A thread for people who have SEEN Fahrenheit 9/11 (do not read if you haven't seen it yet)

*raises hand*

(Kyle, didja get me a ticket???)

Because most of them are filled with jibbering morons calling each other fascists. And none of them have seen the film yet!

omg bush turns out to be a woman! I didn't see that coming. at least they hinted at it, like when all those males signed the partial birth abortion law, and then later some republicans said there were women there.

It's a sledge!

That said-

1)I haven't seen a theater room completely full like that since Episode II.

2) People in my area (dc suburbs) are more subdued and unemotional than most of the country, and it was still a more animated and emotive crowd than I've experienced before with movies.

3) It's the first movie that has ever made me cry.

http://www.efilmcritic.com/feature.php?feature=1150

Please pass it on.

What are the odds that the Academy doesn't give it an Oscar this year even though it's more acclaimed than BfC, because of the fiasco last year?

Which is bullshit anyway.

Of course it does. Lower/lower-middle (maybe drifting up to middle) class incomes working in traditional blue-collar occupations - manual or factory labor.

Is the right-wing response to all class and income issues to stick your head in the sand and repeat a "it don't exist!" mantra?

is this laundry-based class identifier only an american thing?

Moore (and almost no one on the anti-war side) defended Saddam. His problem was with the way the war was carried out, not with putting a bullet in Saddam's head.

You don't think Bush should've at least jumped out of his seat and put on his cape or something?

I liked Roger & Me and Bowling for Columbine better. I think mainly because the material didn't feel as exhausted. All the conspiracy theories were kind of washed out by Moore's bias, and that Bush = oil = Saudis isn't really earth shattering news. Most effective for/on me were the graphic shots of casualities, Iraqi civilians and American soldiers.

Some of the stranger parts were how Moore almost borders on coming across racist towards the Saudi's (although he does back his vitrol with some human rights complaints) and then in the montage mocking the Coalition of the Willing.

Ten bucks that if Bush had jumped out of his seat, Moore would've made a comment about him running off to plan an Iraq invasion.

-- cinniblount (littlejohnnyjewe...) (webmail), June 27th, 2004 1:22 PM. (James Blount) (later) (link)
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you know, they serve brewskis and slaw at the concession stand, ticket takers are wearing overalls, shit like that.

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is absolutely fantastic and was done is such a way that I think the general audience could see and appreciate it. There is one part that centers around the story of a patriotic woman from a military family. Her son dies in Bagdad. His last letter home says "I don't know what we are doing here. I hope at the next election they don't re-elect that fool." Soldiers are interviewed in Iraq and most are saying "What are we going here" when they aren't torturing their Iraqi prisoners or blowing up women and children The footage is very powerful. Dead babies, screaming grandmothers, pieces of young girls and teenage US soldiers gearing themselves up to kill with heavy metal music. They talk about the adrenaline of killing, and as the footage continues to later in the war, these young soldiers are tired, disillusioned, and don't know what the US is doing there. One army soldier whose duty it was to protect Halliburton truck drivers as they worked on the newly secured oil fields was visibly disgusted when he was interviewed at the scene. He pointed to the Halliburton employees and said "I am making two or three thousand dollars a month to guard these guys from Texas who are getting paid seven or eight thousand dollars a month to drive the same two and a half miles and work these oil wells".

Other very effective footage was the footage that should have been shown on the news but wasn't: the riot at the Bush inaugural procession; Bush's limo being pelted with eggs and thousands of people in the street; bodies of US soldiers coming home from the war in coffin; rows and rows of coffins (Bush forbade the media from showing these images). Images of the severely maimed, legless soldiers in a V.A. hospital even as Bush was trying to cut veteran's benefits by half. At the point we see that the media has also betrayed us, and CNN (and all the others) have been the Pravda, putting out all the news that the current administrationswants you to hear.

