OT: Fahrenheit 9/11 - a childish, liberal fantasy
Sharky
Wasn't Michael Moore an honored guest at John Kerry's nomination to the top
of the Democrat Party ticket? I guess that's par for the course of a
nominee who can't seem to separate fantasy from reality.
"On more than one occasion, I like Martin Sheen in "Apocalypse Now,"
took my patrol boat into Cambodia. In fact I remember spending
Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being
shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating
Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a
country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops
was very real." --- John F. Kerry, Source: Boston Herald Oct.14, 1979
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http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/08/17/1092508450528.html
Moore left leaning on his own
August 18, 2004
Michael Moore is like a peculiar left-leaning uncle who guffaws with scorn
through 60 Minutes every Sunday night.
Why do leftist critics hate Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11? Helen Razer
ponders.
With all the fashion sense of an unmade bed, and an equally muddled
grab-bag of cheerfully partisan politics, Michael Moore is without peer as
this season's most disorderly star.
When he's not busy fanning the flames of a cultural inferno, he seems to be
scooping up gold statuettes and embarrassing the heck out of studio moguls.
Rambling into plain view, as he does almost daily, the bloke in the
baseball cap has become, for many, the most annoying and inevitable pop
culture fixture since Paris Hilton was first caught on home video.
It's no great shock that proud pro-war conservatives find Moore every bit
as engaging as a single lesbian mother who lulls her child to sleep with
tales from the Koran.
An unabashed muckraker, Moore had no trouble in telling the New York Times
last June, "It's my personal aim that Bush is removed from the White
House". To conservative critics, Moore is a deceitful one-man-band playing
the requiem for The War on Terror. That he has a willing army of
right-leaning detractors is not exactly a bombshell.
What is a mild surprise, however, is the growing number of leftist critics
who find this ramshackle auteur both dangerous and distasteful. In a widely
cited piece from Microsoft Corp's website slate.com, soft-left, stylish
celeb hack Christopher Hitchens let fly in a piece titled Unfairenheit
9/11: "To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of
a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental."
When Hitchens, a prominent contributor to Vanity Fair and the United States
liberal weekly magazine The Nation for more than 20 years, lobbed his
scatological chestnuts, open season was declared on an ample target. Moore,
the cuddly clown prince of conspiracy theories, had a new and unlikely
enemy.
Avowedly progressive critics attacked his Bush-burning, high-grossing film,
Fahrenheit 9/11, as childish, liberal fantasy. Unlikely commentators
worldwide have now joined in, accusing Moore of reheating "half-baked
fantasies" to audiences hungry for conspiracy.
Australian critics of all hues have not been at all reticent to slap Moore
with similar accusations. According to many commentators, he is guilty of
joining the dots with a poison pen; of confusing historical fact with
emotional memory; and, worst of all, becoming an extraordinarily well-paid
subject of dinner-party conversation.
It has become chic in the most unlikely circles to dismiss Fahrenheit 9/11
as low-down, agitprop trickery. For some leftist commentators, its director
has become a one-dimensional commodity every bit as uncool and omniscient
as the Starbucks coffee chain.
There's a relentless queue of punters, however, who take F9/11 much more
seriously than they might a propagandist Frappuccino with a twist. To eager
Melbourne audiences and queuing admirers worldwide, Moore has emerged as
the leading international roaster of specialty-brand doubt.
Moore himself has freely admitted that his most commercially successful
work to date is a visceral piece intended to rouse the emotions and oust
the US President. Many viewers of the work willingly take this emotional
ride, if not all of its occasionally shaky details.
Certainly, the film cannot be divorced from its political context. F9/11 is
nothing if not a film with a capital-A agenda. Moore has made this point
explicitly in interview and, significantly, within his film.
No one who sits through F9/11 could genuinely suppose for a moment that it
presents a scrupulous and impartial expression of the truth. The
pronouncements of world leaders are spliced into TV westerns; jokes abound;
and our host shows himself commandeering an ice-cream van. There is rarely
an instant where we are unaware that we are watching a Moore translation of
reality rather than reality itself.
It is Moore's iconoclastic enthusiasm that wins him fans, and not his
supposed Leni Riefenstahl-like skill as a propagandist.
