(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.

Just read Dr. Master’s blog about La Nina:

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html
Don’t hate me because I’m excited about the upcoming hurricane season. It’s almost like the feeling of being excited about a favorite sports team’s upcoming season when big things are expected. You know, “they signed a few free agents, they got everyone back healthy, they had a very good previous season, so this coming season should be a whopper.” That’s what I feel like. Except with hurricane season its, “La Nina is going to reduce the amount of wind shear in the Atlantic, surface water temperatures are up, Global Warming is a real wild card.” Yeah, all the trends are pointing to some serious chop in the Atlantic and Gulf this year. I got my favorite sites bookmarked and I’m ready to watch it all unfold.

You know, maybe you should hate me after all. Either way, I can’t wait.

This isn’t so much of a movie review as a warning not to see this movie. I could go on and on about how bad it was, and oh my god it was frakking bad. But the best way to put this is that at the end of the movie the audience applauded - myself included. We applauded that it was over. It was that bad. I sat on the railing and listened to what people were saying as they walked out. They said things like: “Oh my god that was horrible.”, “That was the worse movie I’ve ever seen.”, “I didn’t know a movie could be that bad.” People were really saying things like that.

So please don’t see this movie and tell you friends not to see it. The only circumstance I could possibly think of for recommending that you see this movie is if you have a “belly button fetish”. In that case you might, just might, find it worth watching.

If you don’t believe me then visit RottenTomatoes.com. It get’s a 4%.