The film lays out the long history of ties between the Bushes and the bin Ladens, the connections between other White House figures and the companies that stood to benefit from the war in Iraq. Senators and Congresspeople are shown to be completely powerless from the time of Bushs' election fraud up to the Patriot Act being passed when the majority of Congress didn't even read it. To hear this from the mouths of members of Congress, and to see the dismissal of Congresspeople of color, on camera is powerful.
Moore's sense of humor is still there, but in this film, it takes a back seat to some hard-hitting factual reporting. Unfortunately there were a lot more shenanigans going on than Moore could cover in a film that seemed to be designed with the general public in mind. Perhaps we will be treated with a "Director's Cut" at some point to fill in the holes and sharpen the skewer.

I actually think this is best and most important movie of the year. It deserved the award in Cannes because it is well-made, and every American should be required to see it. If I had my way, it would be on an endless loop on Fox 24/7. Michael Moore has captured everything that I had been thinking since the day I saw the first footage, because I happened to be watching TV at the right (or wrong) time when the planes hit the towers.
I could feel the population of normal people outside, with their flag waving frenzy, using the deaths on 9/11 as a justification for silencing any questions about what had happened and why. I am many others talked among ourselves, because we knew our co-workers, friends and families had been completely drawn into the frenzy.

But I had learned my lesson in the Gulf War, when I *had* been drawn into the flag-waving "Support our Troops" camp, only to later learn that the Gulf War/Kuwait was about oil and ties to American business. Only to learn that the soldiers had been exposed to nerve-damaging substances; that they had bulldozed enemy soldiers into mass graves in the sand, buried alive; and that when they came home, they came home to denial of Veteran's benefits and cuts to existing ones. Perhaps I am the right age to see history repeating itself, because when I was in high school, I had also been drawn in to the hatred of Ayatollah Khomeini, and support of the US, which again the facts show was another case of the US creating monsters and destroying them, and like an oil-seeking Godzilla, wreaking havoc upon the civilian populations in their paths.

I followed this as it happened, using the BBC and the Guardian (UK) reports, comparing them the US reports. I watched Ari Fleisher make a mockery of press conferences on C-SPAN. I documented in my blog Yahoo News changing an article about Rumsfeld's statements about the war after it had been published, I had taken screen shots of both versions. I watched the news being manipulated and documented it, along with hundreds of people at Indymedia.org.

After a while I simply could not stand it anymore. I checked out. The neo-McCarthyism and erosion of civil rights was more than I could take, and the effectiveness of the brainwashing job on the American public was too great. I wrote an essay on Indymedia about it. I am sure I am on every list of "potential Americans" as I call the "potential terrorist" lists-- because I publicly dared to expect this country to uphold the values upon which it was founded. If the values upon which the USA were founded no longer exist, if the Constitution is toilet paper; if the Supreme Court elects Presidents, not the people; if the "Patriot" Act completely destroys our system of checks and balances on government power, and wipes out the Constitutional guarantees of civil liberties then WHAT IS LEFT TO DEFEND? The terror has come from the inside. Those who have dismantled this country are Republican businessmen, from the inside, and with razor precision.

My mom still calls and tells me about the latest terror threat. I am so disgusted at the dishonest, manipulative media terror campaign that I say "I don't care. Don't even tell me. It doesn't matter. What is it *this* week? Terrorists in my Cheerios?. I stopped watching the news because the news was little more than a Republican press release, In fact, I have not watched the news since October 2003. When I do catch it at a friend's house, it amazes me that as regards to terrorism, the same stories with different details are paraded forth to keep the ordinary people of this country in constant fear, and to keep those who see the farce quiet by having the ordinary people, the FBI, the CIA, and local authorities intimidate them using patriot rhetoric and the Orwellian-named Patriot Act.

I am so angry at what has been done to this country using 9/11 as a pretext; at the ties between the Bush's and bin Ladens, at the pattern of paying terrorists, arming them, and then invading their countries when they no longer serve US purposes, or have become monsters of our own creation, that I am ready to move to France. I have stopped watching the news and I am ready to leave this country because it is no longer a country that upholds the ideals upon which it was founded; because it is being run for the profit of the millionaires; because only only ONE member of Congress has a child in the war, and because ordinary people, poor people, working class people with no options are dying to support all of this.

