Posted on 05/18/2004 6:45:20 AM PDT by KeyLargo
Major barf alert!
Less is Moore in subdued, effective '9/11'
May 18, 2004
BY ROGER EBERT FILM CRITIC
CANNES, France -- Michael Moore the muckraking wiseass has been replaced by a more subdued version in "Fahrenheit 9/11," his new documentary questioning the anti-terrorism credentials of the Bush regime. In the Moore version, President Bush, his father and members of their circle have received $1.5 billion from Saudi Arabia over the years, attacked Iraq to draw attention from their Saudi friends, and have lost the hearts and minds of many of the U.S. servicemen in the war.
The film premiered Monday at the Cannes Film Festival to a series of near-riot scenes, as overbooked screenings were besieged by mobs trying to push their way in. The response at the early morning screening I attended was loudly enthusiastic. And at the official black-tie screening, it was greeted by a standing ovation; a friend who was there said it went on "for at least 25 minutes," which probably means closer to 15 (estimates of ovations at Cannes are like estimates of parade crowds in Chicago).
But the film doesn't go for satirical humor the way Moore's "Roger & Me" and "Bowling for Columbine" did. Moore's narration is still often sarcastic, but frequently he lets his footage speak for itself.
The film shows American soldiers not in a prison but in the field, hooding an Iraqi, calling him Ali Baba, touching his genitals and posing for photos with him. There are other scenes of U.S. casualties without arms or legs, questioning the purpose of the Iraqi invasion at a time when Bush proposed to cut military salaries and benefits. It shows Lila Lipscomb, a mother from Flint, Mich., reading a letter from her son, who urged his family to help defeat Bush, days before he was killed. And in a return to the old Moore confrontational style, it shows him joined by a Marine recruiter as he encourages congressmen to have their sons enlist in the services.
Despite these dramatic moments, the most memorable footage for me involved President Bush on Sept. 11. The official story is that Bush was meeting with a group of pre-schoolers when he was informed of the attack on the World Trade Center and quickly left the room. Not quite right, says Moore. Bush learned of the first attack before entering the school, "decided to go ahead with his photo op," and began to read My Pet Goat to the students. Informed of the second attack, he incredibly remained with the students for another seven minutes, reading from the book, until a staff member suggested that he leave. The look on his face as he reads the book, knowing what he knows, is disquieting.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" documents the long association of the Bush clan and Saudi oil billionaires, and reveals that when Bush released his military records, he blotted out the name of another pilot whose flight status was suspended on the same day for failure to take a physical exam. This was his good friend James R. Bath, who later became the Texas money manager for the bin Laden family (which has renounced its terrorist son).
When a group of 9/11 victims sued the Saudi government for financing the terrorists, the Saudis hired as their defense team the law firm of James Baker, Bush Sr.'s secretary of state. And the film questions why, when all aircraft were grounded after 9/11, the White House allowed several planes to fly around the country picking up bin Laden family members and other Saudis and flying them home.
Much of the material in "Fahrenheit 9/11" has already been covered in books and newspapers, but some is new, and it all benefits from the different kind of impact a movie has. Near the beginning of the film, as Congress moves to ratify the election of Bush after the Florida and Supreme Court controversies, it is positively eerie to see 10 members of Congress -- eight black women, one Asian woman and one black man -- rise to protest the move and be gaveled into silence by the chairman of the session, Al Gore.
On the night before his film premiered, Moore, in uncharacteristic formalwear, attended an official dinner given by Gilles Jacob, president of the festival. Conversation at his table centered on the just-published New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh alleging that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally authorized use of torture in Iraqi prisons.
Moore had his own insight into the issue: "Rumsfeld was under oath when he testified about the torture scandal. If he lied, that's perjury. And therefore I find it incredibly significant that when Bush and Cheney testified before the 9/11 commission, they refused to swear an oath. They claimed they'd sworn an oath of office, but that has no legal standing. Do you suppose they remembered how Clinton was trapped by perjury and were protecting themselves?"
Would something like that belong in the film?
"My contract says I can keep editing and adding stuff right up until the release date," Moore said. He said he expects to sign a U.S. distribution deal this week at Cannes; the film's producer, Miramax, was forbidden to release it by its parent company, Disney.
After the first press screening on Monday, journalists noted on their way out that Moore was more serious in this film and took fewer cheap shots. But there are a few. Wait until you see Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz preparing for a TV interview. First he puts a pocket comb in his mouth to wet it and combs down his hair. Still not satisfied, he spits on his hand and wipes the hair into place. Catching politicians being made up for TV is an old game, but this is a first.
