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| 7/9 |
| 2004/6/23-24 [Politics/Domestic/President/Reagan, Politics/Domestic/President/Bush] UID:30973 Activity:very high |
6/23 NYTimes reviews "Fahrenheit 9/11" -dgies
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/movies/23FAHR.html
/csua/tmp/fahrenheit911.txt
\_ "Mr. Moore is often impolite, rarely subtle and occasionally unwise.
He can be obnoxious, tendentious and maddeningly self-contradictory.
He can drive even his most ardent admirers crazy. He is a credit to
the republic."
See, I don't understand this. To a partial observer like myself,
this just looks like, for lack of a better term, cocksucking.
-- ilyas
\_ Yes, because all begrudging praise for people we don't like is
cocksucking. Cheney? Likes to have "swordfights" in his mouth.
Bush? Satisfies the rich and loves bukakke. See how fun this is?
\_ Sure, I understand begrudging praise. But I don't understand
how in this particular case, the praise follows from what was
previously said. Being rarely subtle and obnoxious does not
make one a credit to anything, be it one's parents, one's
race, one's country... -- ilyas
\_ There are any number of comedians, actors and politicians
to whom the same adjectives would apply, and they are just
as much a credit to this country as this author posits
for Michael Moore. -scotsman
\_ Like Al Franken and his popular radio show!
\_ Yes, but those characteristics don't make them a credit.
Those characteristics are negative. Hence my problem.
-- ilyas
\_ It's not an if-then. It's "He all these things that
people tar him with, and thank god he's there." Those
characteristics aren't necessarily negative. -scotsman
\_ All those characteristics make him a credit to his
country if his country also exemplifies those
characteristics.
\_ perms
\_ fixed, sorry.
\_ It's funny that f911 is rated R and The Green Berets is rated G.
\_ why is this even an issue? are there kids who aren't 17 now
who will somehow manage to vote later this year?
\_ Have you *seen* the Green Berets?
\_ Did you see Burning Columbine? footage of executions, etc.
PG-13
\_ Do you mean "Bowling for Columbine"?
\_ Seeing corpses of actual people is probably more disturbing
than phony violence. Nothing wrong with that but it's not
PG-13.
\_ I see dead people... on the news. I think. It's all kind of
a haze mixed with the web media. A corpse is a corpse, of
course, of course, and kids can look at a corpse of course,
that is, of course, unless the corpse is in Fahrenheit 911.
Thousands of folks with their kids went to look at Reagan's
corpse, boxed though it was. There are hanging Jesus corpses
in all the churches. Bah.
\_ This must be a troll. I can't believe you can't tell the
difference between showing a 15 year old cartoon violence
and showing a 15 year old the bullet riddled dehumanised
corpse of some poor dumb dead bastard lying in the street.
Or between a dead guy in a box and the same corpse in the
street. Or between a symbolic carving or Jesus on a stick
and a dirty bloodied corpse in the street. Go away, troll.
\_ You think 15 year olds aren't on the web? I remember
being 15. It depends on how it's presented, but don't
doubt those FPS-playing, pot smoking sex-having kids
are exposed to much worse if they so choose. They
saw jets flying into the WTC.
\_ Hi Lea. Sign your name.
\_ I always sign my name iff it's mine. This isn't.
-chialea
\_ Are you trying to make it rhyme?
\_ What's more amusing is that Moore appealed the rating because
an R-rating might decrease the audience. Sorry Moore, the
rating system is on the content, no the /in/tent.
