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Another one - sorry!

Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Sorry for posting yet another Michael Moore related topic but I just found this review of Fahrenheit 9-11 in The Week and thought it was really good - gives both sides of the debate as it were!


THE WEEK

Fahrenheit 9-11 (two stars out of five)
Michael Moore's no-holds-barred attack on the Bush administration. (certificate 15, 2 hrs 2 mins)

It has been hailed as the movie that will bring down George W.Bush. Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's scathing critique of America's war on terror, is breaking box office records. And it certainly is an epoch=defining film said Henry Fitzherbert in the Sunday Express. Alas its also "manipulative, sloppy and unbalanced". Moore makes a number of startling claims - among them the contention that Bush launched the war on Iraq to divert attention from his family’s links with Osama bin Laden. The argument seems chilling and persuasive at the time, yet on leaving the cinema “you fail to recall a single smoking gun. There is much insinuation, but no hard and fast accusation.”

Crammed with factual distortion and innuendo, this “repellent movie” is not making history so much as rewriting it “in cartoon form”, said Christopher Tookey in the Daily Mail. At times, the “rabble rousing rhetoric” makes Nazi propaganda films seem balanced. To compensate for the dearth of hard facts, Moore shamelessly tugs at heartstrings with footage of dead Iraqi babies and grieving mothers. This hysterical emotionalism destroys all semblance of objectivity, agreed Cosmo Landesman in The Sunday Times. But in Michael Moore-land, “there are no shades of grey; history is cleansed of complexity, politics is free of paradox”.

And that’s why the film is so popular, said Jenny McCartney. It’s filled with “cheap, crowd-pleasing stereotypes”: Bush is painted as a “lazy corrupt and arrogant fool”; pre-invasion Iraq, meanwhile, is presented as an Eden of “smiling women and laughing children flying kites”. The growing threat of terrorism is barely mentioned. And yet there are moments of subtlety, said Johann Hari in the Independent. In his coverage of September 11, Moore simply lets the screen go black: all the viewer hears is the sound of planes crashing and people crying. His probing of the relationship between the Bushes and the House of Saud – something the US media has ignored for far too long – is similarly devastating. Alas for the rest of the film Moore reverts to “fast food politics”, hurling as many allegations as he can, “in the hope that a few will stick”.

It has become de rigeur to mock Moore, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. After all, we ware accustomed to “fence-sitting” documentaries, which “guide the bull elegantly through the china shop leaving the crockery undamaged”. But this no holds barred assault is a breath of fresh air at a time when pro-war liberals are “too sophisticated or amnesiac to be angry about the grotesque falsehood of WMD”. I didn’t want to like this film said Sukhdev Sanhu in The Daily Telegraph. But I couldn’t help laughing at Moore’s “cheap shots” and “low blows”. His crusading zeal was infectious and the movies “vulgar, dynamic energy” symbolises what is best about American culture. Whatever your political bent, we should take heart that a low-budget documentary about foreign politics is luring millions of Americans to the multiplex. “That alone is some achievement”.

Comments

  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    haha bit too long for people to be bothered to read i suppose ;)
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