On the other issue, the Partiot Act is what allowed the harassment to take place. Otherwise, the right to free speech (1st amendment to the Constition) would have proteced this man.

your level of education shows in your rebuttal.

btw Blount, have you SEEN the film? if not shut up.

both sons of democratic congressmen, fwiw. Also Ashcroft has a son in the military, on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.

My dad said something to the effect of "Yeah, well...The Bush's are oil people, what do you expect?" He's voting Bush in 2004 too. I was stunned into silence.

I should point out that I love both of my parents dearly. And I occasionally agree with my father politically. But, jesus christ.

I predict a Bush victory in 2004.

I'm glad Moore discussed the Patriot Act, at least. One of only two parts of the movie that really made me angry was the 'man on the street' interviews where those people were saying that they thought it was a 'good thing' - I literally wanted to shoot them.

The other part that made me white-knuckled was the Britney clip. I knew about this interview before I saw the movie, but watching her actually say it..."I just think we should support our president, and do what he says" or whatever the fuck it was she said. Gee, Brit, that's fine for you and all, but what about us, like, THINKING people?

And. Blount and others, it is absolutely true that people of color and the poor/working classes who have little options in life end up in combat positions. COMBAT, not in the technical definition, but in the definition that THEY ARE ON THE GROUND AND HAVE TO LOOK AT THE PEOPLE THEY KILL. They are at greater risk of being killed or maimed. In this "war" I would say sitting on an aircraft carrier is pretty safe.

I do not believe anyone said they were "ignorant", but you know what, when I saw the footage of the soldiers ON THE GROUND describing their Apocaplyse Now-type use of heavy metal for gearing up to kill targets which the SOLDIERS THEMSELVES said they weren't quite sure about--that they were just shooting and a lot of civilians were killed AND seeing the footage of them "playing" with the war prisoners DID made me think they were DUPED.

What exactly is the point of jumping to the hyperbolic position saying that I in my review (or Moore) think that the working classes/poor are ignorant? I do not think that was the point at all. I came from the bottom depths of American society so don't tell me I have a stereotype of the poor and working classes as ignorant. There wasn't one in the film either. But you know what, Americans are completely duped.

*You* are duped if you support this war.

Actually, ANY Senator had to sign in support - not just a Florida one. That was one of the most powerful scenes in the movie - I hadn't seen any of that footage before and it's as much of an indictment on the Democrats as it is the Republicans too.

By Roger Friedman

'Fahrenheit 9/11' Gets Standing Ovation

The crowd that gave Michael Moore's controversial "Fahrenheit 9/11" documentary a standing ovation last night at the Ziegfeld Theater premiere certainly didn't have to be encouraged to show their appreciation. From liberal radio host/writer Al Franken to actor/director Tim Robbins, Moore was in his element.

But once "F9/11" gets to audiences beyond screenings, it won't be dependent on celebrities for approbation. It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail.

As much as some might try to marginalize this film as a screed against President George Bush, "F9/11" — as we saw last night — is a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty  —  and at the same time a indictment of stupidity and avarice.

Readers of this column may recall that I had a lot of problems with Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," particularly where I thought he took gratuitous shots at helpless targets such as Charlton Heston. "Columbine" too easily succeeded by shooting fish in a barrel, as they used to say.

Not so with "F9/11," which instead relies on lots of film footage and actual interviews to make its case against the war in Iraq and tell the story of the intertwining histories of the Bush and bin Laden families.

