V for Vendetta
A morsel of cinematic candy lacking only a less artificial setting. The overt commercialisation of an “Anarchos Productions Ltd” is also ironic, the system can assimilate anything, neo-liberalism is really the Borg of political ideologies.
It should really be moved to the US, but I’m guessing pre-Trump, US fascism was still literally unthinkable. The Plot Against America is much more uplifting than 1984, you cannot out-bleak the British.
To quote Alan Moore, the comic book had been “specifically about things like fascism and anarchy. The words ‘fascism’ and ‘anarchy’ occur nowhere in the film. It’s been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country”. Fitting that a robber cites “Anarchy in the UK”, the Sex Pistols were also an example of neo-liberalism assimilating his own criticism.
Because of that, it’s also an unintended period piece. The Bush references are almost overt: prisoners in orange scrubs being tortured like Abu Grahib. Since this was pre-Covid, when a million Americans died, 100k killed in a false flag attack on civilians as pretext for starting a dictatorship was supposed to be shocking.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.