I'm going to see it today so I'll let you know what I think later.
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Fahrenheit 9/11
Moore's anti-Bush outrage fuels his riveting 'Fahrenheit 9/11'
By Ty Burr, Globe Staff
Boston Globe
Published: 06/23/2004
For my money, the key scene in "Fahrenheit 9/11" -- the moment on which Michael Moore's blistering yet frustratingly blunt object of a movie hinges -- is when President Bush first hears that a second plane has hit the World Trade Center and that the United States is under attack. He was at a photo op in Florida, remember, reading "My Pet Goat" to a schoolroom full of children, and his expression of pole-axed confusion is by now a matter of public iconography.
But Moore got his hands on all the footage, and he time-lapses us through the entire seven minutes that the president sat in that classroom and, knowing terrorists were using passenger planes as missiles on innocent Americans, stared like a stuffed deer into space. We've recently learned that this was around the time Vice President Dick Cheney was ordering fighter planes to shoot down the hijacked jets and our government's emergency-response mechanisms were convulsing with chaos. You look at Bush, whose circuitry seems quite simply to have overloaded, and think, "This is the leader of the free world?"
Moral scorn can be a beautiful thing. Beautifully patriotic, too -- one thinks of Joseph Welch asking Senator Joseph McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" And for many people who are deeply unhappy with the current administration and the war it has chosen to wage, the wish for someone to come along and articulate that scorn has acquired desperate proportions.
Of such things are 15-minute standing ovations and top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival made, as well as cheering premieres in New York and Los Angeles. "Fahrenheit 9/11," which opens to-day in New York and locally on Friday, has been so feverishly anticipated, in fact, that some audiences will be willing to ignore the film's lapses, the better to embrace its energizing rhetoric. That would be a mistake. "Fahrenheit" is worth the wait, but it should come with a label: "Chew before Swallowing." There are no new smoking guns here. Instead, Moore gives us the case against George W. Bush, a fat compendium of previously reported crimes, errors, sins, and grievances delivered in the director's patented tone of vaudevillian social outrage. And it works for much of the film; indeed, the first two-thirds of "Fahrenheit" are chunky with damning information and imagery.
Moore ice-skates quickly but vividly over the 2000 Florida vote debacle and the placement of Bush relations, appointees, and sympathizers in crucial posts, from Fox News to the Supreme Court. He distills much of the information in such books as Craig Unger's "House of Bush, House of Saud" and Richard A. Clarke's "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" and presents it to the non-reading public with bitter wit and an eye for the telling visual.
It's one thing, for instance, to read about the administration's attempts to hush up the Bush family's longstanding ties to the rulers of Saudi Arabia and quite another to see two versions of George W. Bush's military records, the uncensored one providing the name of the fellow reservist and Texas money manager who allegedly funneled bin Laden family funds into Bush's businesses and political campaigns.
Moore also pauses to ridicule, and "Fahrenheit 9/11" is rich with the mockery of powerful people shooting themselves in the foot. The media and celebrities come in for lumps -- there's a drive-by sound bite from Britney Spears that will destroy any remaining sympathy you might have for the singer -- but Bush and his pals are Moore's prime targets, from John Ashcroft unctuously crooning the self-penned "Let the Eagle Soar" to Paul Wolfowitz spitting on his comb before running it through his hair prior to an interview.
As amusing as this is, it's awfully easy stuff. With the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Moore has to get down to business, and he knows it. He conveys the tragedy itself with remarkable (for him) understatement, leaving the screen black and letting the soundtrack pull us back. He caustically details the administration's manipulation of public fear and spends necessary time on the Orwellian implications of the Patriot Act. (Since no one on Capitol Hill seems to have actually read the act, Moore hires an ice cream truck to drive around Washington while he reads the bill over the loudspeaker.)
There comes a point in any Michael Moore movie, though, where the filmmaker crosses the line from populism into shamelessness. In "Bowling for Columbine," it was when he left the photo of a shooting victim on then NRA president Charlton Heston's doorstep. In "Fahrenheit 9/11," that moment comes when Moore goes back to his hometown of Flint, Mich., and focuses on Lila Lipscomb, a lower-middle-class mother of a US soldier in Iraq.
Already the movie's treatment of the war has blown hot and cold. Moore gets the comedy of Army recruiters trolling shopping mall parking lots for fresh meat, and the tragedy of the Bush administration's proposed cuts in military pay and benefits. Footage of atrocities and abuses similar to those at Abu Ghraib prison are here and terrible to see. At the same time, one tiny sentence about Saddam Hussein's crimes against his own people might have gone a long way to silence Moore's critics.
With the death of Lipscomb's son in Iraq, Moore himself turns exploiter. Her grief, of course, is genuine. So is our response to it. But when Moore prompts her to read her son's final letter out loud, and she cries helplessly as she does so, it becomes clear that the filmmaker's intrusiveness knows no bounds, and that he would sacrifice the dignity of even his beloved Flintians for political theater.
For all that, "Fahrenheit 9/11" remains the summer's must-see. Not because Disney tried to censor it; please, the film studio told its Miramax subsidiary it wouldn't distribute the film well over a year ago, and the recent mini-scandal is both pure PR and exactly what Moore and the Weinstein brothers should have done to get the movie to as many people as possible.