First, I know you want to know who came to the Ziegfeld, so here is a partial list:

Besides Franken and Robbins, Al Sharpton, Mike Myers, Tony Bennett, Glenn Close, Gretchen Mol (newly married over the weekend to director Todd Williams), Lori Singer, Tony Kushner, "Angela's Ashes" author Frank McCourt, Jill Krementz and Kurt Vonnegut, Lauren Bacall (chatting up a fully refurbished Lauren Hutton), Richard Gere, John McEnroe and Patti Smythe, former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Carson Daly, NBC's Jeff Zucker, a very pregnant Rory Kennedy, playwright Israel Horovitz, Macaulay Culkin, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kyra Sedgwick, Linda Evangelista, Ed Bradley, Tom and Meredith Brokaw, director Barry Levinson, NBC anchor Brian Williams, Vernon Jordan, Eva Mendes, Sandra Bernhard and the always humorous Joy Behar.

If that's not enough, how about Yoko Ono, accompanied by her son, Sean, who's let his hair grow out and is now sporting a bushy beard that makes him look like his late, beloved father John Lennon?

And then, just to show you how much people wanted to see this film, there was Martha Stewart, looking terrific. I mean, talk about an eclectic group!

Now, unless you've been living under a rock, you know that this movie has been the cause of a lot of trouble. Miramax and Disney have gone to war over it, and "The Passion of the Christ" seems like "Mary Poppins" in retrospect. Before anyone's even seen it, there have been partisan debates over which way Moore may have spun this or that to get a desired effect.

But, really, in the end, not seeing "F9/11" would be like allowing your First Amendment rights to be abrogated, no matter whether you're a Republican or a Democrat.

The film does Bush no favors, that's for sure, but it also finds an unexpectedly poignant and universal groove in the story of Lila Lipscombe, a Flint, Mich., mother who sends her kids into the Army for the opportunities it can provide — just like the commercials say — and lives to regret it.

Lipscombe's story is so powerful, and so completely middle-American, that I think it will take Moore's critics by surprise. She will certainly move to tears everyone who encounters her.

"F9/11" isn't perfect, and of course, there are leaps of logic sometimes. One set piece is about African-American congressmen and women presenting petitions on the Florida recount, and wondering why there are no senators to support them.

Indeed, those absent senators include John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy, among others, which Moore does not elaborate upon. At no point are liberals or Democrats taken to task for not supporting these elected officials, and I would have liked to have seen that.

On the other hand, there are more than enough moments that seemed to resonate with the huge Ziegfeld audience.

The most indelible is Bush's reaction to hearing on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, that the first plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

Bush was reading to a grade-school class in Florida at that moment. Instead of jumping up and leaving, he instead sat in front of the class, with an unfortunate look of confusion, for nearly 11 minutes.

Moore obtained the footage from a teacher at the school who videotaped the morning program. There Bush sits, with no access to his advisers, while New York is being viciously attacked. I guarantee you that no one who sees this film forgets this episode.

More than even "The Passion of the Christ," "F9/11" is going to be a "see it for yourself" movie when it hits theaters on June 25. It simply cannot be missed, and I predict it will be a huge moneymaker.

And that's where Disney's Michael Eisner comes in. Not releasing this film will turn out to be the curse of his career.

When Eisner came into Disney years ago, the studio was at a low point. He turned it around with a revived animation department and comedy hits such as "Pretty Woman" and "Down and Out in Beverly Hills."

But Eisner's short-sightedness on many recent matters has been his undoing. And this last misadventure is one that will follow him right out the doors of the Magic Kingdom.

As for the movie, it was a well edited piece of propaganda. Honestly, they should be running it in loop fashion at the Democratic National Convention.

Not very impressive, Moveon.org.

so what about those military recruiter dudes? the one guy who selfconsciously adopted a "black" dialect when talking to black kids? also: "we just want to take down your name and number so that we know not to contact you again." i don't know what's more flabbergasting, the gall and avarice of the recruiter or the stupidity of his target (though frankly maybe the latter was just intimidated, since recruiter dude was wearing a uniform).

Exactly.

One of Moore's more intriguing contradictions I think is how he can't quite reconcile being opposed to the war/military but criticizing Bush for not puting more troops in Afghanistan (which would have invariably led to more civilian and military deaths there).