"Through his boorish, knee-jerk leftism, Ebert has become merely another Hollywood elitist thumbing his nose at America. Two thumbs down."
Source: Chris Reed Front Page Magazine http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=9187
Roger Ebert: The Shrill Shill By Chris Reed FrontPageMagazine.com | August 1, 2003
The August issue of The Progressive is out, and, surprise, surprise: It features a TV star unloading on George W. Bush, craven Republicans and the evils of American capitalism in a way that makes Howard Dean seem downright restrained.
Ranting about how Bush stole the presidential election, is simultaneously a religious zealot and disrespectful to the Pope, and is both devious and a moron, the TV star can’t understand why the rest of America doesn’t agree with him.
“I think a lot of working-class people don’t understand their money is being stolen…[W]e’ve had a concerted policy of taking money away from the poor and giving it to the rich wholesale, and at the same time, we have the runaway corporations and the greed. I feel ordinary people really should be angry.”
Martin Sheen? Michael Moriarty? Janeane Garofalo?
Nope. It’s Roger Ebert, perhaps the best-known critic in the world, thanks to his durable weekly TV show and its thumbs-up, thumbs-down gimmick.
But Ebert has other personas besides the one he’s cultivated on television for nearly 30 years. There’s the Roger Ebert whose lucid, middlebrow reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times have made him arguably America’s most influential print film journalist. There’s the Ebert who once moonlighted as a writer for exploitation-film specialist Russ Meyers, getting the script credit on “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”
And now, at age 60, there’s the James Carville-style demonizer who thinks the right is always wrong, and inevitably has appalling motives to boot.
This Ebert came to the fore in the fall of 2000, with his over-the-top raves for “The Contender,” writer-director Rod Lurie’s story about a female senator (played by Joan Allen) nominated to replace a dead vice president who nobly refuses to address Republican-spread rumors that she was involved in college orgies. Lurie’s labored attempt to equate the treatment of his heroine under fire with the treatement received by Bill Clinton after he was caught using the Oval Office to receive oral sex from a doltish intern was widely panned – except by Ebert. In his print review, after hamhanded shots at Republicans and Kenneth Star, Ebert called “The Contender” a four-star classic.
It’s been all downhill since. The lowlights:
-- His vicious depiction (in a July 2001, Sun-Times general-news column) of presidential daughter Barbara Bush as an ignorant “yob” on the loose in London. Given her idiot father, Ebert reasoned, what could one expect?
-- His relentless championing of “Bowling for Columbine,” Michael Moore’s latest agitprop masquerading as a documentary.
-- His tirade about George W. Bush’s alleged vicious insensitivity toward those on Texas’ Death Row in his print review this spring of “The Life of David Gale,” a melodrama about an anti-death-penalty crusader.
-- His likening of the Bill the Butcher character in “Gangs of New York” – a cleaver-waving, mass-murdering thug – to Katherine Harris. Ebert’s point, made on “Ebert & Roeper”: Both Bill the Butcher and Harris used whatever means possible to take and keep power. Even the Democratic National Committee comes up with more sophisticated insults disguised as insights.
It’s worth comparing Ebert’s reflexive right-bashing with the approach of Pauline Kael, the legendary New Yorker writer who was considered the nation’s most influential film critic in her heyday. The contrast does not flatter her successor.
Kael was a Manhattan liberal. She liked the protest movies of left-wing European filmmakers like Costa-Gavras and famously decried “Dirty Harry” as a “fascist” entertainment.
But Kael also had little patience for stridency from the left. She denounced Oliver Stone’s films as bombastic and didactic. And Kael, remember, was the journalist who more than any other helped expose Michael Moore for the propagandist he remains. Her New Yorker piece on the “gonzo demagoguery” of Moore’s maiden “documentary” – 1989’s “Roger & Me” – helped killed its chances at an Oscar.
Ebert, or at least his latest incarnation, is incapable of writing such a piece – or any piece whose politics wouldn’t be at home in Mother Jones. When it comes to American politics, you see, it’s the yobs vs. the smart guys. And if the smart guys smear or slander the yobs, well, so what? The yobs have it coming. Through his boorish, knee-jerk leftism, Ebert has become merely another Hollywood elitist thumbing his nose at America. Two thumbs down.
Read this review:
http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/24315.htm
NEW '9/11' FLICK HAS FAR 'MOORE' FIZZLE THAN SIZZLE
By LOU LUMENICK
I give this movie "The Finger."
