EVIL! *><*

Election Day has come and passed, Lieberman won, Bush is still in office, whupdeedo, but what do we do about kids as young as our seniors who are putting their lives on the line to “police” a country that clearly wants us out? Sure I agree that now that the Democrats almost officially control the House of Representatives and The Senate we have the potential to change some things around here, but what worries me is ‘will we’? My mom is a teacher and one of her kids has a brother who died in Iraq. I was grading his geography paper (and it wasn’t turning out too well) and called my mother over to help decipher what hyroglyphs he had tried to print. She told me to; ‘go easy on him, he doesn’t have a brother anymore because he was killed in Iraq.’

Many of the stories troops tell in the blogs are about everyday life at their bases. But some also show how terrifying, confusing and chaotic battle can be. Among the most gripping stories told so far: Army Spc. Colby Buzzell’s Aug. 5, 2004, account in his blog My War of a battle in Mosul, Iraq, the day before. “I saw 2 guys creeping around this corner … (and) hiding behind a stack of truck tires,” he wrote. “I saw another guy come out of that corner with an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) in his hands. I freaked … I gathered my composure as fast as I could, put the cross hairs (of a gun) on them and engaged them. … I didn’t see anybody move from behind those tires after that.”

It kills me to hear that we have people every day in a country we aren’t very familiar or friendly with and are dying trying to help a people that obviously don’t want any. Our soldiers are not trained to police politically unstable nations, so why are we still there? This sounds more like a job for the United Nations, that way perhaps they can help take our troops out. Not only that, but our taxes (as my father has complained about) are going up due to the insane amount of revenue spent on keeping and supplying our guys over there. We keep getting calls for my brother from the Marines, saying they need him to enroll, but both my mom and my dad agree we’d rather move to Canada before let him join to be killed in a foreign country! We need to bring our brothers and sisters home!

Even though I knew V was about to get what was comin to him, having seen the movie, I still cried while reading the book. :*( . I thought the jail scene was a bit harsh and was a bit of an odd way of saying “I love you” but she did say she wanted to get over her fear of death. The fighting scene was incredible too! I guess seeing the movie first wasn’t all that regretable, because the fighting was a lot easier to picture. I know first hand that describing a brawl between characters is a feat in itself if you make the reader truly understand what’s going on. It’s even more amazing when they can picture it in their heads as it happens. Contrasting a scene from a movie and a few paragraphs in a book for one quick second; while a scene can happen in a matter of seconds or even minutes, reading all that onto a page can make things seem to happen in slow motion. When I read about a fight, I wait untill I can imagine each “frame” if you will and then when I’m done put it all together. When he came back to Evey I thought he was actually going to make it, but then as he proclaimed his love for her I knew he was a goner. The most satisfying part was the downfall of the Chancellor by far, because V finally got what he wanted to do done. He saved Britain (and in the larger picture, the world) from the potentially problematic dictatorship. Fantastic Book overall!!

When I saw the movie, I knew it was going to be good. I laughed, I gasped and I cried. There were some things that I didn’t understand when I watched them on a screen that I suddenly understood in the book. So far, I’ve read about half the book and I believe I’m at the part where Evey hears about V’s past. I never got the whole flashback in the movie, but now I understand. V was taken to some sort of a concentration camp type of a place and was supposed to burn to death, but somehow survived. He then vowed to seek revenge not by killing all those in his way, but to keep the British Government from doing such a horrible thing to another innocent life. It’s also interesting how “V” is a roman numeral for five, and that number appeared on the file cabinet. Though I think V for Vendetta as a movie was one of the best I’ve ever seen, I still think I should have read the book first for the visual affects and to understand the story plot. Two thumbs up so far!!

The movie and the book are now so close together on the plot I could have written this on the movie! The funny part is that I am a huge movie critic when it comes out of a book.  This I would give an excellent review! It was so sad when Evey’s best friend V (posing for the real V I think) was arrested and she was hiding under her bed.  Hm, I thought, that seems familiar, then in the movie they show the flashback of her doing the exact same thing.  I didn’t figure Evey’s friend was the masked V because his hands weren’t burned and he wasn’t being played by Hugo Weaving.  (I know the actor because he also plays the virus dude who always says “Mr. Anderson” in the Matrix and Elrond in LotR).  Did you also know that the stunt coordinators and special effects staff were the same used for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the Matrix? The book would have been better to read as the comic book than as the novel but I’m not one for comic books.  Either way I love this book! I suggest it to anyone.