Posted on 06/25/2004 7:47:27 AM PDT by jtminton
Michael Moore is a loudmouth, a bully, a merry left-wing prankster who enjoys yelling "fire" in a crowded theater even when there's no smoke for miles. His movies, including Roger & Me (1989) and Bowling for Columbine (2002), are as provocative and raucous as they are confused and easily dismissed.
Until now, anyway.
Moore's hotly anticipated Fahrenheit 9/11, opening today throughout the Metroplex, is the most heartfelt and measured work of the director's career. Moore has a vast and knotty case to make. He's out to prove that President Bush is colossally ill-suited for his job and that the Bush administration has deliberately misled the American public to start a war against Iraq driven entirely by personal interests.
Moore achieves all that and, well, more. Fahrenheit 9/11 is something unprecedented in American film history, a work of mass popular art designed solely to get a sitting president kicked out of office. It's so powerful and so damning, it may end up doing just that.
Moore begins with the events of 9-11 and home-video footage, heretofore unseen, of Bush sitting in a Florida classroom, listening to schoolchildren read, even after he's been alerted that America is under attack. Why, Moore asks, did the president sit there for seven minutes doing nothing? Could it have been because this is a president who cannot act unless someone tells him what to do?
This is merely the beginning of an audacious, superbly argued political broadside. The next section of the movie is devoted to a thorough explication of the Bush family's connections to the bin Ladens. For readers of Moore's book Dude, Where's My Country? -- or close readers of any major metropolitan newspaper -- none of this will seem particularly groundbreaking. That's one of the minor shortcomings of Fahrenheit 9/11. Unlike Bowling for Columbine, with its provocations about a "culture of fear" that compels Americans to violence and armament, the ideas in this film are well-trod.
But Fahrenheit 9/11 also reveals a filmmaker who has beautifully come into his own -- a screamer who has learned the virtues of speaking in dulcet tones. Moore keeps the cheap, anti-Bush drive-bys to a minimum, so that when he does deliver them (such as the montage of Bush at his ranch, played to the Go-Go's' Vacation) they're hilarious.
Nor does Moore come off, as he often does, as a self-serving megalomaniac. Indeed, his trademark guerrilla theater tactics are reduced to just one funny and pointed scene in which he harangues members of Congress to enlist their own children in the military.
Instead, the second half of Fahrenheit 9/11 focuses squarely on a handful of real people living with consequences of the Bush administration's actions. In one sequence, Moore follows a pair of Marine recruiters who've been trained to seize upon the most disenfranchised teens in the most impoverished towns in America and seduce them with promises of martial glory. Moore's argument -- that the rich use the poor to fight wars that serve to keep the poor down and allow the rich to get richer -- is illustrated with a mixture of compassion and moral outrage that may very well leave you in tears.
Does the movie -- as its critics will no doubt suggest -- preach to the leftist converted? Certainly. But it also preaches to the undecided and, perhaps most significantly, to those who have disengaged from the American political system altogether. Most of Moore's criticisms of Bush have been lodged elsewhere, but here is a compendium, fashioned into a work of accessible, mainstream entertainment. He makes politics pop. It's a two-hour anti-Bush campaign ad that is never anything less than enthralling, enlivening, funny and deeply touching.
Moore will no doubt be attacked as a liar, and some of those attacks may be legitimate. (That has certainly been the case with his previous movies.) But Fahrenheit 9/11 conveys deeper truths that can't be disputed. Throughout the film, Moore follows a woman named Lila Lipscomb whose son was killed in the Iraq war. Near the end, Moore watches as she commiserates with an anti-war protester in front of the White House. Another woman comes from out of nowhere, saying that the Bush administration shouldn't be blamed for the war.
"Blame al Qaeda," the woman shouts.
Lipscomb goes berserk. In the process, she becomes the movie's heroine. She screams at this knee-jerk war supporter. She rails about "ignorance." She's sick of people who make up their minds without knowing the full story.
That's the final message of this movie, and it's what makes it so much more than mere agitprop. Ignorance is fundamentally anti-American, says Fahrenheit 9/11, and those who encourage that ignorance are the true enemies of the state. Beyond the partisanship, Moore has served up a fierce and universal cry for political engagement.
You walk out of Fahrenheit 9/11 eager to ask questions, demand answers and effect change -- you walk out in a state of enlightenment. It's thrilling.
GRADE: A-
Fahrenheit 9/11
Director: Michael Moore
Length: 119 min.
Rated: R (violent images, strong language)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Christopher Kelly, (817) 390-7032 cmkelly@star-telegram.com
This guy needs a life.
Your saying Shrek2 is not for this?
Well, you can probably do it during a screening of Fahrenheit 911 since, you know, you'd be the only person there and all.
No. Shrek would have married Donkey if that was the case.
Yeah - saw the movie...the people getting married were a ummm...big green male ogre and a ummm...big green female ogre...
Donkey was interested in a guy in that movie?? Don't remember that...I do remember pinnochio wearing a thong...but I just thought that was really freaking funny...
But about the main topic of this thread: of course a liberal would be "enlightend" by this move - it's a movie made of lies (at the very least, a movie that ignores the actual truth). Liberals are liars, who like to rewrite history for their own ends. No one should be surprised when this stupid movie does well in liberal cities...
No, Shrek2 is NOT for gay marriage.
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