\_ http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723
\_ Why do you hate America? |
| 7/9 |
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| movies2.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/movies/23FAHR.html Most E-Mailed Articles Respect for the president is a longstanding American tradition and one that is still very much alive, as the weeklong national obsequies for Ronald Reagan recently proved. But there is also an opposing tradition of holding up our presidents, especially while they are in office, to ridicule and scorn. Which is to say that while Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' will be properly debated on the basis of its factual claims and cinematic techniques, it should first of all be appreciated as a high-spirited and unruly exercise in democratic self-expression. Mixing sober outrage with mischievous humor and blithely trampling the boundary between documentary and demagoguery, Mr Moore takes wholesale aim at the Bush administration, whose tenure has been distinguished, in his view, by unparalleled and unmitigated arrogance, mendacity and incompetence. That Mr Moore does not like Mr Bush will hardly come as news. But one thing it is not is a fair and nuanced picture of the president and his policies. Mr Moore is often impolite, rarely subtle and occasionally unwise. He can be obnoxious, tendentious and maddeningly self-contradictory. While his new film, awarded the top prize at the Cannes International Film Festival this year, has been likened to an op-ed column, it might more accurately be said to resemble an editorial cartoon. Mr Moore uses archival video images, rapid-fire editing and playful musical cues to create an exaggerated, satirical likeness of his targets. The president and his team have obliged him by looking sinister and ridiculous on camera. Paul D Wolfowitz shares his icky hair-care secrets (a black plastic comb and a great deal of saliva); John Ashcroft raptly croons a patriotic ballad of his own composition; Mr Bush, when he is not blundering through the thickets of his native tongue, projects an air of shallow self-confidence. Through it all, Mr Moore provides sardonic commentary, to which the soundtrack adds nudges and winks. As the camera pans across copies of Mr Bush's records from the Texas Air National Guard, and Mr Moore reads that the future president was suspended for missing a medical examination, we hear a familiar electric guitar riff; Perhaps because of the scale and gravity of the subject of ''Fahrenheit 9/11,'' perhaps because his own celebrity has made the man-in-the-street pose harder to sustain, Mr Moore's trademark pranks and interventions are not as much in evidence as in earlier films. He does commandeer an ice cream truck to drive around Washington, reading the USA Patriot Act through a loudspeaker (after learning that few of the lawmakers who voted for it had actually read it), and he does stand outside the Capitol trying to persuade members of Congress to enlist their children in the armed forces. His case is synthetic rather than comprehensive, and it is not always internally consistent. He dwells on the connections between the Bush family and the Saudi Arabian elite (including the bin Laden family), and while he creates a strong impression of unseemly coziness, his larger point is not altogether clear. After you leave the theater, some questions are likely to linger about Mr Moore's views on the war in Afghanistan, about whether he thinks the homeland security program has been too intrusive or not intrusive enough, and about how he thinks the government should have responded to the murderous jihadists who attacked the United States on Sept. At the same time, though, it may be that the confusions trailing Mr Moore's narrative are what make ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' an authentic and indispensable document of its time. The film can be seen as an effort to wrest clarity from shock, anger and dismay, and if parts of it seem rash, overstated or muddled, well, so has the national mood. If ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' consisted solely of talking heads and unflattering glimpses of public figures, it would be, depending on your politics, either a rousing call to arms or an irresponsible provocation, but it might not persuade you to re-examine your assumptions. But the movie is much more than ''Dude, Where's My Country,'' carried out by other means. It is worth seeing, debating and thinking about, regardless of your political allegiances. Mr Moore's populist instincts have never been sharper, and he is, as ever, at his best when he turns down the showmanship and listens to what people have to say. The trauma that deindustrialization visited on that city was the subject of ''Roger and Me,'' and that film remains fresh 15 years later, now that the volunteer army has replaced the automobile factory as the vehicle for upward mobility. The most moving sections of ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' concern Lila Lipscomb, a cheerful state employee and former welfare recipient who wears a crucifix pendant and an American flag lapel pin. When we first meet her, she is proud of her family's military service -- a daughter served in the Persian Gulf war and a son, Michael Pedersen, was a marine in Iraq -- and grateful for the opportunities it has offered. Then Michael is killed in Karbala, and in sharing her grief with Mr Moore, she also gives his film an eloquence that its most determined critics will find hard to dismiss. Mr Bush is under no obligation to answer Mr Moore's charges, but he will have to answer to Mrs Lipscomb. edited by Kurt Engfehr, Christopher Seward and T Woody Richman; released by Lions Gate Films, IFC Films and the Fellowship Adventure Group. |
