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.

"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.