As a propagandist, he's no great shakes. As an especially funny human, he
excels.
Within F9/11, there are multiple instances where audiences are reminded
that the "reality" they are watching is filtered through the grubby Moore
lens. This film repeatedly disobeys documentary convention with gags,
down-home tropes and a gaudy rock'n'roll soundtrack.
While Moore's politics might be akin to documentary makers John Pilger or
David Bradbury, his filmmaking techniques are not. F9/11 is no professedly
unbiased bleeding heart doco shot through a gritty lens. This entertainment
is, very explicitly, armchair current affairs.
Like a peculiar left-leaning uncle who guffaws with scorn through 60
Minutes every Sunday night, Moore lets us know: this is the stuff that I've
been thinking about.
In the thrust of fashionably left zeal to dismiss the Moore Franchise as
cheesy and cheap, many commentators overlook the details that make F9/11 so
very engaging.
In an apparent eagerness to safeguard the defenceless public, critics
repeatedly warn that this documentary, although it may appear very real,
depends on the fairytale of objectivity. We are repeatedly cautioned that
Moore's apparent realism is, in fact, just his own version of the truth.
This is precisely why so many loved F9/11 to bits. Not because it's a
reliable document of irrefutable fact, but because it's the charming
handiwork of a chunky man from Flint, Michigan, with whom audiences
wouldn't mind sharing a beer and an idle afternoon.
We know that this document is The Truth According to Moore. We are aware
that it's every bit as skewed as the six o'clock news.
The film's refusal to be a genuine documentary and its folksy partiality
have landed it in the multiplexes of the Western world.
However, it is not just Moore's charming gall that has delighted audiences
and appalled so many liberal critics. Hitchens and others have specifically
disputed many of Moore's claims. One writer in this newspaper insisted that
most of Moore's assertions "disintegrate on any contact with evidence".
While Moore does maintain the same fluid relationship with truth that any
raconteur might is beyond dispute. That media commentators might want to
unpick these assertions for the benefit of suggestible audiences is not
surprising.
What is astounding is the volume of this painstaking critique and the fact
that it so often originates from those who might be predisposed to a
Moore's Eye View of the world.
F9/11 is not a documentary. It is a gloriously rickety vehicle for Moore
and his passions. That being said, many of its broad central contentions
are difficult to dispute: George Bush is marginally less statesmanlike than
Britney Spears; the urban poor are over-represented in the US military; the
war in Iraq has been shamelessly sanitised for electronic media
consumption.
Moore cannot be blamed for deluding audiences any more than he could be
legitimately accused of being a snappy dresser. While his document is a
polemic, it is not, in the strictest sense, a "lie".
He is not guilty of untruth. What he is guilty of is outrageous success.
Moore's fault is to take a marginal political view and make it sizzle. He
makes current events much more entertaining than most journalists could.
Perhaps that's why Hitchens remains so miffed.
Harlow
http://www.democracynow.org/
"Fahrenheit 9/11"
http://www.michaelmoore.com/
The Saudi Connection:
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/conspiracytheories/saudi.html
The Bush-bin Laden Connection [Nov. 9, 2001]
BY ANDREW WHEAT
http://www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=480
"Contrary to its title, 'Michael Moore Hates America'
isn't a hatchet job on the filmmaker. It's a journey
across the nation where we meet celebrities, scholars
and average folks alike, all of whom are living the
American Dream and proving that America is a great
place to be! In the process, we'll look at Michael
Moore's claims about the country, its people, and
our way of life."
Mike Wilson
Director, Michael Moore Hates America
http://www.michaelmoorehatesamerica.com/
Found! George W. Bush's Resume!
http://www.graffiks.com/dylan_articles/bush_resume.html
compiled by James Dylan, 18th Airborne Corps soldier in the US Army
http://www.graffiks.com/dylan_articles/dylan.html
One Thousand Reasons
http://www.thousandreasons.org/
Stalin's Research Institute of the Parallel World
http://www.ufoarea.com/limits_time.html
Sharky <m...@privacy.net> wrote in message news:<fdj5i0l3r1irbnb07...@4ax.com>...