People’s opinion of Farenheit 9/11 usually fall into one of these categories:
Completely agree- “Michael Moore is a genius. Bush is evil and this movie proves it.”
Somewhat agree- “The film feels propaganda’ish’ and probably is, however Moore brings up some points that are hard to refute. If even 15% of his claims are true there is a lot of explaining that the Bush administration needs to do.”
Somewhat disagree- “The film feels propaganda’ish’ and probably is. While points are made to support Moore’s arguments you never know if your getting the full story. Some of it feels staged.”
Completely disagree- “Moore is a moron. Everything in this film is a lie. Bush is a saint.”
I’d believe that the target audience that this film needs to reach to have any effect on the election would be group “2”.
Dihard Moore fans have already seen the film and made up their minds. The curious ones who’ve seen it are split in groups 2 & 3.
Then there are tons of people who are curious about it that will be seing it this week. I believe the DVD release will majorly hit the target audience.
Being the theatrical release was limited and attended mainly by diehards the DVD release will be major. Think of every Blockbuster Video coast-to-coast with the 50 or so copies each and they will consistently be rented for at least a week.
Those who didn’t want to spend $8 a person to see a movie they didn’t really know how they’d feel about are a lot more likely to spend $3 to rent it and turn it off if they don’t like it.
Viewers in my opinion can only leave this movie one of two ways- Opinion not changed at all or opinion going against Bush.
Good post Hampshire. I agree. Those in the “4” category would probably never see it, and it wouldn’t make them reconsider their positions if they did. I’m surprised at all the “1” people (seen by me on other message boards) who still haven’t seen it.
I can’t find a cite at the moment, but I heard that the Networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) refused to take advertising for F9/11 during their news programs.
Judging from the crowd when I saw the movie, quite a few of those “foreigners” must have been American ex-pats. Most of us are eligable to vote via absentee ballot. (I will actually be returning to the US to vote.)
Just finished watching the DVD. Not quite as moving as when I saw it in theatres, but that scene in front of the Whitehouse when that passer by tries to tell the mother of a dead soldier ‘It’s all staged!’ still makes my blood boil. I’m of the ‘Even if 15% of it’s true…’ camp, with a dash of ‘and if one of those things were true about John Kerry, he would never live it down’ sprinkled in. Check out the special features footage of Iraq a few days before the bombing. It’s a real eye opener for anyone who has never seen the country portrayed as anything but a war zone. It’s not paradise, but it is chilling to see people go about their lives- kids playing in parks, women shopping, merchants chatting.
Haven’t gotten the DVD yet, but I’ll probably do so within a week or so – I’ve never bothered to buy his other films before, but IMO this one is his best work yet, and well worth having around.
An interesting sidebar is that Moore also has two related books hitting the stores as the same time the DVD is: The Official Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader, which covers the facts in the movies, along with reviews, reactions, and whatnot; and Will They Ever Trust Us Again?, a collection of letters from military personnel fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan on what it’s really like on the front line. I’m sorely tempted to pick up both…
Obviously, that wasn’t filmed in either the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq or in the Shiite slums of Bagdad. I’m surprised people would fall for that sort of thing, particularly leftists. They would be the first to point out that romantic notions of, say, 1950s America — kids playing in parks, women shopping, merchants chatting — ignore the black children who can’t play in the parks, the black women who sit at the back of the bus, and the signs the merchants have posted that say, “White” and “Colored”.
I beg your pardon, but I really don’t get you sometimes. So the only acceptable image of Iraqi people before the glorious war of liberation is suffering and dying at the hands of Saddam Hussein? Any suggestion that life wasn’t that bad in some parts of Iraq is misleading? I suppose Moore filmed those scenes of children playing on a Hollywood set, right? Nobody ever had any fun under Saddam Hussein, they just spent all their time getting tortured and executed.
No, Farenheit 911 didn’t deal with the unpleasant aspects of living in certain parts of Iraq. Maybe it was because the Bush administration had already made that case! They talked nonstop for years about how much Iraqis suffered under Saddam Hussein! They actively encouraged us to forget that there were children playing on swingsets in Baghdad. If I’m trying to make up my mind about whether to support an invasion of another country, is it irrelevant that there are regular people going about their business there? Or am I only supposed to take into account the official version from my political leaders? "Don’t worry about the Iraqi civilians that will die in this invasion, because life is so bad in Iraq that each and every one of them would rather be dead than live another day under such tyranny!"
Footage of people living their lives in Iraq before the invasion was relevant, and Moore was right to include it.
I don’t recall that the US bombed and killed thousands of Americans in the name of civil rights, did I miss something in history class?
Showing these scenes is a good way to get us to understand why some of these “ungrateful” Iraqis (yes, I hear that phrase fairly frequently) might be upset about what the U.S. did in the name of “liberation”. Some might even think that the U.S. made bad into worse, and I think that’s the point Moore is trying to make.
Well, putz smileys aside :rolleyes: , yes - at least where it supports Spree’s apparent assertion that the $209 million the movie made meant that it would “reach more undecideds” than the “detractors” predicted. I was just pointing out that anyone who saw the movie who was not a registered US voter could not be counted in that “undecideds” portion of his claim. A lot of people seem to think that the more people that see the movie, and the more money it makes, the more votes will go against Bush in November. I don’t agree.
Yes, I saw it. My problem with it was not the facts, nor the (well-done) personal-tragedy stories. I didn’t like the heavy reliance on carefully juxtaposed clips and edited/prepared interviews which lead the viewer to jump to conclusions without actually drawing those conclusions explicitly; Moore did the same thing in Bowling for Columbine. I think you could make a similar mocumentary about any political situation that has ever occurred, picking who you want to look bad and positioning factual data to make it happen.
Having said that, I fall into Hampshire’s “3” category.
You know, things don’t always have to be such extremes. It really isn’t the case that we either have to believe every aspect of one thing as opposed to another. It is possible both to criticize Moore and to criticize the war. Unless you can provide reason to believe otherwise, I don’t see why Iraq should have been different from any other one-party State with ethnic oppression, like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. If you were a member of the Ba’ath Party, it is likely that your life was more pleasant than if you were not. It is also likely that if you were a Kurd or Shiite, your lot was not as great. I think that it is likely the case that life was real good for Sunni Ba’athists and that there was a spectrum of lifestyles from there all the way down to Kurdish or Shiite rebels. I think that a balanced presentation would emphasize that fact. It is neither the case that Iraq was a happly place for everyone nor a horrible place for everyone.
But isn’t that exactly the point that Cuauhtemoc just made? That prior to F9/11, the only extreme that the American public was exposed to was that Iraq was a horrible place for everyone?
Exactly, Munch. Michael Moore’s audience doesn’t exist in a vacuum. He knew what messages his audience had been getting for years from the Bush administration. The people are in bondage, they want us to liberate them, they’ll greet us with flowers and candy, etc. The images in Farenheit 911 are a counterpoint to that. They were a reminder that the invasion ended or disrupted a lot of lives. And people should be confronted with that, whether or not they think Saddam’s removal was worth it.
I’d just like to point out that Fahrenheit 9/11 sold out in the BX here the day they got in. I didn’t even think they’d have F9/11, much less sell out.
You don’t need courage to watch Fahrenheit 9/11 in the cinema, you need courage not to be swept up in the mass hysteria and back-slapping, or blinded by the vicarious feeling that you’re “making a difference”.
