I hope that you won’t have to wait until then to decide if that is at least less than optimal or ideal to use the testimony of a known fabricator supplied by known intelligence agent of from “The Axis of Evil” while making the case to take our country to war.
I also hope that history does its work before November. Those of us in the American electorate don’t really have the luxury of waiting decades before we have to exercise our own judgment without waiting on the pronouncements of those in the ‘ivory towers’ of academia about the numerous similar situations involving grave, WH-sponsored mistakes re Iraq.
As an aside, some fundies are forgiving of everything except gay marriage and the like. I saw on MSNBC just the other night that there is a large fundie movement to go easy on and maybe even parol serial killer David Berkowitz (The Son of Sam) now that he has “seen the light” and been born again.
Exactly. I saw the movie last night, and I figured I’d end up spending some time here debating the merits of the movie. But there’s very little to debate. You can see a more biased perspective on current events on mainstream TV. This is stuff you know already - no is no need to distort or twist. I was surprised and almost disappointed by how little opinion and commentary are inserted, especially in the latter half of the film. This movie is being mischaracterized, even by those who overall say it’s a great movie. This movie needs to exist, because it presents a perspective that helps balance out the bullshit the media is feeding us.
Just to confirm, that was it. You might be able to argue that Iraqis have killed some Americans, but that is that the same as murder.
Bowling for Columbine made $21.5 million in its entire run, the most ever for a documentary. Fahrenheit 9/11 made nearly $22 million in its opening weekend alone.
YOW! $22 million in one weekend for 5 interviews, a bunch of news footage, and two or three easy stunts? Anyone who says Michael Moore doesn’t love America must clearly be missing how well he is using the American Capitalist system to make a huge wad of cash. Anyone know how much this movie cost to make?
I don’t think you can put a price tag on the psychological damage he surely must be suffering from being called fat by millions of Republicans scurrying for cover.
Another fun one - “Michael Mooron”
It cost $6 million to make and $10 million to distribute. Every penny of profit is well deserved.
Right. And it was Bush’s terrorist policy that created the psychology that caused Michael Moore to balloon up another 273 pounds. Damn Bush!
Ummmmm Um! – I smell the aroma another ‘all you can eat’ docudrama stewing!
One thing I forgot to comment on earlier. Okay, two things.
First, I had been expecting the scene with Bush sitting in the classroom to be exceptionally powerful, given the reviews I’d seen. But perhaps my expectations had grown too great, because it really didn’t do it for me like many other scenes did. I already knew that Bush sat there for a long time.
I guess what I had been hoping for was for Moore to have played the whole seven minutes in its entirety, uncut. That would have been excruciating, and really would have brought the point home. I know it wasn’t possible, but I would have liked him to have juxtaposed Bush just sitting there with some of the audio we recently heard of the confusion and chaos among all of those who were actively trying to do something. Like the clip where one person says, “Do we want to shoot them down? Someone is going to have to make a decision on that in the next 10 minutes?” The response is something like “Uh, God, I don’t know. Everyone just left the room.” The way it was done was apparently effective for a lot of folks, but it wasn’t quite powerful enough for me.
The second thing is that this film really does deserve an R rating. Some of the images are exceptionally painful and difficult to take. This should not be minimized. I think they are necessary to make the point, but they are not for children.
I disagree. While I wouldn’t suggest a 13-year-old see it unescorted, I think most 15- and 16-year-olds could handle it just fine. There have been plenty of PG-13 movies released with more gore and profanity than this one.
The only convincing argument you could make for giving Fahrenheit 9/11 an R-rating is that it’s using real-life footage, but IMO that makes it all the more compelling that it reach a wider audience. Why is it okay to show the consequences of fake wars, but not of real ones?
