**Official FAHRENHEIT 9/11 Discussion Thread - READ GUIDELINES BEFORE POSTING!*** (2 Viewers)

[Robert Anthony]

Friday, me and my girl had to go to Tacoma to stay the night for a family function occurring the next day. We tried to catch the flick before we drove up there. It's playing at 4 theaters in Portland, and 2 of them have the movie on multiple screens. At 3pm, I called for tickets. Every theater and every showing was sold out thru late Saturday. No good. Went home, decided we'd get into Tacoma early and check it out there. Called around once we hit Tacoma. Every place was sold out. There was one arthouse who had turned away so many people they'd set up an additional screening at 11:45pm and THAT screening had a line for it at 8pm.

There was ONE theater in the Tacoma area that had tickets, one multiplex in Lakewood, WA, that had about 10 tickets left for the 9:50 show. There were some extra theater chairs just set up against the back wall to accommodate. We sat in those two. Others just kinda stood around in the aisles or against the door.

This is a documentary, remember.

My overall impressions? Good stuff. definitely more straight to the point than Bowling for Columbine, but then again, that doc had a more expansive, rhetorical question at the heart of it. This one is more focused because the subject matter is pretty clear.

He's still Moore, so he still uses his typical bag of tricks. He's still about as subtle as a sledgehammer, and some would say that's insulting to the audience, but I've always taken Moore as an Op-ed columnist with a movie camera, so I don't mind that so much. What's funny is that his newfound subtlety is employed most often during the segment where things really DO need to be drawn with the biggest, blackest Sharpie you can find: The Bath/Saudi/Bush connections at the beginning. I followed it easily, I'd read some stuff on it before--but there were more than a few confused faces in that theater.

There are a couple instances in the last 3rd of the film where the opinion piece veers more into recruitment tool (showing a really tore up soldier talking to the camera about "I used to be republican, but I'm voting Democrat" seemed to be a bit much, at least the way it was presented.) And there's one moment specifically during the middle that's a little too much (Iraqi kite flying) But there are moments in this doc that are outright chilling. The WTC blackscreen, as people have mentioned. The public beheading that seems to start and finish so quickly and savagely, in front of a crowd of thousands. The Iraqi man, having to perform the horrible task of cleaning the streets of the dead, killed by American bombing runs, angrily pulling a toddlers corpse out of the back of a pickup truck and shaking it angrily at the camera. An Iraqi woman, going from rage to pure grief within milliseconds, back and forth, standing amidst the rubble of her families houses. And Lila Lipscomb, near collapse at the White House.

I've never heard a theater have their laughter cut off so suddenly. This documentary definitely packs a punch, even if Moore actually PULLS some of his harder roundhouses. After leaving the theater, my girlfriend noticed (i'd missed it) that Moore went pretty easy on Rumsfeld. He didn't pop up much. Wolfowitz got clowned pretty hard during the credit sequence (I heard more "ewwwwwwwww's" during that than I'd ever heard during a farrelly brothers comedy) but he was mostly absent for the rest of the flick. Ashcroft got roughed up a little, but all in all, it seems to me that the rabid, foam-at-the-mouth picture people paint of Moore seems way out of focus in this movie. He doesn't go after people as hard as I'm used to. And he stays off camera mostly. Although it was funny to see him trying to approach congressmen and watching them all flee and scatter. There's one particular shot I'm thinking of, where he walks into an area where 4 or 5 people are standing, one woman is smoking, another man is on his phone, and Moore is dead center of the frame, back turned to us. He trundles into their area, and it's like the cue-ball breaking the rack--they all immediately rush off in opposite directions, clearing the frame, leaving Moore dead center, perplexed.

here's the interesting part: during the 5'o clock news, while me and my girl were getting packed for the trip up to Tacoma, I was flipping through the stations: ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CNN--and almost every time I hit the button, I caught a story on this movie. And every story had a very negative, meanspirited slant towards the movie. I mean, it wasn't even close, and it wasn't like I was looking for it. I noticed it on NBC first, then ABC, then on down the line. The main thrust behind most of these news stories seemed to be to discredit the film. the word "inaccurate" came up not as "people are worried about possible inaccuracies." but more like "the film, inaccurate and incendiary, opens.." And it was hammered home. I found that weird. Most entertainment reporting I've seen has never gone that route. I was kind of amazed. After watching the movie, I noticed the press got slapped around a little in the movie as well. I thought "Well, that might explain the news stories I saw earlier" but I'm not even so sure about that. I don't know, I thought that was very interesting.

