It's an entertaining movie, with some enjoyment to be had watching it, and that's what I generally base my film reviews on. Was it a good movie, did I enjoy watching it, what did it do well and what did it do poorly, etc. That works for most movies, but with F9/11 it's not adequate. Moore's film is meant to be political, to score critical points against George Bush, while also entertaining and informing the viewers enough to keep them watching.

So do I review it on those grounds? Do I give it points or take points away for it not being objective?  Do I rate how effectively it shoots holes in the current president or knock it down for doing so little else?  Do I give it points for bringing up some issues that needed addressing, or take points away for the things it didn't cover that I think it should have?

I see a lot of good topics to discuss and debate about the film, but I don't see an easy way to stick actual 1-10 scores on various aspects of it. I probably need a new categorized scoring system that's just for documentaries, come to think of it.  I usually score on the following, and of those how many are appropriate for F9/11?

Script/Story: 1-10
Acting/Casting: 1-10
Action: 1-10
Humor: 1-10
Eye Candy: 1-10
Fun Factor: 1-10
Replayability: 1-10
Overall: 1-10

Well, Overall works, and maybe Replayability, but the others are basically irrelevant in this case. So what should a documentary be rated on, and how does F9/11 stack up in these categories?

Held My Interest: 7
Presented/Explained the Issue Clearly: 6
Contained New Information: 4
Replayability: 4
Was Entertaining: 6
Overall: 7

Those seem okay, though Replayability is iffy, since most of the time a non-fiction film is only going to be of interest once, so you can learn from it and absorb its message. And while it's true that all of the usual movie categories are very subjective as well, the "contains new info" one is especially flexible in this case since as I said last blog, how much of the stuff in this movie is new and powerful to the viewer will depend greatly on what the viewer knows going in.  I'd read most of the information in the past, often in far greater detail than the movie presented it in, so for that reason my scores on Explains the Issue and Contains new Info aren't very high. If I were going in with no more info than I got watching FOX News (or CNN, of ABC, etc) and skimming my local paper, I'd imagine the movie would have opened up my skull like a can opener.

I want to make clear that I do recommend the movie to everyone, with the possible exception of people who follow the news as much as I do, and know as much about this stuff as I do. In your case you won't dislike it, but you won't be exactly riveted to the screen.  For the rest of you, if anything I mention in the rest of this review is not old news to you, you really should see F9/11. It'll be educational, and it's entertaining, switching gears and scenes quite often. It's not at all a boring, fact-stuffed, talking head documentary, like some Ken Burns snooze fest on PBS. (I actually like those sort of documentaries, since they're so full of info, but that's not the point.

For my F9/11 review, do I write it based on how it worked for me, or how I imagine it would work for the hypothetical average person? Or both?  And how much do I assume the average person knew, going in? I thought the fact that Bush started his "read to the children" thing in the Florida classroom after plane #1 hit, and continued it for 10 minutes even after plane #2 hit was common knowledge, but I've seen several reviews mention that as shocking; someone wrote in to Ebert's Movie Answer Man feature several weeks ago all pissed off and refusing to believe that that could have happened.  I read about that numerous times last year, and blogged about it on May 12, 2003, for one time. I recall seeing the streaming video of Bush sitting there, with a time stamp on it, and think I blogged about that as well, though I can't find it in my archives right this minute.

Anyway, my point isn't that I'm so much better informed, it's that I don't see how it's possible to judge just what people know and what they don't.

A major chunk of F9/11 that didn't work very well for me at all was the bereaved mother section. I forget her name, but she's a 50ish white female whose son died in Iraq. His last letter home talks about how much he hates it there, how Bush is to blame for putting them there for nothing, etc, and mom obviously takes that to heart when he dies a week later. Moore spends a lot of time with her, filming her at home, while she reads the letter and cries, while she's in Washington looking at the White House and breaking down, etc. It's obvious that she's upset, that her grief is genuine, and I certainly don't begrudge her that. But so what? Of course she's upset and crying; her son just died, and he died for a stupid reason, fighting a stupid war. But I repeat, so what? She's entitled to her grief and I wish her son had never been there to die in the first place, but a mother crying for her dead son isn't exactly proof of the righteousness or evilness of any given cause.