I’m just saying that it’s possible to present facts, and then make totally unfair points by use of suggestion. Personally, I agree with mhendo that people like Hitchens are misleading people by pretending that Moore is alleging that Saudis are part of a vast conspiracy: his point seems more to be that they inexplicably recieve special treatment at a time when Republicans are attacking our own civil liberties and brooking no special treatment for us, and that it’s hard to see how Bush can objectively consider policies that might call upon him to look into Saudi dirty dealings when he and his family have strong ties of friendship and business dating back to before his birth. But that doesn’t mean that Moore himself is fair when he makes these nasty associations. If he’s going to do that, then facts dont matter, because the case isn’t factual to begin with.
Hentor the Barbarian snippet
I would have liked him to have juxtaposed Bush just sitting there with some of the audio we recently heard of the confusion and chaos among all of those who were actively trying to do something. Like the clip where one person says, “Do we want to shoot them down? Someone is going to have to make a decision on that in the next 10 minutes?” The response is something like “Uh, God, I don’t know. Everyone just left the room.”
On the money!!!
Where were you when Moore needed an inspired editor, Hentor?
It certainly is as has been demonstrated by GW, Cheney et al who run worldwide terrorism, al Qaeda, 9/11 and Saddam Hussein all together in a single sentence and then stand back. As a result of such tactics polls showed that a majority of people were confident that Saddam had a hand in the WTC and Pentagon attacks. I think that is still the case.
I’m at a loss as to all this. The film hasn’t shown here and I doubt that it will. We have only one theater company and my guess is that the owners won’t book the movie. If they do, I’ll go.
I don’t have any fucking problem with the profanity (well, okay, I did take my senior citizen mother with me to the film, and cringed a hair listening to “let the motherfucker burn, burn motherfucker burn”, but that is another story…). But I think the widespread depiction and glorificaiton of gore across films is a problem. I think the R rating is intended to convey this, and should be respected more for all films. It should help people to make a very rough estimation of the nature of the content, even for adults seeing the film on their own. It allows parents to make a decision about taking their child or not.
You seem to be arguing that I believe it is okay to show the consequences of fake ones. I think that the convincing argument about the film having an R rating is that it contains unflinching images of graphic violence and murder. Their reality makes them exponentially more disturbing, sure.
Well, last night, after all this pre-release fuss, I finally saw the movie, at a special screening at the National Conference of the American Library Association in Orlando, Florida. Now, librarians are not a typical representative sample of the American population. We are in an intellectually-oriented profession, devoted to an ideal of public service, not driven by the profit motive (librarians earn an average of $10k a year less than accountants), and most of us are employed by governments, schools or universities. In consequence we tend to be a rather liberal bunch (although there are many conservatives among us). Furthermore, the entire American library profession is pissed at Bush over the provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act which threaten to invade reader privacy. We nurse bitter memories of earlier periods when government agencies tried to monitor what people were reading at the library as a why of trying to spot foreign spies or domestic dissidents. So the audience for this screening was even more predisposed against Bush than most audiences who saw the film this weekend.
That said, the audience reactions were everything Moore could have hoped for. Everybody laughed, cheered, applauded, or hissed in just the right places, and everybody walked out talking about what a great, powerful film it was.
And I agree completely. I just wish there were some way to get this movie shown on prime-time television some time before the election! On broadcast, not cable! Would CBS touch it? You know, just for the sake of the ratings? Would NBC? UPN? How about Fox? 
No doubt it will be shown on a big screen on the main floor of the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. The DNC would be really foolish to miss an obvious bet like that. It would really fire up the troops, even if every person in the hall already had seen the movie three times.
It might also be helpful to put Arabic subtitles on it and have it shown on al-Jazeera – just to let the Arab world know that not all Americans think the way Bush does.
I just came back from the film. Packed house, which was interesting because it was 3PM on a Monday. Hugely positive reaction from the audience.
I watch films of this sort very skeptically, and I know a bit about Michael Moore’s methods. So I’m on the lookout for things that could be taken out of context, misrepresented, and I think about how the situation could be different if one were to give the benefit of the doubt. So I came out at the end still skeptical about a few things, and wanting to fact-check several items.
But having said that, if only 5% of what Moore put out there is true, that’s enough to be very disturbing. I it were demonstrated to me that half of it were true, I’d be enraged.
