But Matthew, it's based on a comic book.

Comic books are silly!

mike

When do conservatives ever criticize their own?  Joel Silver has been

out in public pumping Bush for sometime now and he's one of the

main producers of the film: 

http://www.tpmcafe.com/user/reset/12162/1142342513/148a7cb10ea1fd55bfea659e476df7b3

It's the same reason you never hear them criticize Bruce Willis or

Arnold for making violent films. 

Matt,

 Accept my apologies.  I re-read your post and realized you were amazed the Right hasn't reacted adversely yet.  Give them a chance. 

You obviously haven't yet seen Front Page Rag's review. It'd be hilarious if it weren't, you know, serious.

Maybe people just don't get it. Roger Ebert (not a right-winger) said that the film was an allegory for something, but he couldn't figure out what that something is.

Oh man. That Front Page review both makes me way more excited and provides me cover: I can pretend I'm lining up the night before it opens as a matter of political conviction rather than dorkiness.

I think there will be less right wing attack because this is likely to be a widely popular movie.  It is your basic pop-corn action flick that draws mega-audiences across the country.  It is much easier to attack what are essentially art films with niche audiences (albeit farily large niches in some cases but still niches) which is really what Syriana, Crash, Brokeback, Good Night, and Munich were.

It is the same reason that someone like the Dixie Chicks is fair game while Bruce Springsteen can say the same stuff with little backlash.  Bullies generally pick on weaker targets, they shy away from fair fights:-)  Lots of red-state voters love Bruce, no right-wing hack demogue is gonna risk pissing off a bunch of his fans. 

Which now that I think of it shows how stupid O'Reilly is, what is he thinking picking fights with Clooney?  It is one thing to attack Jane Fonda, Barbra and Alec Baldwin, but I bet the bulk of his fans love Ocean's Eleven and so on.

Actually, what Moore has said about writing the comic was though he's a bit to the left, it was based on a premise of the outcome of a labour victory. Incidently, Moore is totally PO'd over how the film turned out and has disassociated himself from it.

I neither know nor care on what the right wing would think of the film, what I do know is that dystopian tales such as this aren't warnings of right wing extremism exclusively,they also warn against left wing extremism as well.

Spoken like a good Brit/Frenchman circa 1938.

But at least I am conducting myself like an adult.

Why no attacks from the right? I'll offer some ideas, and you can decide. First, it's early. Matt is playing the Washington insider game again, a bit like Maureen Dowd, I'm afraid, forgetting that the rest of us hadn't a clue what he's talking about. I first heard of the movie from his post, and I read more about it only yesterday in the Voice. And I'm an allegedly cool New Yorker.

Second, it doesn't exactly have the establishment or the left lined up behind it, at least yet. Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck were critical successes and Oscar contenders. We don't know if this will be, but I already have my doubts. J. Hoberman called it "tasteless," and his full article made me pretty sure he thought it simply inane, although his capsule under "Choices" is quite favorable. (And this is from a rather liberal publication.) I've a feeling this is going to be another film like The Matrix, with a vociferous core of fans who think it represents reality while the majority scratch their heads. As someone noted, it is after all from a comic book (well, ok, graphic novel, but spare me).

Third, its premise is that the terrorist is a dark, anonymous figure, while the state is a dystopian fantasy. Perhaps the right will decide that the hero is too scary to give us lefties a comforting role model, and perhaps they won't want to appear to be defending the equivalence between the Bush administration and a sci-fi totalitarian nightmare. Besides, the film makers admire Negri, and I loved his book on globalism myself, but he got his act together while America was under Clinton. 

So for all three reasons, I think we're learning more about Matt's tastes in movies than about cultural politics, but we'll see!  And aren't I nice? Not once did I call Matrix fans overgrown adolescent males.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

"first heard of the movie from his post, and I read more about it only yesterday in the Voice. And I'm an allegedly cool New Yorker."

What makes you think living in New York makes you "cool"? Most people in the country would imagine it makes you an idiot, given New York's and New Yorkers' reputations.

Be that as it may, however, the really COOL people have known about this film, the previous graphic novels and Alan Moore, the author, for the last twenty years.

Moore actually hates the film (as he did previous cinematic conversions of his works, such as "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and "From Hell".) In fact, he's had his name removed from the credits. One of his primary complants is that Joel Silver appears to have watered down the hero from an anarchist into a - horrors! -  liberal! Silver also watered down the fascist state into more of a, well, George Bush administration.

An interview with Moore can be found here:

http://www.comicon.com/thebeat/2006/03/a_for_alan_pt_1_the_alan_moore.html#more 

Money quote:

"So I decided to use this to political effect by coming up with a projected Fascist state in the near future and setting an anarchist against that. As far I'm concerned, the two poles of politics were not Left Wing or Right Wing. In fact they're just two ways of ordering an industrial society and we're fast moving beyond the industrial societies of the 19th and 20th centuries. It seemed to me the two more absolute extremes were anarchy and fascism. This was one of the things I objected to in the recent film, where it seems to be, from the script that I read, sort of recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism. There wasn't a mention of anarchy as far as I could see. The fascism had been completely defanged. I mean, I think that any references to racial purity had been excised, whereas actually, fascists are quite big on racial purity.

The Beat: Yeah, it does seem to be a common element.

Moore: It does seem to rather be a badge they wear. Whereas, what I was trying to do was take these two extremes of the human political spectrum and set them against each other in a kind of little moral drama, just to see what works and what happened. I tried to be as fair about it as possible. I mean, yes, politically I'm an anarchist; at the same time I didn't want to stick to just moral blacks and whites. I wanted a number of the fascists I portrayed to be real rounded characters. They've got reasons for what they do. They're not necessarily cartoon Nazis. Some of them believe in what they do, some don't believe in it but are doing it any way for practical reasons. As for the central character of the anarchist, V himself, he is for the first two or three episodes cheerfully going around murdering people, and the audience is loving it. They are really keyed into this traditional drama of a romantic anarchist who is going around murdering all the Nazi bad guys.

At which point I decided that that wasn't what I wanted to say. I actually don't think it's right to kill people. So I made it very, very morally ambiguous. And the central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think, and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history. I was very pleased with how it came together. And it was a book that was very, very close to my heart."

Richard Steven Hack

www.computerproblemssolvedcheap.com 

Well, you obviously don't watch TV. I guess that's cool. But how did you avoid seeing the posters all over New York?

Actually people move to California to get away from the East...:-)

Anyway, I agree that most people wouldn't understand the anarchism. In fact, I suspect that's why the Repubs aren't so upset - if there HAD been anarchism in the movie, they would have flipped. As it is, they can just complain that "liberals are terrorists" - which they do, anyway.

Richard Steven Hack

www.computerproblemssolvedcheap.com