While I agree with the criticism that Moore misleads his audience somewhat by not dating/locationating the “cold dead hands” clip, I don’t remember the film fooling me into thinking that the NRA rally was in response to Columbine. I, at least, came away with the impression that his contention was not that they had planned a rally in response to it, but rather that they wouldn’t postpone, reschedule, or move their rally.
Right.
But, this is exactly what every news outlet does each night and he’s taking his chance to do it.
Michael Moore does often let the viewer form his own conclusions, for instance, (I’ll cite frank rich’s column from yesterday’s NYT since I haven’t seen the movie) in F911, Moore shows Bush “minutes before he makes his own prime-time TV address to take the nation to war in Iraq. He is sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. A makeup woman is doing his face. And Mr. Bush is having a high old time. He darts his eyes about and grins, as if he were playing a peek-a-boo game with someone just off-camera. He could be a teenager goofing with his buds to relieve the passing tedium of a haircut.”
Clearly, the last sentence is Rich’s interpretation of the movie, but you see it and draw your own conclusions about that behavior. He’s wants to show you images that he thinks exmplify the presidents attitude towards this war. Probably showing the president minutes before he announces the war on TV is a decent indication of his mood, Draw your own conclusion.
Rich also says, “We also see some of the 4,000-plus American casualties: those troops hidden away in clinics at Walter Reed and at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Fort Campbell, Ky., where they try to cope with nerve damage and multiple severed limbs. They are not silent. They talk about their pain and their morphine, and they talk about betrayal.”
How many times have you seen those images and those interviews on TV? You can call this “grains of truth assembled into a mosaic of fiction” all you want, but that doesn’t make it so. And, the things you’ve said hardly apply at all to BFC.
Also, Rich says this…
“Perhaps the most damning sequence in ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ is the one showing American troops as they ridicule hooded detainees in a holding pen near Samara, Iraq, in December 2003. A male soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the sexual humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib at that same time. Besides adding further corroboration to Seymour Hersh’s report that the top command has sanctioned a culture of abuse not confined to a single prison or a single company or seven guards, this video raises another question: why didn’t we see any of this on American TV before ‘60 Minutes II’?”
Also, “he (Moore) implicitly raises the issue that much of what we’ve seen elsewhere during this war, often under the label of “news,” has been just as subjectively edited.”
And that’s really the point of all this. Moore, from the sounds of it, is presenting selective images of war and of our leaders as we prepared for war. He’s clearly not fair and balanced, like Fox, but that doesn’t make something FICTION – misleading to idiots who live in a vacuum – but not FICTION.
Lastly, people really miss the point when they nitpick through his movies. R&M is not worse because it was unfair the CEO wouldn’t talk to him. The point of the movie is NOT the inaccessibility of CEOs. That was just a humorous staged event that was a “tile” in his “mosaic”. BFC is not worse because he edited misleadingly with Chuck or because the bank didn’t give him the gun the day he opened his account. The movie is ultimately about why there’s so much FEAR in the US.
I, for one, look forward to F911
Trunk, did you look at the section on the Charlton Heston - Gun Victim Picture fabrication?
I mean, based on that evidence, I am certain the scene was shot twice. Mr. Moore claims that they got it in one, using two cameras, which is inconsistent with the only evidence I have… film which he himself edited.
In my view, that makes him a liar. Staged, dishonest images … so already we’re perverting the meaning of the word documentary. I’m not saying documentaries should all be without bias, or that they should include evidence on both sides, but when you have an incident like the above, what’s the difference between that, and just scripting a piece of fiction?
Reading the rest of the site (a lot of which is ciircumstantial, or can be written off as ‘editing for time’ or otherwise justified) … coupled with the fact that the man’s already lost my trust makes me suspect that the entirety of the film, while mostly composed of things people actually said and did, is constructed to sell a lie.
No.
I didn’t preview before posting.
But, that still doesn’t matter. The point of BFC is about the gun culture in the US and patricularly the FEAR CULTURE in the US – the overestimation of insecurity. It wasn’t about whether Charleton Heston saw a picture of a little girl.
And F911 sounds like it is just Moore’s presentation of images he selected and his own ideas about the war. Moore talks about how he came across images of abuses almost a year old, and he’s not even 1) college educated or 2) a journalist. It’s his presentation of the war, and the story of how the media is presenting the war.
Anyway, regarding that two-camera thing. “Moore’s Back” is on the right side of the frame, which means the camera is behind his LEFT shoulder, which is CROPPED in the first photo. There’s nothing about that that indicates to me that it was faked.
Look, when you base your argument on “facts” which are at best, creatively interpreted, and at worst, completely fraudulent and hysterical, you have no fucking place to complain when someone tells you your argument is therefore bullshit as well.
And since when is there so much FEAR in the US? That seems to be a complete fabrication on the part of the filmmaker, from the (admittedly amusing, but bullshit) Parker/Stone “history of the US,” right up through the bizarrely inconclusive, extraordinarily unenlightening comparison with Canada.
There’s just so much underhanded polemic the film can stand before it collapses under the weight of its own hubris. The part where the K-Mart executive office announces that it will discontinue ammunition in its stores? Remember how it happened? Moore and friends went to the executive offices and explained his point of view, complete with object lessons in the form of the kids, and the next day (I believe), the K-Mart PR department had a ceremony and made the announcement that ammunition would no longer be carried in K-Mart stores.
