Exactly! I feel the same way.
Me, too. There's not much out there on the actual content of the film. Here's one thing, though:
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
Guelph Mercury (Ontario, Canada)
May 18, 2004
ARTS & LIFE; Pg. B2
Moore ignites Cannes with Fahrenheit 9/11; Relentless critique of Bush administration could become rallying cry for Democrats
Associated Press
DATELINE: CANNES, FRANCE
Michael Moore lit the powder keg he promised at the Cannes Film Festival: His incendiary Fahrenheit 9/11 riled and discomposed audiences Monday with a relentless critique of the Bush administration in the post-Sept. 11 world.
If Moore can get the movie into U.S. theatres this summer as planned, the title Fahrenheit 9/11 could become a rallying cry for Democratic voters in the fall election between President George W. Bush and opponent John Kerry.
The movie reiterates other critics' accusations about the Bush family's financial connections to Saudi oil money and the family of Osama bin Laden. Moore also repeats others' condemnations that the White House was asleep at the wheel before the Sept. 11 attacks, then used fear-mongering of future terrorism to muster support for the Iraq war.
Yet Moore -- the provocateur behind the Academy Award-winning Bowling for Columbine, which dissected American gun culture -- applies his trademark satiric outrage to the Sept. 11 debate, packaging his anti-Bush message in a way that provokes both laughs and gasps.
Even skeptics of Moore, who draws criticism that he skews the truth to fit his arguments, were impressed.
"I have a problematic relationship with some of Michael Moore's work. There's no such job as a standup journalist," said James Rocchi, film critic for DVD rental company Netflix, who saw the movie at a press screening before its official Cannes premiere.
Yet in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore presents powerful segments about losses on both sides of the Iraq war and the grief of American and Iraqi families, Rocchi said.
"This film is at its best when it is most direct and speaks from the heart, when it shows lives torn apart," Rocchi said.
Moore still is arranging for a U.S. distributor. Miramax financed the movie, but parent company Disney blocked the release because of its political overtones.
In the days before Cannes, Moore's Disney criticism whipped festival audiences into a fever for Fahrenheit 9/11. Hollywood cynics called it the usual P.T. Barnum showmanship by Moore, but when the movie finally unspooled, it earned resounding applause at Monday's press screenings.
"You see so many movies after they've been hyped to heaven and they turn out to be complete crap, but this is a powerful film," said Baz Bamigboye, a film columnist for London's Daily Mail.
"It would be a shame if Americans didn't get to see this movie about important stuff happening in their own backyard."
Fahrenheit 9/11 seems assured of U.S. release, however. Miramax bosses Harvey and Bob Weinstein are trying to buy back the film and find another distributor, with Moore hoping to have it in theatres by Fourth of July weekend.
Harvey Weinstein showed up outside the Cannes theatre after the first Fahrenheit 9/11 screenings. He declined to speak at length, but as reporters asked if the film would be released, he said, "Have I ever let you down?"
The film takes its title from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which refers to the temperature needed to burn books in an anti-Utopian society. Moore calls Fahrenheit 9/11 the "temperature at which freedom burns."
Fahrenheit 9/11 opens with a whimsical recap of the 2000 presidential campaign and the rancour after Florida's photo-finish vote threw the election to Bush over Democratic rival Al Gore.
"Was it all just a dream?" Moore ponders. "Did the last four years even happen?" The movie characterizes Bush's first eight months in office as a prolonged holiday for a potential "lame-duck president," backed by the Go-Go's tune Vacation.
The Sept. 11 attacks play out with no images of the planes that destroyed the World Trade Center or damaged the Pentagon. Instead, Moore fades to black and provides only the sounds of the planes crashing into the towers, before fading in again on tearful faces of people watching the devastation and a slow-motion montage of floating ash and debris after the buildings collapsed.
.
Thanks my blood pressure shot up just reading this biased short report.
The theatre was more than full. Half of the people were American, but a lot of us were French. He was warmly applaused when he came in. Then the doc began.
The doc begins with the election day, stressing the point that Gore had won, until Fox News told the contrary.
The documentary goes from the investiture and the riots that happened that day, to the first months of "work" for Bush. Pretty soon we get to September 11. Moore made the choice not to show the images of the tower, but left a black screen, with only the noises. When there finally are images : it's the faces of people in the streets.
Moore shows what was Bush doing when he get the news (sitting in a school, reading a child book) and how he stayed there, doing nothing, for several minutes. The critic to the man is obvious and violently funny. The audience in the theatre was laughing and cheering.