 

[Marque D]

http://movies.yahoo.com/boxoffice/latest/rank.html
Fahrenheit 9/11 $21,800,000 (868 Theaters)
White Chicks $19,600,000 (2726 Theaters)

 

[Al_S]

I saw the movie yetserday and thought it was great. I saw a 1:15PM showing and there were more people at the theater then I thought there would be. I heard Michael Moore hired some fact checkers to make sure everything in the movie was correct. I'm not a big news or political junkie so there were a lot of things I learned from the movie. The one thing that I learned was that there were family members of OBL here in the US when 9/11 happened and we put them on planes and let them leave the US. My jaw just dropped when I heard that! I couldn't believe it! Another thing was the amount of money that the Saudi's have invested in the US. That really scares the heck out of me!

I've seen BFC and went to look for Roger and Me at the video store but it was checked out. I'm now an official fan of Michael Moore.

 

[MikeNeuman]

So, it's official that it came in 1st at the box office this week?

 

[Chris]

Really? Newsweek, Time, Rolling Stone, MSNBC, all gave it very positive reviews through their websites and print.

It's not a bad thing to point out innaccuracies.. that's part of the media's job when they chose to do it.. of any one of every political ilk.

 

[Michael Reuben]

Not until final statistics are released tomorrow. Statistics released on Sunday are partly based on estimates.

M.

 

[Robert Anthony]

I know, and that's mostly what perked my ears up: Print media seems to be covering this mostly fairly positive. TV media, however, seemed a lot more mean-spirited. it's not that they were pointing out inaccuracies. As a matter of fact, they didn't specify what was accurate and what was inaccurate. They just called it "inaccurate" which is a pretty broad brush to paint with.

I'm not charging the media with political maneuvering or anything. it just seemed really weird to me. I mean, if you're going to look for an ulterior motive, politics doesn't seem to fit as well as the media simply being pissed because they get spanked in the movie and Moore had told Katie Couric and a number of other interviewers on TV that day that the media had failed us. I can see producers and editors giving stories a more negative slant in retaliation to that, if I'm going to use a Soap Opera styled reasoning

and yeah, the B.O. total is not OFFICIAL. But there'd have to be a very wide margin of error for White Chicks to make up the difference. Plus, it's very possible the estimate is low. Not by a lot, but word is that "scheduling extra showings" phenomena I encountered in Tacoma isn't very uncommon with this movie.

Hell, I had to drive over 150 miles to see this movie, and I live in the 23rd biggest media market in America. (but the 5th biggest in terms of internet connectivity)

 

[Michael Caicedo]

I'm glad I went to see it for myself. That lightweight Joel Siegel on Good Morning America called it "reprehensible" but then, did not elaborate on what he found reprehensible about it. Best I could tell, he had a problem with with the caption "A few days later". Said MM had to know exactly how many days it was.
I give the film a B. I agree it was somewhat scattered but very effective at times.

 

[Jeff Adkins]

I disagree that the "kite-flying" sequence was ineffective. I think Moore's point was that Iraq wasn't exactly the type of place that the media and the right-wing had portrayed it as being. Yes, we all know that some atrocities had taken place there prior to 3/2003 but I think it was effective in pointing out that many Iraqis lived a fairly normal life prior to our invasion. I think many of us (myself included) had a vision of Iraq of being this out-of-control police state under vicious government rule.

I had never seen the clips of Powell and Rice from 2001 basically saying that Saddam was powerless and not capable of much of anything. I wish the media had played these contradictive statements back in 2003.

Also enjoyable was the "Greatest American Hero" sequence. That had the entire theater roaring with laughter.

 

[Haggai]

Jeff, the kite-flying stuff only portrayed one aspect of things. Many Iraqis did indeed live more normal lives than they've been able to since the invasion, with all the chaos and violence that have come with it, but the impression that almost any viewer would get from that sequence was that things were fine for people in Iraq before the US invaded. The reality is that certain aspects of many Iraqis' lives have turned for the worse since the war, even though a lot of the terrible consequences of living under what was universally acknowledged as a monstrous dictatorship have been eliminated. It really was an "out-of-control police state under vicious government rule," as was well-documented by all the leading human rights groups around the world. The question, of course, was whether or not this justified invading the country. In the interest of actually being "fair and balanced," without just using that as a slogan, I will of course acknowledge that most of those human rights groups decided that invading the country was not the proper way to deal with its government's terrible brutality.

