The first-anywhere big-media blowjob for Larry and Andy Wachowski’s V for Vendetta (Warner Bros., 3.17) is in the current February issue of Vanity Fair, and has been written by renowned media/political columnist Michael Wolff, of all people. This London-based political tinderbox of an action film will be screening before long, and I guess it’s about time to dive in. I’m guessing Warner Bros. is feeling fairly nervous about it, which, in my book, makes this grimy-and-desexualized-Natalie Portman-with-a-tennis-ball- haircut flick seem preemptively cool. Wolff, who’s seen it, says the film’s “punch line” is that “some of the world’s most famous towers are blown up — by the good guys.” Talk about running counter to mainstream post-9/11 sentiments, or about a film that seems destined, if not determined, to out-do Fight Club in terms of setting off tremors. I’m not saying this will happen, but if there’s an incendiary political-alarm potential in this film (and I do say “if”), who will be the first journo or essayist to launch an Anita Busch-like “first strike”? V for Vendetta is a big-metaphor flick with some kind of impassioned portrait of violent revolution as a brave and heroic thing. The passage that got me is when Wolff invokes and compares it to the gunfire-from-the-rooftops finale of Lindsay Anderson’s If… — the greatest mythological 1960s revolt movie ever made. However good or intriguing or deliberately alarming V for Vendetta turns out to be, I’m presuming right now that all kinds of political horseshit will be part of the process leading to decisions by Warner Bros. publicity about who in the media gets to see it first (or at least early)…just wait. (Yes, yes…I’m aware that James McTeigue is the credited director and I’m sure he’s a consummate pro and knows how to say “cut” and “once more, please” and all that, but we all know he was basically hired to be a flunkie stand-in for the Wachowskis.)

Defamer‘s Mark Lisanti is a good wordsmith to start with but… fuck it, I just like this one in particular: “There’s going to be an Ocean’s 13, and you know what that means: turn the incestuous-rich-and-famous-movie-star-friends-circle-jerk-o-meter up a notch!” If producer Jerry Weintraub wants to really deliver a total debasement of this once semi-respectable pseudo-heist franchise, don’t get Soderbergh to direct it…get Roger Kumble, Brett Rattner…someone guaranteed to slap-dash it and blue-collar it up.

The filmmaker interview for tonight’s “Elsewhere Live” is with Why We Fight director Eugene Jarecki, and even if I do say so myself I think it’s the best discussion I’ve ever done since the program began. I kept my questions simple and kept my irritating “uhm-hmm” sounds to a minimum and just let the guest go to town. And Jarecki is brilliant, and so is his film, which I’ve just seen for a second time. Why We Fight will have its New York and L.A. debut on 1.20 and then spread out from there.

In the wake of Larry Miller’s shutdown of Brokeback Mountain at his Salt Lake City Jordan Common plex on Friday, the Salt Lake Tribune ran a solid and obviously timely piece the very next day about why men who worship and cherish the rugged-cowboy tradition find the film so threatening. Written by Leonard Pitts, it’s simply called “Why ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is so frightening”…and here’s an excerpt: “[The lovers in] Brokeback Mountain…are not cute gays, funny gays, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy gays. These are ‘cowboys’, and there is no figure in American lore more iconically male. Think Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, the Marlboro Man. The cowboy is our very embodiment of male virtues. In offering us cowboys who are gay, then, Brokeback Mountain commits heresy, but it is knowing heresy, matter-of-fact heresy. Nor is it the sex (what little there is) that makes it heretical. Rather, it’s the emotion, the fact that the movie dares you to deny these men their humanity. Or their love.”

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil has the behind-the-scenes, numerical breakdown about how Capote won the National Society of Critics Best Picture award. It went down complicated, but David Cron- enberg’s A History of Violence got the most initial votes for the first three or four (or was it five?) ballots, but on the sixth ballot the 57 members — 26 attending, the rest voting by proxy — finally gave it to Capote over Violence by a one-vote margin. The 5 and 1/2 hour meeting happened at Sardi’s restaurant in New York City. Congrats to Miller and the team for the Capote win, and especially to Philip Seymour Hoffman for his first-ballot Best Actor triumph.