(my beloved) David Denby on Fahrenheit 9/11

[librechik]

snip

“Fahrenheit 9/11” has a kind of necessary shock value: it reveals the underside of the war, the bloody messes not shown on news broadcasts. Moore makes use of footage given to him by American and foreign cameramen—scenes of Americans who were blown apart near Baghdad, or of maimed and nerve-shattered men trying to put their lives back together in a Washington hospital or at their home base. One soldier achieves a memorable clarity as he says, fighting pain and incapacity, that he’s disgusted by the lying way the Republican Party conducts its business. However embroiled the movie becomes in the upcoming election, no attack can lessen the impact of these scenes or diminish the anger they create in the audience; Moore, for once, offers experience rather than attitudes, sharp immediate suffering rather than his usual exasperated nostalgia for, say, the good old days, when the unions were strong and the workingman was king. If the rest of the movie had been created with this kind of directness and force, Michael Moore would have made a masterpiece....

The great documentary filmmakers of today—Frederick Wiseman, Marcel Ophuls, and Andrew Jarecki (of “Capturing the Friedmans”)—know that truth in an absolute sense is unattainable. It’s not even imaginable. Who would validate it? Who could say that another interpretation besides the filmmaker’s was out of the question? Movies are made by men and women, not by gods hurling thunderbolts of certitude. But the great documentary filmmakers at least make an attempt, however inadequate, compromised, or hopeless, to arrive at a many-sided understanding of some complex situation. Michael Moore is not that kind of filmmaker, nor does he want to be. He calls himself a satirist, but he’s less a satirist than a polemicist, a practitioner of mocking political burlesque: he doesn’t discover many new things but punches up what he already knows or suspects; he doesn’t challenge or persuade an audience but tickles or irritates it. He’s too slipshod intellectually to convince many except the already convinced, too eager to throw another treated log onto the fire of righteous anger.

Yet Moore has talent and mother wit, and he has become a significant figure in this culture—a shrewdly manipulative humorist-crank sticking pins in the hide of American self-esteem. ..." (more)

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/?040628crci_cinema

[MontecitoDem]

1. I guess we'll see if this is right:

"He’s too slipshod intellectually to convince many except the already convinced, too eager to throw another treated log onto the fire of righteous anger." This may have less to do with Moore and the film, and a lot to do with the polarization in our country. Few are left to be decided.

Moore on GMA argued that he was presenting the side of these issues that have been ignored by the media for 4 years. And he's only using 2 hours to do it. Yes, it's an op-ed piece, he agreed, but it's a factual one.

Haven't seen it yet, so can't really analyze the review until friday night!

[thebigidea]

2. blegh

"and I’m not entirely impressed by the standing ovation and the Palme d’Or that the film received recently at Cannes, where the audience may have been all too eager to applaud its own detestation of the United States."

Blegh... and what a cheap ending:

"Michael Moore has become a sensational entertainer of the already converted, but his enduring problem as a political artist is that he has never known how to change anyone’s politics."

But I'm sure this guy has. Or could point out a list of "political artists" who have.

Man, I hate film critics. What a horrible trade.

[the Kelly Gang]

3. a bit partonising

[struggle4progress]

4. "Moore is a genuine populist, but what he can’t deal with ...

... is the unpleasant possibility that Bush .. has made a shrewd assessment of the lack of virtue and curiosity in the American public. A lot of Americans still admire the ignorant, smirking, chest-out, crotch-forward triumphalism."

Lots of us need to think carefully about this. :(

[pretzel4gore]

5. the one percenters.....

have always been the liberals, the forgiving, the generous in spirit and the good samaritan (which is why they stand out so much)....bikers, with their greedy selfish brutal dishonest mentality, are in the vast majority of humanity throughout its history. It took immense work, and courage, to change the norms of how the mob thinks.....aristotle etc said democracy CANNOT WORK cuz human beings are...human, but democracy does work, and will work in future, if the geebushes of the world, and their mediawhores, can be controlled.

[struggle4progress]

6. To win elections, we can't completely disregard what you call ....

the greedy selfish brutal dishonest mentality.