Moms cry when their sons die in drug busts, when they get the capital punishment needle after being convicted of mass murder, when they die drunk driving, etc. Did the mothers of sons who died fighting Nazis in WWII feel any less sorrow because they knew their sons had died in a necessary war, rather than Bush's little Iraqi excursion? Well, maybe. but my point remains the same; that tears and sorrow prove nothing.

The other 800+ US soldiers who have died probably all have sad moms as well, and probably quite a few of them know enough to hate Bush for sending their kids off to die. But watching one particular mother in her grief doesn't move me too much more than knowing her son died in Bush's war in the first place.

What I wanted more of from the movie was facts and figures. The movie had a ton of video clips, news clips, TV images, etc. The biggest fact I took away from them is how awful something from a low-resolution TV screen looks when it's magnified and projected on a full sized movie screen.  The difference between actual movie film and TV quality images is startling, when you see them back to back on a big screen.  But besides that aesthetic issue, I thought the movie spent too much time quoting ignorant media people, going over and over the same old and familiar (to me, at least) points, and showing Bush on vacation or mangling his words. But again, none of that's news to me. I know the man is borderline mentally retarded, looks lost every time he's not on message, and is unable to do anything on his own or speak coherently without a teleprompter and a handler or two. Yet to people who have bought the Republican spin that he's a steely-eyed, intelligent leader, clips of Bush making funny faces at the camera and laughing it up with his rich golfing buddies are probably revelations.

Also, what I wanted from the movie; more investigation, more details, more info, would probably not be what most people would find interesting. It would be too in depth, too detailed, and their eyes would glaze over. Besides, a movie is not the best venue for that sort of thing. A website is, with links, text, tables, etc.

If I were a filmmaker, I'm sure that while my version of F9/11 would make me happier, it would be a lot less entertaining a movie than Moore's film was, and that it wouldn't have as much of an effect. I'd look at F9/11 as sort of a training wheels version of Bush's presidency. For people who don't know the sort of stuff I blog about, it's a great way to get started on learning about what's actually happening in the world and the US, and I just hope they go on from there and keep up with newer info, and do more reading on their own. I'm sure the vast majority will go home and watch a Friends rerun instead, or surf for porn, but I can always hope. And at least they know more post-F9/11 than they did going in.

As for the common criticism that Moore twists everything and lies about events, I haven't seen much of that thrown at F9/11. The only real debating point is from people who claim he says the 140 Saudi nationals who were flown out of the country after 9/11 were on some special secret plane, going before commercial aviation had resumed. It's rather a picky point, since for years there were constant denials that any such flight took place, and now that it's been proven the best the Bushites can say is, "Yeah, but Moore doesn't actually say that other commercial flights had resumed by then." Which is true, but he doesn't say they hadn't either, and none of that changes the fact that they were on special flights, organized by the US government, and they were whisked out of the country before the FBI was able to do thorough interviews with them.

Other than that, 95% of the movie is film clips with little or no narration. You can argue that anyone would look bad if you only showed the worst bits of their public speaking, but you can't argue that Bush and others aren't really doing and saying the things they're shown doing and saying.  You can't argue that the footage of US soldiers in Iraq, talking about how much they hate being there and how meaningless it all is, is bullshit. Moore's facts are strong in other areas as well. I haven't heard anyone dispute his figures for Saudi investment in the US, the amounts of the payments George Bush Sr. and others receive from them, and so on. 99% of the damning material in the movie is basically bulletproof, in terms of factual accuracy.  You don't have to come to Moore's conclusions about things, but you can't deny that he's got a lot of evidence to base them on.

There are about 10,000 articles and reviews online about F9/11 by now, so read all you want about it to make up your own mind (and then go watch it anyway) but I'd like to quote a couple of liberals and their comments on the film, since in theory, they're in Moore's corner and well-informed about the issues going in.

Paul Krugman is a well-known columnist for the NY Times, and his newest editorial is about F9/11. I thought he made a lot of good points, but this one is being widely-quoted on others blogs today, so I might as well join in. He's taking on the "there aren't factual errors, but it's full of innuendo!" argument.