Also another pick - the part of there being one lone state trooper Oregon (I think), I noticed nothing was said about local police forces there or the FBI or anything else comparable. Since when are we solely reliant on State Troopers for protection?

I was disappointed by this too.

AL FRANKEN TO THREAD.

a man says something controversial at his local gym, then the FBI comes to his house. think about everything needed to facilitate such a visit.

the fresno peaceniks infiltrator displayed how the govt. was spending taxpayers' money for homeland security. a bookend to the oregon trooper responsible for safeguarding 100 miles of coastal territory friday-monday.

(I admit I haven't seen it nor do I feel a need to, I much prefer reading the debates here.)

I don't remember the movie saying anything about the war in Afghanistan being unjustified, or that war or the military was inherently wrong. The point seemed to be that for socioeconomic reasons the military is not exactly a volunteer service for many people in this country, and thus we ought not to be sending troops to die/kill/etc. in wars that have nothing to do with defending the United States (Iraq/Vietnam).

far be it for me to suggest that moore has all his arguments in order, but i don't think the film's POV is "anti-military" by a long shot. and i think there was some (unfortunate?) ambiguity regarding his opposition/non-opposition to the invasion of afghanistan. but i think a central point of his film is that the war in iraq was a misdirection of the war on terrorism, thus civilian casualties/troop endangerment/other problems there are fundmentally purposeless in a way that can't be said of the situation in afghanistan.

now i know moore has made comments opposing the invasion of afghanistan prior to making his film, but i'm just writing about the film here.

that said, there is a lot of stuff (some of it from al-jazeera) in moore's movie that american news programs have not shown us.

well, that sort of stuff--images of wartime casualties and so on--is always a tough call. their effectiveness depends on your acceptance of the overall argument for which they are employed as emotional accents. (i.e. photo of dead baby = "let us withdraw" OR "let us reconsecrate")

sometimes. sometimes--as in the current case, where americans NEVER see such casulaties on the news--they are just helpful reminders of the costs of war, whether justified or not.

I'm going to see it tonight.

Do I need to see things, when others have already told me about them, when they're just going to make me upset and not add anything new to how I feel? I'd rather spare myself the trouble. As far as news coverage/American news bias, I know that--I, like you, tend to get my news from bbc.co.uk.

(x-post: amateurist- personal attacks are the soup du jour, chief.)

This article has a lot more background information on the frosty relationship between the US and France. Basically for the majority of the war, the United States had intended that France be part of a post-war American protectorate without national sovereignty once the Germans were defeated. The United States went as far as to begin negotiations with the pro-Nazi Vichy government before reversing it's intentions and officially recognizing De Gaulle as head of the French government in October 1944.

The main point is the connections that are made:
The stolen election leads to...
Profit from 9/11; which is used as a excuse to support war to benefit Bush's business interests and used as an excuse to pass....
the Patriot Act to hush criticism and questioning of above.

The main point is that the election was a fraud. That news was censored. That we were lied to. That we were told that everyone supports Bush when his approval ratings were in the 40s, and 9/11, which he knew about and didn't prevent happened, it served his business and political interests. The point isn't whether you are for or against the war; the point is that the shenanigans in the White House are against everything this country stands for, and the average American is saying "Please Sir, give me more".

The reason no bodies were shown coming home is because that is what led to the working and middle classes getting behind the Viet Nam anti-war movement.

Actually I feel about Bush the way that the French felt about the Vichy during WWII - they were traitors to what the country stood for.

They weren't shown because they're bad PR, yeah. But that doesn't equate to "they could turn the tide!" We (editorial) keep forgetting that US casualties are remarkably minimal (compared to history and to current civilian casualties) for a year-long invasion and occupation.

(ps The working- and middle-class had always polled higher in opposition to Vietnam than the upper-crust.)

Milo, most analyses of the anti-war movement in Viet Nam DO say exactly this: That the American public did NOT get behind it until they were shown footage from the war and of injured soldiers coming home, and those media images did indeed turn the tide as regards popular support for the movement.

