Great Movies
From: Adam Hoover, Philadelphia, PA
I just wanted to remark on a trend that I have noticed about "V for Vendetta." I was reading reviews on Yahoo! of the movie after I had already seen it to see what other people thought. I thought that it was a good movie and I thought that it raised some good questions about true patriotism vs. blind allegiance. I know the 20+ year history/origins of this movie and know that it was not put out to attack President Bush. The trend that I wanted to remark upon was that while some of the positive reviews took a political slant to them and made Bush comments, every single one of the negative reviews said that the movie was a liberal's movie come true and was un-American.
Usually, the negative reviews have the common "this sucked," "it was too slow," etc. complaints. The really interesting thing is that none of the negative reviews had this. Practically every single review criticizing this film said that it was un-American. One suggested that this movie did not support the troops in Iraq (a far jump of logic as far as I'm concerned). Another review said that it was un-American to support a terrorist that wanted to fight against his own government.
I found this last argument to be very curious because I consider fighting against your own government to be very American as this is how our country began. I'm sure that Britain considered our forefathers in the colonies to be terrorists of some sort because they were opposing the ruling government and fighting back. I'm also curious to know if the people that saw the movie and criticized it for advocating fighting against the government would be content living under the rule of the government that was shown in the movie. I know that this movie was intended to make people think and that there were two violent extremes in the movie fighting for opposite beliefs, but I think that the really interesting observation that has emerged is how divided our country truly is. The fact that there are people who hate this movie solely because they are under the assumption that it is taking a crack at our President is truly fascinating. I did not feel that this movie had an anti-American theme to it. Do you think that people are being overly sensitive?
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
