Special NYT section on Fahrenheit 911

[struggle4progress]

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/movies/FAHRENHEIT-REF.html

Unruly Scorn Leaves Room for Restraint, but Not a Lot
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Mixing sober outrage with mischievous humor and blithely trampling the boundary between documentary and demagoguery, Mr. Moore takes wholesale aim at the Bush administration, whose tenure has been distinguished, in his view, by unparalleled and unmitigated arrogance, mendacity and incompetence.
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As the camera pans across copies of Mr. Bush's records from the Texas Air National Guard, and Mr. Moore reads that the future president was suspended for missing a medical examination, we hear a familiar electric guitar riff; it takes you a moment to remember that it comes from a song called "Cocaine."
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The most moving sections of "Fahrenheit 9/11" concern Lila Lipscomb, a cheerful state employee and former welfare recipient who wears a crucifix pendant and an American flag lapel pin. When we first meet her, she is proud of her family's military service — a daughter served in the Persian Gulf war and a son, Michael Pedersen, was a marine in Iraq — and grateful for the opportunities it has offered. Then Michael is killed in Karbala, and in sharing her grief with Mr. Moore, she also gives his film an eloquence that its most determined critics will find hard to dismiss. Mr. Bush is under no obligation to answer Mr. Moore's charges, but he will have to answer to Mrs. Lipscomb.

http://movies2.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/movies/23FAHR.html?pagewanted=1


Michael Moore Is Ready for His Close-Up

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After a year spent covering the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, I was recently allowed to attend a Hollywood screening. Based on that single viewing, and after separating out what is clearly presented as Mr. Moore's opinion from what is stated as fact, it seems safe to say that central assertions of fact in "Fahrenheit 9/11" are supported by the public record (indeed, many of them will be familiar to those who have closely followed Mr. Bush's political career).
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Mr. Moore charges that President Bush and his aides paid too little attention to warnings in the summer of 2001 that Al Qaeda was about to attack, including a detailed Aug. 6, 2001, C.I.A. briefing that warned of terrorism within the country's borders. In its final report next month, the Sept. 11 commission can be expected to offer support to this assertion. Mr. Moore says that instead of focusing on Al Qaeda, the president spent 42 percent of his first eight months in office on vacation; the figure came not from a conspiracy-hungry Web site but from a calculation by The Washington Post.
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http://movies2.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/movies/23FAHR.html?pagewanted=1


Now Playing: Eisner and Me

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Meanwhile, back home, the influence of Mr. Moore is very much visible in Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me," a bouncy anti-corporate polemic that explores the links between the rise of the fast food industry and the catastrophic expansion of the American waistline. Like Mr. Moore, Mr. Spurlock combines humor, didacticism and a personal style at once amiable and confrontational. He clearly enjoys the impromptu, on-camera conversations with McDonald's customers he meets in the course of his 30-day excursion into bad nutrition, and he also likes needling the flacks and bureaucrats whose job is to spin, euphemize and lie. Propelled by raucous pop music and unafraid of visual gimmickry, "Super Size Me" is both documentary and social satire, delivering its stinging message with brio and showmanship.
Fifteen years after "Roger and Me," which took on General Motors, this style of filmmaking seems so familiar, so naturally suited to populist finger-pointing, that it is easy to minimize the originality of Mr. Moore's first film and the discomfort it caused. For a long time, the ethics of documentary filmmaking, especially about weighty social and political issues, had been essentially journalistic. The films, even when their intentions were polemical, strove to be objective and rigorously impersonal. In the cinéma vérité rule book, the on-camera presence of the director was forbidden, and when documentarians did appear in their own movies it was in the role of self-effacing narrator or interviewer.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/movies/16SCOT.html?ex=1088049600&en=62ff7dbeb955e105&ei=5070


'Fahrenheit 9/11' Wins Top Prize at Cannes
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It was a night of many surprises: a 14-year-old boy won the award for best actor; the first Thai film ever placed in competition shared a jury prize with an American actress; and all three French films in competition were given awards.
But Mr. Moore's victory outdid all of them. For one thing, Cannes is notoriously indifferent to documentaries. "Fahrenheit 9/11" was one of only three nonfiction films allowed in competition in nearly 50 years.
The meaning of Mr. Moore's Palme, however, extends far beyond the cozy, glamorous world of Cannes. "Last time I was on an awards stage in Hollywood, all hell broke loose," Mr. Moore said in his acceptance speech, referring to his antiwar remarks at the Oscars last year. His new film, which does not yet have an American distributor, has already begun to stir passions in the United States, as the election approaches and the debate over the conduct of the war in Iraq grows more intense.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/22/movies/23canne.html?ex=1088049600&en=5600669bd88f231f&ei=5070


'Fahrenheit' Ads Use the Fuss the Film Is Causing

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The trailer for the film ends with Mr. Bush calling on all nations to do everything they can to stop terrorist killings. Then the camera pulls back, and the viewer sees the president with a golf club as he says, "Now watch this drive." The voice-over narration promises "the true story that will make your temperature rise."
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Tom Ortenberg, president of Lions Gate Films, the independent distributor for "Fahrenheit," said that the film was being marketed "in a totally nonpartisan manner," despite efforts by many to make ticket sales a referendum on the political mood.
"We're in all 50 states," Mr. Ortenberg said. "We're going in red states and blue states and purple states."

The liberal MoveOn political action committee began an Internet campaign to get people to pledge to see the film, and said yesterday that 110,703 had promised to do so. At theaters across the country, MoveOn plans to distribute leaflets inviting people to house parties around the country next Monday, when Mr. Moore will have an online conference call to talk about the film, said Adam Ruben, the field director of MoveOn.

... Move America Forward asked people to let theater operators know their objections to the film. It called Mr. Moore's film a propaganda flick and said it was getting "a chilly reception from skeptical movie theater operators." Lions Gate executives dismissed that claim and said no major theater chains had backed out of showing it.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/movies/23MARK.html


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[Gators4Dean]

1. Finally

Good reads, bout time thay stop trying to kill this flick.