Moore illustrates then his point : the relationships between Saudians families and the Bush family, all linked through weapons and oil firms. Moore uses a fragmented chronology and flash-backs to prove the manipulations and the contradictions in speeches.
Very soon, Moore explains that the real goal was Iraq though Afghanistan was attacked first.
Then begins the second part of the doc : about war.
Moore demonstrates, with the help of a psychiatrist and of archives documents, how the opinion and American people were manipulated, putting an emphasis about the Patriot Act.
Moore went to Baghdad, where he shot soldiers, speaking freely, where he just the people and how they are treated by American troops. He creates a "décalage" between what is said by some soldiers and by what he shows of the war : civilians being killed or arrested.
His purpose is clear : he doesn't put the blame on the troops, but on their ignorance, their violence and on the manipulators.
We also follows with him the story of Lila, who is an ordinary family mother from Flint, Michigan. We follow her in time : her pride that her kid is a soldier, like many in her family before, then the first doubts of Lila, to, eventually, her son's death and her trip to Washington, while, in the meantime, Moore shows himself trying to recruit, unsuccesfully the senators' kids to go to war in Iraq.
The doc ends with a George Orwell quotation about war and politics. Moore closes his doc with a final commentary, which you can't really calls optimistic.
He got the biggest standing ovation I ever saw in Cannes. Most people were red-eyed because it was so moving. But everyone stood and applauded, and cheered for at least 15 minutes.
When he went down the steps, the music being played was John Lennon's Imagine. A beautiful choice for a beautiful doc.
Celia
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
Time Magazine
May 31, 2004
The Art of Burning Bush;
Michael Moore whipped Cannes into an inferno with Fahrenheit 9/11, but did he make a good film?
Richard Corliss/Cannes
(snip)
For all those eight-figure earners, the largest presence at this French film fete was a fellow from Flint, Mich., who's usually seen in a scruffy beard and duck-hunter couture. Michael Moore was prowling the Riviera, and this time the game he aimed at was George W. Bush. Bull's-eye! His Fahrenheit 9/11 captured Cannes's highest prize, the Palme d'Or, from a jury headed by Quentin Tarantino. "What have you done?" the winner asked in benign shock. "You just did this to mess with me."
(snip) ... in his acceptance speech, he scolded the President for invading Iraq. So Cannes was primed for his latest movie Molotov cocktail. Its first screening, on a Monday at 8 a.m., got total team news coverage; a dozen or so radio and TV crews circled the U.S. critics to get their early reaction as Miramax Films co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, whose Disney bosses had forbidden him to release the film, paced nearby and chortled, "They say I've lost my edge? Have I lost my edge?" He had not. He spent the rest of the week negotiating with a flock of U.S. distributors hoping to profit from the film's marketable notoriety.
(snip)
The film details, with Moore's usual mix of flippant comedy and moral outrage, the case for the prosecution in the left vs. Bush: the Bush Administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq, its Patriot Act clamping down on civil liberties and its cozy relationship with the ruling families of Saudi Arabia, including the bin Ladens. Moore is particularly indignant that the President had a chummy White House visit on Sept. 13, 2001, with Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia, from whose country 15 of the 19 hijackers had come, and that in the dire days after 9/11, when U.S. flights were grounded, two dozen of Osama bin Laden's relatives were flown out of the country without the FBI being allowed to question them.
Much of the material is familiar. The film buttresses its arguments from reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post, Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud and Moore's own best seller Dude, Where's My Country? But Moore, a master propagandist and incorrigible entertainer, knows how to assemble footage in piquant ways. He shows a news clip of Bush on a golf course saying sternly, "We must stop the terror," then reverting to country-club form by adding cheerfully, "Now watch this drive." Moore precedes his section on the Patriot Act by noting that Attorney General John Ashcroft had lost his U.S. Senate seat in 2000 to the recently deceased Governor of Missouri: "Voters preferred the dead guy." There's a shot from a few years back of Moore elbowing his way to talk to then Texas Governor Bush, who recognizes him and says, "Behave yourself, will ya? Go find real work."
Moore's work here is to show the corruptive influence of the war in Iraq: coarsening some Americans abroad, killing others. The film contains previously unseen footage of U.S. soldiers' abuse of Iraqi detainees last Christmas Eve. Toward the end, Moore returns home to Flint to grieve with the parents of a dead soldier, then goes to Washington in a quixotic attempt to badger members of Congress into volunteering their sons and daughters for military service.
(snip)