An example of where I’d give benefit of the doubt: the scene where Bush sits there after apparently being told about the second airplane impact. We don’t really know what was whispered in his ear. Perhaps he was told, “Sir, another plane hit the World Trade Center. We’re moving fast to get more information, Cheney and Rumsfeld are on it, and we think it would be best if you didn’t alarm everyone by leaving. Give us a few minutes to find out more.”
But what makes me angry is that even if that were true, I’d still expect more of the president in that situation. This was my reaction to a lot of the film. Even when I gave benefit of the doubt to Bush, I think Moore’s points were often still damning.
More truth than poetry in that remark, BG. I think thats pretty much what the situation does call for, and not just for the political angle. Let other people see what its like to live someplace where you can speak out like this.
Which is why it can’t happen, which is why I don’t think Al-Jazeera would touch it with the proverbial ten foot pole, and if they did, it would not be welcome in most of the Middle East. Sure, they’d love the Bush-bashing part, but things like that start people to thinking, thinking about how long they would live if they tried something like that.
“So, this Moore guy, The Bush declared a fatwa, and he’s dead, right?”
“No, he’s rolling around on a pile of hundred dollars bills with three super-models”
“Hmmmmmm…”
It was actually a lot better than I had read. A lot of the conservatives trying to immunize people against it’s message have been implying that it’s a bunch of conspiracy theories. But they’ve missed the message entirely. It isn’t claiming that the Saudis or even Bush masterminded 9/11. It’s claiming that this President and his allies coast along on a sea of privelege and preconceptions about who and what is really important. It’s about who you should really trust to be on your side and who you shouldn’t. The points were the points Moore always makes: the rich and powerful and well connected can sail through life with barely and effort and then lecture the rest of us on what’s important: but there’s something definately very very screwy with their worldview.
The major thing I find serious fault with is that he didn’t at least token acknowledge that Saddam was a pretty awful bastard (heck, he could have couched it with the disclaimer that he was originally our bastard) and certainly at least <I>somewhat</I> of a threat to his neighbors, legitimate American interests, and people whom Americans have an interest in protecting (just far from the most important issue out there). This critics have rightly found fault in this, though I might also argue that it is taken as a given: everyone knows that Saddam was a rat bastard. Not everyone seems to know that Iraq was, even under him, a society that functioned well enough most of the time for families to be families and to get by, and that the war took a terrible toll on many people. Moore’s interest, again, is not the view of the priveleged, which he exists to ridicule, but the people.
In the end, what no one can dismiss about the film is the way it showed things on film we’ve never seen: which is a major indictment of the failures of our media, and collected footage together in a more coherent whole: which is another major failure of our media. Almost nobody was showing real footage of our troops actually talking away from approved spots and subjects. Almost nobody in the U.S. was showing footage of Iraqi casualties and the fact that they were real people with real families that have to wonder whether or not the U.S. really did everything it could to avoid their deaths even if only accidental and unintended. Nobody was showing what it was like to lose a son and to doubt your own convictions for why he was put in harm’s way. This stuff alone is what makes the film worth seeing no matter what political stripe you are from: what makes it more than just the throwaway anti-Bush attack it basically boils down to.
As for all that stuff, critics scoff at stuff like that, but the reality is that it’s something that I’ve never seen them be able to really look in the face or incorporate into their worldviews in any serious way other than to briefly acknowledge, hastily intone about, and then quickly push it away. It would be one thing if it were really a serious part of their worldview. But instead it’s something we are usually carefully insulated from. Our leaders and critics claim that it is all explicable, all worth it, and maybe it all is. Maybe Moore has no point. But you have to ask yourself: why then, is he the only one who makes any attempt to actually show any of it? And why do we end up having to hear it from a polemicist like him instead of it simply being part of a full and complete discourse? Why do we have to rely on the President’s political enemies to be able to see even a few brief clips of these sorts of things?
Actually, we do, because the people involved have told us.