There has been much tut-tutting by pundits who complain that the movie, though it has yet to be caught in any major factual errors, uses association and innuendo to create false impressions. Many of these same pundits consider it bad form to make a big fuss about the Bush administration's use of association and innuendo to link the Iraq war to 9/11. Why hold a self-proclaimed polemicist to a higher standard than you hold the president of the United States?

As other bloggers have said, Moore doesn't actually say Bush invaded Iraq to create financial opportunities for politically-connected corporations owned by his friends and business buddies, and he doesn't say that the Saudis were behind 9/11 and that they own Bush. But he presents evidence of these things repeatedly. There's no denying that the Saudis were involved in financing Al Queda, and that Bush's corporate buddies are getting rich off of the Iraqi war, and that the Saudis invested very heavily in Bush and his dad's businesses.  Does this all add up to something more? Moore never says that, not in so many words, but it's easy for the viewer to make that leap.

And as Krugman says, the Bush fans can claim that Bush never actually said Saddam was behind 9/11, (even though he did, and Cheney continues to do so) but there's no denying that Bush insinuated it in dozens of speeches.

The whole "Bush might have used innuendo, but so did Moore!" argument reminds me of the other popular one from a few months ago, when the first unarguable proof of US soldiers torturing Iraqis was coming out. Once the Bush defenders gave up on denying it had happened, they segued to one of the weakest arguments/justifications ever: "So what if we tortured some Iraqis!  Saddam/Al Queda did worse things than we did!"

That's true, but is pointing out that we're slightly better than the worst people on earth really a point of pride?

For a really left wing point of view, let's see what Ted Rall has to say about the issue. He's had a chip on his shoulder about it for weeks, since he wasn't consulted at all despite being the biggest expert (in his opinion) on the UNOCAL pipeline through Afghanistan, and not being invited to any of the NYC premieres. He continues bitching about various things in his post, but concludes with a pretty good wrap up.

And that's that. We all wish the movie could have been more than it was, but for what it was, and for the general audience it was targeted at, it did a pretty good job.  The weeks to come will demonstrate if the movie has any real effect on the overall mood of the country and the public's opinion of Bush, and check back in a year to see if there's a lasting impact of any kind.

Originally posted July 2, 2004.

Well of course it won, you're thinking. The French hate Americans and especially our cowboy president, etc, etc, so on and so on. Moore's one step ahead of you on this one though:

Which may be true, but politics and being the hottest flavor of the day definitely had something to do with it.

Most of the early Cannes reviews of the film are full of praise, and I'm interested enough to see it, assuming they ever get the distribution lined up in the US. Read some of the reviews linked from RT if you want more info about the movie, though they'll all pretty much full of spoilers, in terms of describing the best scenes and biggest revelations in the documentary.

June 28, 2004

As you've undoubtedly heard by now (4 of the top 6 most popular articles in Yahoo Sunday night were about it), Fahrenheit 9/11 had an enormous opening weekend. There are infinite articles about it all over the news, but I'll quote one from the best site for movie box office information, partially because it's got so many handy links in it to supporting and related information.

Here it is, from BoxOfficeMojo.com.

With $24.1 million in the till since its record-breaking debut in New York City on Wednesday, Fahrenheit 9/11 is already the highest grossing documentary of all time -- excluding large format, concert and other non-"apples-to-apples" sub-genres – surpassing Moore's own Bowling for Columbine's $21.6 million lifetime gross.

Fahrenheit is also the first documentary to land in the weekend top five, let alone be No. 1. Its opening topped Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction's $9.3 million as the best ever for a Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner, and it was Tarantino's jury that handed Moore the prize this year.

Fahrenheit's $27,558 per theater average ranks as the second highest all time for a wide release (adjusting for ticket price inflation knocks it down to No. 11) and the best of 2004, ahead of The Passion of the Christ's $27,554 and Shrek 2's $25,951.