FAIR's head talking about the "myth of the media's role in Vietnam" - http://www.fair.org/articles/kerrey-vietnam.html

I'd like to see polling data that shows conclusively that "footage from the war" - rather than, you know, having your neighbor's kid dead - turned the tide of public opinion.

Very diverse crowd, packed for a Monday afternoon, lots of gray hair. Few to no teens, except for a couple their with a parent.

Maybe the first movie I've seen in the theater where audience participation - talking, cheering, etc. - seemed welcome. I didn't even mind the elderly guy behind me talking loudly to his wife - "Who's that?!" when Wolfowitz licks his comb, various other exclamations of anger and disgust. At the end the entire audience cheered and clapped.

The pre-credits sequence with everyone getting their makeup on was very effective - it wasn't explicitly mocking them, but making them slightly more human than they normally appear. This was actually some of the best editing in the film, it reminded me of parts of Fog of War.

The black screen w/911 sound effects and then 911 footage was an incredible sequence. The whole Saudi business connection was muddled, though, and dragged down the film. The bookends of the film were so powerful, it's too bad that got stuck in the middle.

Moore's problem is still focus, he was all over the place here and (cf. Saudi connections) that didn't help the impact. But he made up for it following Lipscomb. His gag sound edits - '80s lite-pop tunes over the President, etc. - was just terrible and didn't belong in the film.

Poss. more of my "I Luv Errol Morris" dick-riding, but he has a problem cutting away from the interview statements too quickly. The impact of some of the more heinous comments by the business conference attendees was blunted, they needed more time to sink in. I would have left the Alliance guy on for a few beats after he says "We want to make sure they didn't die in vain" ie MAKE MONEY. (actually, if I were Moore I probably would have just beat him to death with my camera)

Effectively makes the Chimp look like a harmless stooge, but Cheney is pure evil.

All the way through, my housemate, my girlfriend, and I would look to each other and give these "what the fuck is going on?!" looks. The most shocking part of the film, for me, was being reminded of the 2000 election debacle. The BushBin Laden portion of the film was no big news for me, although I was incensed by the depth and breadth of the ties between the two families.

I didn't find the scenes with the American woman whose son had died in the war particularly tear-jerking or anything. Much more than that, I was blown away by the Afghani grandmother screaming "God will avenge us!" etc. That's something more people should be exposed to.

After the film I was just feeling dazed.

I saw it when it happened. Maria Shriver was riding on top of some sort of flat-bed trailer dodging them. I thought it was cool seeing signs like BUllSHit on network TV.

me too. how did he get that footage?

also, i was born & raised in flint, mi. the segments they drive thru are probably from the north side, and the mall they visit with the recruiters is about 5-10 miles south of my parents' house. i've BEEN to the main recruiting office for the Marines in Flint, mainly becuase i was trying to find out about Navy ROTC programs. This was in another life, of course...

moore's parents live within a mile of the house i grew up in.

i agree with Prof Juan Cole here, in some of his criticisms of the film. The saudi stuff detracted from the rest of the pic, and the editing was off. i HATED the multiple extended shots of the army mother from flint breaking down.

calling this flick proproganda is inaccurate; it's more of a polemic or op-ed piece.

still, i think there were several bits he could have covered better; connecting the lone trooper in Oregon to bad Homeland Security funding practices, opening more of an attack on the Patriot Act, etc.

At least 9451 Iraqis have died as a result of US action.

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

5032 American "casualties"

Do you really think that we prevented over 9,451 Iraqi deaths and the the net benefit to Iraq was greater? I wager that using pretty much any cost-benefit metric, removing oil sactions from Iraq would have been better.

The problem remains how the war was run, who was running it and post-war expectations. If your average lefty - ala Moore - had good reason to believe that a war was being undertaken for defense, and that it would make life better for the Iraqi people, that's one thing. But it wasn't undertaken for defense, and there's little evidence to suggest that things are going to be any better.

