dial v for vendetta

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I just finished watching the movie, having purchased it from Costco today. I think I'd have found it pretty satisfactory if I hadn't read the comics a score of times first. I had to keep divorcing my expectations from the book, but I kept going back to it, and finding it a little less sharp, a little less vivid. Ultimately, the screenwriters decided to substitute what they felt was an equivalent story, based perhaps on something else they saw or read.

Still, an impressive amount of the script came through. Like other Alan Moore graphic novels, I think it would have been better made as a miniseries. Failing that, I still think it could have been made at about the length they made it without going to a different story. Watching along, seeing what had been left out, it seems to me that they could have just kept leaving things out all the way to the end and still ended up in the same place. The substitute story is interesting in its own way, I think, and I don't dislike it.

If I have any beef with it, it's the "making of" that accompanies it. Here we are treated to all sorts of silly junk. They betray some ignorance of the comics field when they let the creators rhapsodize over how cinematic the comic is, as if this was an invention of the comic -- as if comics and movies haven't been feeding off of each other since Will Eisner decided to make his living from sequential art. I almost expected the featurette to be called "Biff! Bam! Pow! Comics Not Just For Children Any More!"

I hope I'm past the worst of it. I'm going to try and watch the rest of the supplementary material. Wish me luck, and I'll see you all right here. Same Bat-Time! Same Bat-Channel!
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farthing

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I've been turning the book over in my mind for about a week, ever since the feverish day and a half in which I read it. I was finally spurred to write by a review that declared the book to be an allegory, then faulted it for some failing in its allegorical nature. As Tolkien said, "I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author." It's not an allegory, as far as I can tell, though the complicity of government officials certainly makes it resonate with, shall we say, more recent events in our own timeline. One might as well say it's a very poor epic poem, because it doesn't rhyme and the lines are of unequal length, a strawman (or yarn person) only slightly less preposterous.

So, could I say something about the book now, please?

Farthing is an English manor-house mystery, set in the haunts of the powerful a few short years after the end of the second German War. It is 1949, and England has avoided a major conflict by coming to terms with Hitler in 1940. The Reich has the rest of Europe, and it's a bad time to be a Jew, even in England. We find out how bad it can be when compromise with evil has bought a sort of temporary respite for the fortunate few.

What of America? Will they ride to the rescue? Ask President Lindbergh.

The story alternates between first-person narration from the seemingly light-minded wife of the accused man, a Jew who has never been accepted by her lovely, lovely family (pretty ironic phrase, eh reader?) and a third-person view of the honest policeman with his own secrets to protect, who notes sadly that there is one law for rich and poor alike, which prevents all equally from stealing bread or sleeping under bridges.

Author Jo Walton's plotting and pacing kept me going all the way through, with increasing agitation as it neared the finish. The seesaw point of view of the chapters set up cliffhangers of various sorts. I recommend it to lovers of tales of detection in the classic British mode, as well as those interested in the paths history might take with the smallest nudge in a wrong direction. I'm pretty sure it's not an allegory, but it might make you think about where we're going.
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surfin' with ludwig and johannes

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Those wonderful guys and gals at WFMU's Beware of the Blog have come through for me again with another 60s album from that groovy Japanese band, The Bunnys. This time, Takeshi Terauchi and his hodads have given us eleven hot tracks of surf guitar versions of ...wait for it... well-known selections by the great masters of classical music.



Yes, you can thrill to Theme from Symphony No. 5 (Beethoven) & Theme from Swan Lake (Tchaikovsky)! In a Persian Market (Ketelbey)! Flight of the Bumblebee (Rimsky-Korsakov)! Sabre Dance (Khachaturian)! Theme from Unfinished Symphony (Schubert)! Hungarian Dance Number Five (Brahms)! Toreador Dance from Carmen (Bizet)! Blue Danube Waltz (Strauss)! One Fine Day from Madame Butterfly (Puccini)! and Fur Elise (Beethoven)!

This is the coolest surf recording I've found online since geckoman hipped me to the Tiki Tones wailing version of the theme from The Ghost and Mr. Chicken!

Frosty, man! Frosty!
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come fly with me

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Why not hop into the biplane and fly over Washington DC, or NYC, or Mars, or Disneyland? Other swell locations, too, using maps from Google Earth. And they call it Goggles, of course. You can crash your biplane right into the Enchanted Kingdom, if you're sufficiently un-American.

Thanks to this item at WFMU. Check out the 'disturbing ads' link, too (where the following image is from):



Thank god! At last, my own Martian Radio Hat!
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