"In "Columbine," Moore had something new to say about the gun-control debate and did so in a refreshingly entertaining manner. "
One of the most boring movies I've ever seen.
This one must be REAL depressing and nasty.
Beware of The Blob!!!
How does he continue to get away with the "documentary" category? Sounds no more like a "documentary" than Bowling for Columbine".
Wow... Lila's been a busy girl.
The fact that he "liked" the latest propaganda project from the Moore factory belies an even more vacant brain. Like his fellow fat traveler Moore, his memories of being made fun of in the schoolyard seem to be getting the best of him.
I'd rather have a bullet in my brain than to live in Michael Moore's idea of America.
I don't understand the title. From the pictures of MM i thought he was up for the remake of Moby Dick. And I don't mean the captain.
Did it cross Roger's teeny brain that this film might be even slightly disingenuous?
Wow, he seems so eager to swallow the "material" as true.
I know, I know, he's a huge lib. Still, it is always disturbing to see such twisted thinking presented as if we're supposed to take it seriously.
Bzzzzt. Sorry. When was this story the official story? I've never heard anything but that the President was informed of the second attack (making it terrorism and not an accident) during the classroom appearance.
When did Lumpy's strawman ever emanate from official sources?
Who cares about the race of these Congressmen? (Except race-baiting liberals) And why is it eerie?
Ebert has allowed his pathological hatred of Bush to ruin the majority of his reviews over the past three years. At least one of his weekly movie reviews HAS to have some juvenile anti-Bush cheap shot. He's gone from being one of the best newspaper critics to a tiresome, petulant crank.
Has Roger Ebert ever lead off a review of any of his other product calling him a wiseass?
He plays fast and loose with the facts but his supporters say that "the general story" is more important than blatant falsehoods in a work of non-fiction.
The film premiered Monday at the Cannes Film Festival to a series of near-riot scenes, as overbooked screenings were besieged by mobs trying to push their way in. The response at the early morning screening I attended was loudly enthusiastic. And at the official black-tie screening, it was greeted by a standing ovation; a friend who was there said it went on "for at least 25 minutes," which probably means closer to 15 (estimates of ovations at Cannes are like estimates of parade crowds in Chicago).
(A) Roger Ebert has already said in his book on Cannes that the crowds in France are rude. They will regulary push past a line to get into a movie. The French response is that if the British are too stupid to wait in a line/que then they deserve to be in one.
(B)The "man on the street" report to AintItCoolNews.com has a leftist gushing that EVERYONE he has talked to at Cannes HATES President Bush. He says that it is a conversation starter among complete strangers. This crowd response was nothing more than a Hate America/Bush rally. I wonder how much it resembled Triumph Of The Will. Did Lumpy Riefenstahl decend from the sky? Was he smart enough to shoot this footage for the DVD? American Splendor is a much better film on DVD for having the coda of Harvey Pekar being celebrated at Cannes.
Got to love too how the media makes excuses for exagerations of just how much they loved this film/hate Bush.
"estimates of ovations at Cannes are like estimates of parade crowds in Chicago"
Or million leftist marches?
The official story is that Bush was meeting with a group of pre-schoolers when he was informed of the attack on the World Trade Center and quickly left the room. Not quite right, says Moore. Bush learned of the first attack before entering the school, "decided to go ahead with his photo op," and began to read My Pet Goat to the students. Informed of the second attack, he incredibly remained with the students for another seven minutes, reading from the book, until a staff member suggested that he leave. The look on his face as he reads the book, knowing what he knows, is disquieting.
Toronto Star: Moore rant wows Cannes Anti-Bush polemic funny, emotional yet very powerful
At one point in the film Bush is seen in the primary school classroom where he first learned of the planes being flown into the World Trade Center towers, and Moore slows the footage down so that Bush is seen to be blinking uncomprehendingly and endlessly, a child's storybook open ridiculously before him, as a counter in the corner of the screen counts out the nine minutes before the President seemed to react.This is a trick that the Kennedy Assassination conspiracy theorists use too. They print individual frames of the Oswald assassination to suggest that Oswald gives a knowing glance to Ruby before he is gunned down.
Can anyone at all tell me what President Clinton was doing and how long it took him to respond after:
The 1993 WTC Bombing?
The destruction of the compound near Waco?
The OKC bombing?
The bombing of the US embassies?
The bombing of the USS Cole?
I'm sure that there are even more attrocities I could list.
About the only "tragedy" that we know how the Clintons responded to was the suicide of Vince Foster. Mrs. Clinton immediately cleared some items from his office.
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