(Moore even follows this logic, if you've seen the film - he's asking why Americans are dying, what's the use?)

During this scene an audience member completely broke down sobbing.

still, i think there were several bits he could have covered better; connecting the lone trooper in Oregon to bad Homeland Security funding practices, opening more of an attack on the Patriot Act, etc.

That did needed to be handled better - specifically connecting distribution of Homeland Security funds to political connections

was the old woman iraqi or afghani? the fact that i wasn't sure speaks, i think, to the somewhat disorganized character of the film.

i completely agree. it had me in tears.

Freakish, in that Part was specifically who I thought of/turned to shortly after 9/11 itself when it came to some sort of musical 'comfort.'

...In its second half, Fahrenheit 9/11 contains almost purely anecdotal information about the war in Iraq. Mothers, soldiers and regular citizens recount what they've seen and experienced. The point is that war is hell; and that's a pretty fucking cheap maneuver by Moore. I think all of us who've blown the heads off their GI Joe dolls with M-80s know it. Anecdotal information plays on emotion and isn't the basis of a sound argument about a battle that's a shitload bigger than a few stories. I mean, you could have found grieving mothers who would have said they opposed WWI, WWII and probably even the Revolution. Grief in itself doesn't make a war wrong. Showing dead bodies doesn't get to the root of why this war is even more hell than any other. This is a fucked up war we shouldn't be in, I agree, but regurgitating graphic footage of injured soldiers and children doesn't prove that. Moore preys on our squeamishness...

this is true--except that i think moore did an important service in simply SHOWING us certain things that CNN et al have deemed inappropriate or uninteresting or too sensitive or whathaveyou, even if the relationship between this material and moore's thesis (does he have a thesis?) is not so straightforward.

-- Felonious Drunk (wangchungvsah...), June 29th, 2004.

OTM.

"yeah, the dead baby was good, but the screaming grandmother really turned me on."

I thought that it was rather necessary to counter the footage of the soldiers talking about how much of combat is a video game and how pumped up they were to play CDs in the tank.

heh. then again, it looks like they already have 'em...

Moore included a number of clips where Bush talked about soldiers "not dying in vain," which I think is a key idea. We can accept fallen heroes, and even the collateral damage of civilians in the name of a worthy cause (e.g. WWII). The horror of the images is difficult to stomach not simply because it is intrinsically awful, but because the message of the movie is that it is all unnecessary and pointless.

Maybe that's true of a lot of wars, but I think it's worth saying, and seeing, any time that it is.

"you dont think that we actually read the bills."

this is democracy at work. why are these people getting paid to do a half-assed job?
a sad commentary i say.

the guy who said this was john conyers, who i like a lot. he said it as a matter of fact--legislation is simply too longwinded for senators to read it all. the fine print is often left to their underlings who come up with summaries of the salient points. i think this is only natural given the demands of a senator's job. however the point moore (and conyers) were making is that the bush admin. purposely didn't give the senators enough time for either them or their staff to read the legislation in full.

I concur with those who say "sad". However, I would also say that Moore's thesis, insofar as the film can be said to have one, is largely baloney. His implication seems to be roughly this: Saudi Arabia was really to blame for 9-11 but since Bush is bought and paid for by the Saudis, he did their nefarious bidding by making scapegoats of Afghanistan and Iraq instead. This is a highly unlikely scenario for many reasons: the Saudis were opposed to the Iraq invasion, the Iraq invasion in fact puts more pressure on the Saudis to democratize as well as reducing their oil-derived political leverage - hardly outcomes they would be enthusiastic about, that despite the fact that the Saudis do deserve some of the blame for 9-11 (as does the US for that matter) it's not clear what Bushco could have done to be harder on them - clearly invasion is out of the question - and in addition, the US-Saudi relationship predates the rise of Bushco, and there are many reasons economic and geopolitical why that alliance has taken place which have nothing to do with the Bush family. I like to see Bush taken down a peg as much as the next person, but I think that Moore tends to traffic too much in paranoid fantasy for my taste.