It's a complex set of facts, which Moore oversimplifies to the point of being misleading. I agree with many of Moore's viewpoints, quite a bit more than I disagree with, and I thought the movie overall was very effective and well-made, but that sequence was pretty irresponsible.

 

[pitchman]

My wife and I caught a matinee this afternoon at a sold-out screening. The scene that generated biggest crowd reaction overall was when Moore recapped Ashcroft's unsuccessful run for governer. The audience burst out laughing. My guess is that living here in Missouri, that scene plays differently than it does in other parts of the country.

 

[Pete-D]

I think TV press focuses on the negatives/controversial aspects for ratings.

It was the same thing with PotC, I think they made the controversey really bigger than it actually was.

 

[Chris]

This is just an aside.. as I said, I have good friends who have lived off an on in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere for the last twenty years.

The situation in Iraq could best be compared to the situation in any despotism. The situation was largely enforced police government, open opposition to the government was a death sentence, and the state of humanitarian care was terrible. Moore himself has acknowledged these facts, and says he did not cover them because the media has covered them to a great extent. (which is true)

The problem is, the "kite flying" scene is somewhat out of place as it's single image of the government. A great example of this occurred in Bosnia before we went to war there; Milosivec presided over what was basically a box-car-derby two weeks before our invasion. 600 kids were involved. I'm sure you could have had some photos of dancing, happy kids.. but that scene wouldn't make the problems in his government go away

Moore's film is very effective at getting his point across, and most of the "sins" of the film are sins of omission. I'm just saying this sequence acted as a means to convey legitimacy on something that you just can't convey His film would have had a better chance reaching out to a broader audience if he had said "the Iraqi government was terrible, there is no doubting it, that's why we bombed them 6 times in the last ten years under three different administrations.. but that still doesn't make this right" the showing of little kids as his only real "before" shot undermined his point because people know that even in bad circumstances/governments some good does happen..

 

[Derek Miner]

I wish the standards were the same now, but they have definitely changed. Check out the commentary for Shattered Glass where the director recounts that they had to remove one f-bomb (leaving just one) to get their PG-13.

 

[MatS]

 

[Chris]

They were running for Senator, not governor. They were both term-limited governors.

 

[MatS]

yes Chris
thanks for the correction

still the result is the same

 

[Chris]

Yep. Losing to a dead man is not a good thing.. his wife served two years (losing in 2002 to Jim Talent, primarily over a stadium issue)

You know, my sister went to see this tonight, and she had a different reaction then I, of course But there was one moment within it that really bothered her that I guess I didn't think about while watching it.. that being the secret service guard detail of the Saudi embassy.

What bothered her about it was that it's pro-forma, a standard duty of the secret service, as voiced at their website.. http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/ud.shtml

The reason it bothered her is because in her job (she works for the state department) she gets a good idea of what responsibilities are whos.. apparently, almost 80% of all embassies in DC have a secret service detail, with only the smallest/those that opt out not receiving one. Because all foreign missions are protected, it's not a change of standard..

I guess I hadn't thought about this.. it just didn't hit me.

Sometimes, though, that's the kind of thing that if you don't know, the way it's played can give you a different outlook on things.

She did also observe something I didn't as well, and maybe it was her screening.. did anyone else seem to think the tint of the film was "reddish/overly pink" in comparison to other films?

(Just as a matter of clarification so this is all open: I do have family who work in both the pentagon and state department, as for fair disclosure; my sister is left, but voting Nader; my brother of course would not say, so just so it's noted)

 

[Ricardo C]

EDIT: Sorry, wrong thread. Ack.

 

[Arman]

[For the 2nd time in Movie forum today] What Scott said in post #27 (pretty much)! [Never seen/experience watching a film documentary like this. What an amazing full-packed crowd. They laughed, cried, applaud/cheered & jeered at the right moments and gave the film a deserving almost unanimous rousing ovation when it ended. I did'nt notice any walkout incident.]