Everyone knew the publicity and controversy surrounding the title would generate solid sales, but no one predicted this big of an opening. There is quibbling about whether the huge per screen gross is due to it being on relatively few screens, and how it's not really that huge if you adjust for inflation in ticket prices, etc. All true, but come on. It's a documentary about politics and a failed US war. That sort of movie makes about $500,000 in limited release in NY, LA, and Seattle, and then vanishes to DVDs that are only shown in poly sci classes the day the instructor has laryngitis.  No one in the US pays money for anything political, other than rich donors who can actually purchase politicians themselves.

Ordinarily I'd have a review to accompany my news discussion, but while Malaya and me both want to see it, we didn't have time on Friday, and then just never got out there over the weekend. Sadder yet, one of my B-day presents from mom was $40 in movie gift certificates, so we could have gone for free. (Well, free for me, and Malaya's got a job, so she could afford the ticket; it wasn't her birthday, after all. *cough*)

We'll probably get out to see it this week though, so I'll have a review of some sort sooner or later. In the meantime, it's not as if there's any shortage of critical opinion to be found. Rotten Tomatoes links to 148 reviews, 124 of which are positive. The problem for me with most political books and movies is that since I read political news and blogs every day, I generally know 90% or more of the stuff they're talking about. So while the material may be interesting, it's almost all old news to me. I don't know if F9/11 will feel that way to me, but I recently read parts of What Liberal Media, by Eric Alterman, and Bushwhacked, by Molly Ivins, and while both were well-written and very topical (the first chapter from Ivins book, detailing Dubya's history of insider trading with Harken Energy should be required reading for everyone), lost interest in both of them since I'd heard almost everything before. That and they were depressing me, as they brought home just how totally the right wing controls the US media, and how badly the Bush presidency has screwed America, respectively.

So while I want to see it, and while I'm hoping I'll enjoy F9/11 start to finish, I know that most of it won't be news to me. Hopefully the fact that it's got images and video and such will keep me interested, or more interested than just text did.

The theory going in was that only people who already didn't like Bush were going to see the movie, and that it therefore wouldn't make much difference nationally. One of the frequent assertions of pollsters is that there are no more swing voters, since Bush's presidency has so deeply-polarized the country. I don't think that's entirely true, and in any event, it's the 50% of the population that doesn't bother to vote at all that can make a huge difference, if even a small percentage of them could be motivated or mobilized.

That point aside, this article from the LA Times is an interesting read, as it profiles various non-Michael Moore fans, and gives their reactions to seeing F9/11.

DES PERES, Mo. — Before the movie started, Leslie Hanser prayed.

"I prayed the Lord would open my eyes," she said.

For months, her son Joshua, a college student, had been drawing her into political debate. He'd tell her she shouldn't trust President Bush. He'd tell her the Iraq war was wrong. Hanser, a 41-year-old homemaker, pushed back. She defended the president, supported him fiercely

But Joshua kept at her, until she prayed for help understanding her son's fervor.

Emerging from Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," her eyes wet, Hanser said she at last understood. "My emotions are just…. " She trailed off, waving her hands to show confusion. "I feel like we haven't seen the whole truth before."

The less people know, the more likely they are to vote for Bush?

In theaters nationwide, many viewers said they couldn't imagine loyal Republicans coming to see a movie the Bush administration had dismissed as a twisted montage of misleading innuendo and outright falsehoods. But for all the partisan hooting, the movie did appear to draw at least a strong smattering of the Republican and the undecided voters that Moore most desperately hopes to reach.

...

For Richard Hagen, 56, it was the footage from Iraq: the raw cries of bombed civilians, the clenched-teeth agony of wounded American troops. A retired insurance agent from the wealthy River Oaks neighborhood in central Houston, Hagen described himself as a lifelong Republican. But then, standing by his silver Mercedes, he amended that: A former lifelong Republican.

"Seeing [the war] brings it home in a way you don't get from reading about it," he said. "I won't be voting for a Republican presidential candidate this time."

I always find it interesting how eager people who support war are to keep the American public from seeing images of it. Bush banning photos of American coffins returning from Iraq, the US military tightly controlling all battlefield video in every war since Vietnam (where scenes of dying Americans did so much to turn the country against the quagmire of a war). The reasoning is obvious; people don't get upset about newspapers reporting how many people died here or there, but when there's video and the actual suffering and emotional toll is visible, it has a huge impact.