and that thing from tompaine tries to replace moore's "it's all the saudis!" with "it's all israel!" so no real insight there i don't think.

the expressive power of many the images moore employs and the "emotional truth" of their cumulative effect notwithstanding, i thought F911 was awful. i think attempts to draw some kind of solid thru-line between all the various tentacles of bushpolicy is a waste of time at best. the saudis, israel, oil, "democracy," stability, idealism, fundamentalism, detente, preemption &c &c -- these things DON'T sit next to each other easily, they DON'T add up to some kind of public/secret picture of right activity, ie the right is scattered in the same way as the left (even if it doesn't seem to slow them down). the war in iraq sat at the intersection of many of those ideological ley-lines but not all of them.

(cahiers du cinema)

"if 'fareinheit 9/11' was 'only' a bad film, we would have plenty of time to explain why when the film comes out in theaters. the problem is much more serious: for the first time in its history, what Cannes has crowned isn't a film. it's the cinema itself that the jury has insulted by awarding an audio-visual product of another kind, another aim."

That's what I think a lot of Moore' detractors either don't get or deliberately downplay about him: his whole critique (or shtick, whatever you want to call it) is populist and aimed at a broad audience. He doesn't get into the finer points of history or policy because they don't interest him, and he knows they won't interest his audience. He starts from the assumption that the Rich and Powerful are screwing over everybody else, and finds examples to make his case. I don't think he's stupid, by a long shot, but he's deliberately unsophisticated (which is one of the reasons a lot of establishment liberals have been wrinkling their noses at him). He may not know or care a whole lot about, say, the way the Arab-Israeli conflict has evolved and its influence on regional dynamics. But that's not what his movie's about. His movie's about how he thinks a lot of people are being lied to and getting screwed. He's capable of extending that sympathy overseas, to families bombed out of their homes and so forth, but his main focus is American working-class and middle-class families. That's who he cares about (and I do think he does actually care -- sure as hell no one else is making movies about Flint), and that's who he's making movies for, too -- which is, again, part of why he provokes so much sniffiness amongst the punditry.

they do have a tendency to stamp whatever is his recent film with what seems like fairly unreflective approval, AND to approve/forgive/excuse/politely pass over in silence whatever asinine comment he's made lately, AND in the same issue there is a one-page photo-essay by godard on the metaphysics of cropping the frame which seems to me like near-total horseshit, BUT i'm not sure this is a case of them parroting anyone.

that said, later on in the article they call tarantino desperate/disingenuous (p.s. they generally don't like "kill bill") for asserting at the post-awards press conference that moore's film was given the palme d'or on aesthetic and not political grounds. tarantino made the (appropriate, i thought) point that critics might be looking for "pretty images" when he is interested in "powerful images"--a point seemingly lost (i can't think but deliberately) on the cahiers editor, who says that it is ironic to speak of the "images" of moore's film since the film is comprised largely of stock footage. however, i DO think tarantino's comments smacked of desperation and while i believe him to have been entirely sincere i still think reflection would probably reveal to even him the political basis of their decision.

THAT said i don't think moore's film being awarded the palme will have any lasting negative effect on the Honor of the Cannes festival. if anything i think the fracas may make succeeding juries more reflective about such issues.

I dunno, what you translated (yay french class!) seems like a sophisticated way of saying "he doesn't know what he's doing" (ie what Godard said).

godard's comment IIRC was a very silly one: he said moore's film would help bush get elected. godard also hadn't seen the film (probably still hasn't). i had fun with my french film-studies friends having arguments about godard.

Cahiers OTM. Positif still going? The film is a dog. British TV news does it better.

by paying the people who owned the various rights.

Interesting to wonder what Al-Jazeera's audience made of it. The bit that struck me most was the army recruiters in Flint. I had no idea that the world's most powerful army recruits in the same manner as a religious cult would, and by telling people that Shaggy was in the Marines.

reading the hitchens review now, the guy is seriously fucking deranged.