| slate.msn.com/id/2102723 By Christopher Hitchens Posted Monday, June 21, 2004, at 12:26 PM PT Michael Moore Moore: Trying to have it three ways One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was infinitely slight. Nonetheless, it seems that an answer to this long-felt need is finally beginning to emerge. I exempt Al Franken's unintentionally funny Air America network, to which I gave a couple of interviews in its early days. There, one could hear the reassuring noise of collapsing scenery and tripped-over wires and be reminded once again that correct politics and smooth media presentation are not even distant cousins. With Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, however, an entirely new note has been struck. org and the filmic standards, if not exactly the filmic skills, of Sergei Eisenstein or Leni Riefenstahl. To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery. In late 2002, almost a year after the al-Qaida assault on American society, I had an onstage debate with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film Festival. In the course of this exchange, he stated his view that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. The intervention in Afghanistan, he maintained, had been at least to that extent unjustified. Something--I cannot guess what, since we knew as much then as we do now--has since apparently persuaded Moore that Osama Bin Laden is as guilty as hell. Indeed, Osama is suddenly so guilty and so all-powerful that any other discussion of any other topic is a dangerous "distraction" from the fight against him. I believe that I understand the convenience of this late conversion. Still from Fahrenheit 9/11 Recruiters in Michigan Fahrenheit 9/11 makes the following points about Bin Laden and about Afghanistan, and makes them in this order: 1) The Bin Laden family (if not exactly Osama himself) had a close if convoluted business relationship with the Bush family, through the Carlyle Group. Either the Saudis run US policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not. As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush's removal of it, or they did not. If we were going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qaida forces survived or escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless than I suspect that Mr Moore is really recommending. And these are simply observations on what is "in" the film. If we turn to the facts that are deliberately left out, we discover that there is an emerging Afghan army, that the country is now a joint NATO responsibility and thus under the protection of the broadest military alliance in history, that it has a new constitution and is preparing against hellish odds to hold a general election, and that at least a million and a half of its former refugees have opted to return. I don't think a pipeline is being constructed yet, not that Afghanistan couldn't do with a pipeline. But a highway from Kabul to Kandahar--an insurance against warlordism and a condition of nation-building--is nearing completion with infinite labor and risk. We also discover that the parties of the Afghan secular left--like the parties of the Iraqi secular left--are strongly in favor of the regime change. But this is not the sort of irony in which Moore chooses to deal. He prefers leaden sarcasm to irony and, indeed, may not appreciate the distinction. In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at the opening of the film, he makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members of the Bin Laden family out of the country after Sept. I banged on about this myself at the time and wrote a Nation column drawing attention to the groveling Larry King interview with the insufferable Prince Bandar, which Moore excerpts. However, recent developments have not been kind to our Mike. In the interval between Moore's triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in the United States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights. he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those Saudi departures. This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except that--as you might expect--Clarke is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 moment. And it does not seem very likely that, in his open admission about the Bin Laden family evacuation, Clarke is taking a fall, or a spear in the chest, for the Bush administration. So, that's another bust for this windy and bloated cinematic "key to all mythologies." A film that bases itself on a big lie and a big misrepresentation can only sustain itself by a dizzying succession of smaller falsehoods, beefed up by wilder and (if possible) yet more-contradictory claims. President Bush is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. I say "shows," even though this photograph is on-screen so briefly that if you sneeze or blink, you won't recognize the other figure. A meeting with the prime minister of the United Kingdom, or at least with this prime minister, is not a goof-off. The president is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, on a golf course, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the president on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm. More interesting is the moment where Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infant school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane on 9/11. Many are those who say that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance, and gone to work. But if he had done any such thing then (as he did with his "Let's roll" and "dead or alive" remarks a month later), half the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse. The other half would be saying what they already say--that he knew the attack was coming, was using it to cement himself in power, and couldn't wait to get on with his coup. This is the line taken by Gore Vidal and by a scandalous recent book that also revives the charge of FDR's collusion over Pearl Harbor. At least Moore's film should put the shameful purveyors of that last theory back in their paranoid box. But it won't because it encourages their half-baked fantasies in so many other ways. From the night sky come the terror weapons of American imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and recalling them well, I can recognize various Saddam palaces and military and police centers getting the treatment. In fact, I don't think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic. You would also be led to think that the term "civilian casualty" had not even been in the Iraqi vocabulary until March 2003. I remember asking Moore at Telluride if he was or was not a pacifist. He would not give a straight answer then, and he doesn't now, either. I'll just say that the "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably outraged, whereas the ... |