Instant Movie Review: Fahrenheit 9/11

[serinde]

It struck me as somewhat uneven: a mix of extremely powerful bits and long, sort of rambling bits. But when it's good, it's very good.

I haven't seen any other Moore efforts, so I have no idea what his usual style is like; whether his other documentaries wander around quite so much, or whether there were just so many angles to choose from to harsh on the Bushies that he suffered option paralysis. There didn't seem to be a cogent point, a particular argument, other than "These guys suck in myriad ways". Mind you, I fully agree with that assessment, but I think the movie would have benefited all around from a more cohesive vision. Tied in with that, some editing: The most egregious example to me is how the section laying out the Bush family and friends' links to the Saudis belabored the fact into the ground well past the point where even the thickest brick in the audience would've got it. And then we still had to wait through a montage of pictures of Bush Sr. shaking hands with members of the House of Saud, the House of Bin Laden, etc. etc. (to the sound of "Shiny Happy People", which would've been funnier if my thought bubble hadn't been along the lines of "Yes, and then my ears, I understand, let's GET ON WITH IT!").

That being said. The powerful bits were like unto a punch in the breadbasket. When covering Sept. 11 itself, there was a certain laudable delicacy--not a single shot of the Twin Towers or the airplanes--but it brought me right the hell back to the several hour gap, right after the towers fell, when I didn't know what happened to sweh (for those of you who don't know, he works only a few blocks from WTC) and all you could see of lower Manhattan was a hideous cloud of debris. I will confess that some tears flowed in the theater there. The sections covering matters in Iraq also had quite an impact. Not just the injured and the dead, the mourning of the survivors, or even the shots of those contractors' burned bodies dragged through the streets (which somehow I'd never seen before--I knew about it, of course, but had not seen any of the images), but the bewilderment on all sides, the anger and confusion, etc.

A really telling moment: they spoke a couple of times to a woman in Michigan, salt-of-the-earth type, whose son was killed in Iraq. On a subsequent trip to Washington for work, she went to the White House, just to try and get some closure. Out front, a Muslim woman had a little tent set up, protesting the deaths of Iraqi civilians, and calling out to passers-by. As the Michigan lady stopped to commiserate, a well-groomed stylish woman walked by, gestured to the Muslim lady's photos of the dead, and said "It's all staged, you know. None of it's real." Our heroine got right up in her face and said "My son is dead. That's not staged. He died in [Iraqi town name I don't remember]. This is real." And she walked away. The other shouted after her "Well, you should blame Bin Laden for that!". There are lots of things to say and think about this scene, but the biggest one I took away is just how freakin' uninformed Our Fellow Americans are. I mean, here in tree-huggin' hippy liberal land that's customarily blamed on Joe Sixpack who only watches Fox News and NASCAR, but the bitch in question here was no trailer trash. And that's important to realize--that the cluelessness is rampant at all levels.

In sum, there wasn't much in the way of new information for anyone who actually reads all the damn political threads in panix.chat, but the presentation made a lot of it more visceral. The (packed) crowd was getting unruly towards the end; there were people shouting vituperation when Bush or one of his people showed up on-screen with some smug line (not to mention when a Taliban ambassador, invited & received by Bush when he was Texas governor, told a woman reporter that he felt sorry for her husband for having a woman like her to manage). Much applause at the end. Now, this is probably to be expected in NYC; I'd be curious to see it in Ohio and note the reaction.

For myself, I can't judge what lasting effect it may have. My opinions were already pretty well-formed on the whole topic, so it was a certain amount of preaching to the choir. However, I can say that it dramatically decreased my tolerance for Bushistic platitudes; when we got home, sweh downloaded an interview much spoken of on panix.chat, that being Bush vs. Irish TV (requires RealVideo or something that can fake it). I had to walk out of the room in fury at what a fatuous, condescending, smug son of a bitch our President is acting like when representing me and mine to the rest of the world. It is to vomit. Copiously.

Comments

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

It's not even a question of thinking for themselves; people who, for whatever reason, don't have access to the full drinking-from-the-firehose flood of information that is the Internet--or who don't have time to devote to it beyond reading their mail and the occasional pr0n--only have the administration's data, as pushed out to the national media which is really falling down on the job, to base their decisions on. Garbage in, garbage out.