After two margaritas, I felt sufficiently braced for disappointment, but V怪客 turned out to be a four margarita movie--best enjoyed semiconscious. Perhaps it was unwise to have reread the comic last week; as the movie unspooled, I checked off each departure from the source material. None was an improvement. The choice to replace the Elizabethan hat that V wore in the comic with a Zorro hat was an early misstep--it served as a constant reminder of how much I'd have rather watched The Mask of Zorro again.

The emotional center of both comic and film comes while Evey is in prison. She discovers a letter written by another prisoner, one who had been arrested, tortured, and killed for being homosexual. The movie here was extremely faithful to the comic--camera angles and editing followed the original closely. And yet, what was a devastating 16 pages became on screen only mildly affecting.

The movie, which was rated R in the US, has been released on the mainland already as V字特工队 (Secret Service Team V). This is a bit of a surprise. The movie may be toothless, but it’s still about a totalitarian regime that, among other offenses, persecutes homosexuals and controls the media. The movie’s tagline is “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” The climax features some rather Tiananmen-esque imagery. I guess things are loosening up over there.

Or maybe not. Ang Lee may be "the pride of Chinese people all over the world, and he is the glory of Chinese cinematic talent," but Brokeback Mountain still isn’t suitable for public consumption: “The film is rated R for ‘restricted’ in the United States, which means that children under 17 are not admitted unless accompanied by parents or adult guardian. As the mainland has not adopted a movie rating system, the film could not possibly be approved by the film censors.” Oh.

But I'm not there; I'm here, on the permissive renegade province, where public decency is really going to hell. Outside the theater, I stopped to look at a poster for something called Date Movie. A condom has been worked into its Chinese title. Is this a first?