(No spoilers)

My first impressions of V is for Vendetta are very good. The movie is 2 hours and 12 minutes long and I never felt that it was dragging on. Pretty captivating from beginning to end, I thought. As usual I sat on the railing at the theater and listened to the people comment on the way out. Everyone I heard sounded favorable. There was even a short applause at the end of the movie. My impression is that the applause was meant to show favor for the message of the film rather than the quality of the story. I’m here in Seattle and I’m going to guess that the film isn’t as likely to get an applause in, shall we say, more conservative areas of the country. I could be wrong but that’s my impression.

I wouldn’t attempt to write anything deep and meaningful about the movie at this point. I’d like to see it a few more times when it comes out on DVD and this is for sure something that I would want to own. As a production of the Wachowski brothers there are a lot of subtleties in there and the dialog moves along too fast to really keep up with in a theater on opening night.

Natalie Portman was excellent. Her character - Evey - went through a huge transformation during the film. While she didn’t pull it off as well as Sigourney Weaver in Alien or Linda Hamilton between T1 and T2 I think it’s more because she is just too damn pretty to portray the steely hard woman thing.

Hugo Weaving, wow. Can there be a harder role to play than a man behind a mask for an entire film. He was brilliant, mask and all.

For those of you who thought that the fight scenes in the Matrix trilogy were too long - that would be nearly everyone but me - you’ll be happy to know that there isn’t any of that in this film. In fact there are only a few fight scenes and they go by pretty fast.

I’d give the movie an A- at this point. Perhaps after a few more viewings it will creep up to an A or A+.

Interesting personal note: In V there is a lot made about there being no such thing as coincidence. Everything happens for a reason or as part of a plan. So, this morning - the day after seeing V - I had the TV on in the background as I went through my morning routine. The two movies that came on TNT were: The Mask and Back to the Future. The coencidenitification (my word) of The Mask is obvious. But what is coencidental about BTTF? Want to guess what day Marty lands in the past? Yep, you guessed it: Remember, remember, the 5th of November. That’s just a little freaky. I did a little searching and couldn’t come up with why the chose that date in BTTF. Dates like that in movies are rarely random. I’d like to know why they chose it.