I've read articles in the past to the tune of, "Spend an afternoon in a cancer ward, watch people in agony as they gasp away their lives through cancerous lungs or throats, and it's virtually impossible to come out and not be committed to banning cigarettes."  This sort of reasoning goes in every direction too; why else do you think anti-abortion protesters carry around huge color photos of dismembered babies, even though such photos aren't accurate representations of 95% of abortions?

Another quote from the article that hits upon the best line in the movie. 

Mary Butler, too, may not bring herself to punch the ballot for Bush.

She didn't vote for him in 2000. But Butler, 48, said until this weekend, she was leaning strongly toward supporting him this year. "In a war situation, I figured it was too hard to switch horses midstream. I thought the country would be too vulnerable," she said.

Butler, a librarian from suburban St. Louis, said one sentence in Moore's film made her rethink.

After showing faces of the men and women of America's military, Moore reminds his audience that they have volunteered to sacrifice their futures for our country. We owe them just one obligation, he says: to send them into harm's way only when we absolutely must.

And really, can anyone disagree with that?  Well, admit to disagreeing with it? Obviously, there are plenty of political and military leaders who regard the troops as mere fodder to achieve their ends, and plenty of conglomerates who are eager to profit from it, but they can't really come out and say so publicly, at least.  And as long as that holds true, there may yet be hope for us all.

July 20, 2004

Fahrenheit 9/11 remains in the news, largely due to the efforts of wing nut haters, screwball promotions, and the ramblings of aging divas. It probably deserves more credit for the box office, since after all, it's made 4.5x (and counting) more than any other theatrically-released documentary in the history of American cinema.

The reason I bring it up, however, is because of the Internet infamous 56 59 Deceits of F9/11 article. It's very long and fairly unreadably-dry, but it purports to detail all of the lies Moore tells in the movie. You knew such an article wouldn't go long without challenge, and indeed it hasn't. A guy by the name of Anton Sirius who has way too much time on his hands has thus far debunked 1-49 of the so-called deceits, and will presumably finish the job in the immediate future. This link goes to 39-48, and there are links on top of the blog entry to the other portions of it, if you actually care to read them all.

One thing that's immediately clear from reading the debunking is that much of Moore's film runs right on the edge between truth/lie, and that the movie trades heavily in innuendo. Of course that's not really a surprise to anyone; it's an admitted and unabashed piece of agitprop, targeted against George Bush, and as such it hits with emotions, exploits sorrow and grief, and twists every possible ambiguity it can. Much like the PR effort for everything in human history.

The thing that's most immediately clear about the 59 Distortions is how flimsy most of them are, if not outright wrong. I didn't read anywhere near the whole debunking list, but part of #7 made me laugh. Here's a quote from the Deceits article:

By the way, the clip of Bush making a comment about terrorism, and then hitting a golf ball, is also taken out of context, at least partially:

Tuesday night on FNC's Special Report with Brit Hume, Brian Wilson noted how "the viewer is left with the misleading impression Mr. Bush is talking about al-Qaeda terrorists." But Wilson disclosed that "a check of the raw tape reveals the President is talking about an attack against Israel, carried out by a Palestinian suicide bomber." -- "Cyberalert," Media Research Center, July 1, 2004, item. 3.

The movie clip, for those of you who haven't seen F9/11, shows Bush on a golf course, making a tough face to the camera while he gives a quick soundbite about how terrorism is bad and how we must take it seriously. He nods, waits a beat so it can be edited for the evening news, and then runs over to the tee box, saying, "Now watch this drive."

That entire segment of the movie is all about how Bush spent 42% (including weekends) of his first 8 months in office on vacation, and how he didn't take the job seriously, didn't do anything of any substance, and wasn't concerned at all about terrorism or Al Queda before 9/11/01 made it impossible for any US president to concentrate on nothing but those issues. So an entire section of the film that does nothing but showing Bush not worrying about terrorism, not thinking about Al Queda... is misleading since it gives the impression that Bush is talking about Al Queda?