soundtrack is accompanying the script, or if it's the other way around.

Clarissa Lee said...

I buat satu coretan personal tentang v for vendetta dan munich kat
http://www.archiveoflearning.net/clarissa/2006/04/v-for-vendetta-and-munich-tales-of-two.html

Cheers!