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England, Gunpowder Plot, Gunpowder Treason, Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes Night, home-grown terrorism, London, November 5th, Parliament, penny for the Guy?, protoIslamofascism, remember remember the Fifth of November, Terrorism, this day in history, traitor, treachery, treason, true meanings of holidays, V For Vendetta
On which protoIslamofascist Guy Fawkes’ unsuccessful attempt to blow up Parliament is remembered through a holiday and a lackluster film.
Fawkes' Original Plan Was To Strike The Houses Of Parliament With "A Flyeing Contrapshun Of Some Varietee, Laden With Elyxirs Both Incendiaree And Caustic."
Promethean Times 
I enjoyed the movie version of “V For Vendetta” until I went back and read the graphic novel on which it was based, and realized what how much the filmmakers had compromised Alan Moore’s far more interesting work to tell a story that they wanted to tell (and that Moore didn’t).
Alan Moore is one of Smaktakula’s favorite writers, and after waiting two decades for this movie, he was left wanting.
We enjoyed From Hell, although the critics beat the hell out of it.
Don’t even get us started on Watchmen. Seriously.
I didn’t encounter Moore’s work until well into adulthood, so the Watchmen movie wasn’t a desecration on my childhood on par with, say, The Phantom Menace, but I was impressed at how the director got so many of the more minor details right, and so many of the major things wrong.
I was tempted to post a review about it, but a colleague did a much better job of it than I could have: http://yearofthebeard.blogspot.com/2009/03/worse-than-rockies-watchmen.html
We enjoyed the review. However, the film version of Watchmen doesn’t bear comparison with the Rockies, because unlike the plucky pests of the NL West, there’s no chance the film will finish a lackluster season by putting together an improbable string of victories propelling it inexorably toward a disappointing collapse at the hands of the Red Sox. Or maybe that’s just us.
All joking aside (because we take The Watchmen very seriously), our disappointment was on par with Lucas’ Jar-Jarian travesty. The film version of The Watchmen was beautiful, and seemed to capture Dave Gibbons’ artwork better than anything we expected. But the novel (and you’ll note the absence of the term graphic, which seems to rob the work somehow) is so complex and multifaceted that it would be very difficult to present in the limited time accorded by a film. Much of the beauty in Moore’s great work is in the myriad tiny discoveries afforded to the careful reader (Captain Metropolis & Hooded Justice’s homosexuality, for example, or the many, many smiley face motifs hidden throughout the book–just to name two). The movie just shows you these things (the Kennedy assassination is one of those–I think it was in the movie; in the book it’s merely hinted at in a joke the Comedian makes, and in an advertisement from the time which is not in the book, but showed the Comedian in his full gear leaning out a window with a rifle ala Oswald).
Also, I thought the character of Adrian Veidt was terribly lacking. He seemed like a creepy holier-than-thou villain from the start of the movie. And didn’t he tool around in his costume for the whole movie, or is that just my memory? The character in the book was truly likeable, truly–in his own way, good. He instituted world peace–and he only had to kill half of New York to do it.