"People should not be afraid of their governments...

...Governments should be afraid of their people."

It's been a good week for the movies. After not going to the actual theater in months, Hüsbando and I have seen two good ones in less than a week. Monday we saw "Inside Man," with Clive Owen, Denzel Washington, and Jodie Foster -- an extremely enjoyable, solid "caper" film with one of the smartest, unexpectedly funniest scripts in a while. Who knew Spike Lee could do action?

And now, we have just came back from a matinee for V for Vendetta. It rocked my world. Somewhat surprisingly, it also made me cry.

I cried not for the thinly fleshed-out love story between Evey, Natalie Portman's character, and V, played with panache by Hugo Weaving, but for us. For the United States. I cried because we need a revolution, too. Sure, V is based on a comic book, but a comic book written by the great Alan Moore during Thatcher's Britain. It's about a government that lies to its citizens and believes too much in its own power to set reality through TV mouthpieces and secret police. And contrary to the reviews, ranging from tepid to scathing, that I read before seeing it, the movie has heft. It was inspiring, at least to me. The reasonably crowded theater we saw it in gasped and sighed where appropriate, and clapped and cheered at the end.

That said, it was not without flaws. There were several corny bits that made you remember it came from a comic book. And the aforementioned tacked-on "love story" just felt wrong. Reading around the Web, I see other people were peevish that Evey is so passive, despite her much-touted radical roots. I can see all this, and yet...

Without Natalie Portman, who I will watch in anything -- having been mesmerized by her starting when she was a wee girl way back in The Professional -- the movie would probably have been doomed to be cheesy, but she manages to imbue her melodramatic scenes with realistic emotion and fear. And Hugo Weaving is pretty damn phenomenal in that creepy mask -- it's amazing to realize how much of acting is usually dependent on facial expressions, and how hard an actor has to work when he has none to fall back on.

So, sometimes low expectations can work in your favor. Hüsbando and I came out of the theater strangely moved. There was something about the end, the silent march of thousands, that brought tears to both our eyes.

Give me a mask and a cape and I'll storm the White House!