No, "Fahrenheit" should be seen because it takes off the gloves and wades into the fray, because it synthesizes the anti-Bush argument like no other work before it, and because it forces you to decide for yourself exactly where passion starts to warp point of view.
One last thought: "Fahrenheit 9/11" is many things, but for pity's sake let's not call it a documentary. To do so abuses the word and shames the good and balanced work done by filmmakers as storied as D.A. Pennebaker and Barbara Kopple, as current as Jehane Noujaim of "Control Room," and as hard-working and unheralded as Carma Hinton of Brookline's Long Bow Group.
Moore, by contrast, is a maker of agit-entertainment, of cinematic essays whose express purpose is to convince. That's fine as long as he's respecting his audience. But when he pushes the camera into Lipscomb's weeping face and keeps it there, he's saying that he doesn't trust you to think for yourself. And that is when he becomes his enemy.
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Fahrenheit 9/11
( R )
Firestarter: Michael Moore's `Fahrenheit 9/11' rakes Bush over the coals
Review by James Verniere
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
At the end of ``Fahrenheit 9/11,'' Michael Moore's scathing indictment of President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq, I half expected to hear a voice saying, ``I'm John Kerry, and I approved this ad.'' But you needn't spend money on negative campaign ads when you have Moore to do your dirty work for you.
Is it art or is it propaganda?
Since one person's freedom of expression is another person's treason, you may need to see it to answer that question. And the answer may be that, like Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 landmark ``Triumph of the Will,'' ``Fahrenheit 9/11,'' the most controversial film since ``The Passion of the Christ,'' is both. A brickbat tossed into the most volatile and vituperative presidential campaign in recent memory, ``Fahrenheit 9/11'' is a terrifically entertaining piece of attack cinema offering few revelations to news junkies, Bush-bashers or anyone familiar with the content of Craig Unger's ``House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties.''
Moore, a political caricaturist and a walking caricature, reiterates all the usual anti-Bush talking points: the dubious National Guard service, the failed business ventures, the invalidity of his election, the exorbitant pre-9/11 vacation time, the bin Laden-is-set-to-attack memo, the missing WMDs and the political exploitation of the terrorist threat.
The scene every viewer will be talking about is astonishing footage shot on 9/11 inside a Florida elementary school where Bush sits reading ``My Pet Goat'' with the children for nearly 7 minutes after an aide has informed him of the second plane striking the World Trade Center. The look of anguished uncertainty on the president's face cannot inspire confidence.
Nor does footage of the president horsing around like a bratty frat boy seconds before going on the air to inform the nation of the beginning of the bombing in Iraq.
For ``Milestones in Geek History,'' you can't beat a shot of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz sucking on his comb prior to using it (eeew!) before a TV interview.
Shots of U.S. abuse of prisoners already have made waves, because Moore kept them under wraps until after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. While Muckraker General Moore expresses respect and concern for our troops, ``Fahrenheit 9/11,'' like ``The Control Room,'' the current documentary about Al-Jazeera TV, contains more footage of injured and killed Iraqi civilians than we saw on any U.S. news program. Moore also spends time with soldiers who have lost limbs in the conflict and with an angry and disillusioned mother of a dead sergeant.
Moore's stated aim is ``regime change,'' and ``Fahrenheit 9/11'' does not pretend to be fair and balanced. But it is often very funny, and if what Moore says about bin Laden family money funding Bush's Texas oil businesses is true, it might, as Moore also claims, explain why the Bush administration airlifted the powerful Saudi family safely back home (in the film, to the tune of The Animals' ``We Gotta Get Out of This Place''). This was at a time when most Americans were still grounded by 9/11 hysteria.
Moore claims his facts have been carefully vetted. But he has also left no doubt whatsoever that his intention was to create a film as damaging to the president as possible.
Another plus for the film is that Moore, who won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, is less of a presence than he has been in his previous movies, although there is a hilarious moment in which Bush acknowledges Moore in a crowd and tells him, ``Go find real work.''
The Bush gang - Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Ashcroft - takes its lumps, and Karl Rove is conspicuous in his absence. The film is for the most part devoid of the squirm-inducing pranks Moore is known for. Moore does, however, confront several members of Congress outside the Capitol and ask why their children haven't signed up for a tour in Iraq.
Notably, ``Fahrenheit 9/11'' comes to many of the same conclusions as the recent 9/11 panel. The film will play to the choir and may influence voters, especially younger ones, who are straddling the fence. This may drive the conservatives into a boiling frenzy against Moore and Hollywood, even though Disney backed down when the time came to distribute this hot potato.
At times, Moore can take on the scolding tone of the Church Lady, and you expect him to squeal, ``Isn't that special?'' or to wonder aloud if the president is in league with . . . Satan. But you must also congratulate the Academy Award-winning writer-director. Moore (``Roger and Me,'' ``Bowling for Columbine'') has figured out how to make the nonfiction film, once the bane of the box office, into the entertaining, hot-button, hot-topic movie of the day. He can be largely credited with the emergence of the nonfiction film as the ascendant, if not the dominant, film art form of the new millennium.
If you want to be part of the national debate, ``Fahrenheit 9/11 is must-see cinema. This is the true event film of the summer. At a time when the film industry is turning out sugarcoated, content-free junk, Moore has given American viewers a renewed taste for raw meat.