Michael Moore’s response, IIRC, was something like, “We beat them.” No, you didn’t, you self-serving huckster. You presented a case to them, and they responded. You didn’t battle them and force them to capitulate. They volunteered.
So, facts don’t matter, because the movie has a message? Maybe you can clarify this for me. There are a lot of themes in BFC… one of them, ironically, speaking about media spin and the manipulation of facts.
It may be. I haven’t seen it, and may not ever see it. It was just the first stepping stone that inspired the conversation between my friends and I, thus leading to the thoughts about Michael Moore in general.
The Cameraman behind Moore could indeed be cropped. That’s not the cameraman who’s problematic. The one in front of him should be visible from the point of view of the cameraman behind him. (I do think the site tries to point out the unlikelihood of both cameramen, but the one that concerns me is the one that’s supposed to be in front.)
Heh. Read this, Ogre. That cartoon sequence is presented after discussion with a South Park creator, but has nothing to do with the creators of South Park.
Sometimes Moore’s creative arrangements of facts can take in even the skeptical. 
It seems to me the folks who complain the most about Moore’s editing never have any problems with those at Fox News. At least Moore admits his stuff is biased.
Well shit. I was convinced it was a Parker/Stone short.
Thanks for the correction.
I’m curious, CandidGamera - have you seen BFC?
I might be wrong, and excuse me in that case, but it seems to me that you’re using second hand arguments.
I have only seen clips. So yes, mostly secondhand here. I was directed to Bowling for Truth a while back when I expressed an interest in seeing the entirety of Moore’s film.
Has anyone asked Michael Moore about the details of this shot? Did he deny it? We can’t exactly ask Charlie, on account of his illness, but there were other people present during the shot. Rather than speculate, did anyone actually ask?
I’m sorry, but I didn’t get that impression at all. The “cold, dead hands” bit was used to introduce Heston because it is the most famous image of Heston in his capacity as NRA President. Maybe it was clear to me because I had seen that clip, but to me it was no different from introducing him with a clip from “The Ten Commandments”–just some stock footage.
As I’ve said before many times, BfC was a fatally flawed movie, and Moore’s heavy-handedness and failure to focus is his own worst enemy. But I just don’t see anything dishonest about the way Heston’s visit to Denver was portrayed.
I know this is the Pit and all, so ranting is being taken for granted. But SDMB also deals in fighting ignorance. You might have some very good arguments against Moore and his works, but I would be much more prone to debating those arguments, if in fact they are your own. Talking about what he did, why he did it, the art/work of filmmaking, reporting, fiction and documentary gets kinda pointless if we don’t share a common frame of experience, i.e. having seen the film in question.
If you only have an anti-Moore axe to grind, by all means do that.
Or you can head over to the nearest Blockbuster and rent for… what? A buck?
I think it’s just hilarious that people who watch mainstream evening news programs that contain report after report that are edited to within an inch of their lives, suddenly have so much trouble with Moore and his nefarious editing tactics. They’d be better off ignoring him, but his lonely voice of dissent so troubles them that they dissect his works shot by shot.
Here’s some news for you: almost everything you have ever seen on television has been edited! And every process of editing imparts a particular viewpoint! Moore is no less guilty, but he is a little more honest and isn’t bandying this goofy notion of “impartiality” that most journalists lie to themselves about.
I mean, do you really need a frame-by-frame analysis to figure out that Charleton Heston is an asshole? That the war in Iraq is wrong? Is it that terrifying to even listen to an alternative viewpoint? Just disagree with his points if you want, but don’t make him out to be singularly deceptive.
BTW, I’m a leftie that isn’t a big fan. His movies are mildly entertaining but not very intelligent or provacative in my book.
Does any of Moore’s “lies” actually falsify the point he makes? Were there not actually NRA rallies in cities after tragic gun-related events? That was the point he was making, right?
See, but the difference is that when we see CH as Moses, we know it’s not footage at the conference. But when we see stock footage of CH at one rally to introduce him as the subject at another, similar rally, and nothing is explicitly stated to differentiate the two, you can’t blame the viewer from getting the impression that they represent the same event.
Plus, it’s not like the “cold dead hands” phrase is specific to a single time and place (unlike, say, Howard Dean’s whoop)–it’s a phrase that CH has been known to use often, so to include it as mere stock footage is inflammatory, since it is reasonable that some people will conflate the two separate clips together. Moore is being dishonest by omission–holding back information that could easily clarify a point, because the natural (though not inevitable) inclination is to associate one quote with a completely separate event.
Michael Moore is a liar. No doubt about it.
Well, the point he was asserting was that the NRA as an institution was so callous, heartless, and insensitive that they held a national conference near Columbine, ignoring the pleas of people who were still traumatised from the event.
What he conveniently leaves out is that most of the ancillary events related to the NRA event were cancelled out of deference to those families. Moore also omits what anyone with an iota of event planning experience knows: that it’s impossible to casually reschedule a national event (often years in the planning) of that size. With thousands of members, vendors, and organizations flying in, booking cars & hotels, and arranging travel plans, it would’ve been logistically unrealistic to call a halt to everything at the last minute.
I’m a leftie who’s never held a gun in his life, but even I’m willing to admit that the group made more than reasonable accomodations under the circumstances (and took quite a financial hit in the process). But Moore characterized it as Business As Usual, which was certainly not the case.
Er… what?
If the “cold, dead hands” is so well-known and so often-used that it’s become a Charlton heston “signature,” how is using it to introduce Charlton Heston improper?