Posted on 06/09/2004 6:15:46 PM PDT by Pikamax
Fahrenheit 9/11 Debuts in Beverly Hills Cinemocracy There to Cover Event Cinemocracy attended the 10:00 screening of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 last night at the Laemle Music Hall Theater on Wilshire last night. Never mind how we got in. Quickly noticing a friend from high school (we’re everywhere), we sat down just in front of the reserved aisles in the back. A legion of celebrities, fresh from the Laker game and Kobe Bryant’s last second heroics, filled in around us. To satisfy the salacious appetite of Defamer readers, we’ll mention them here.
Leonardo DiCaprio, trying hard to look incognito, sat just behind us. Nearby were Billy Crystal, Matthew Perry, Sharon Stone and date. Chris Rock snagged an aisle seat far to the left, and Ashton Kutcher grabbed the right aisle next to escort Demi Moore. Jack Black arrived a little late and had to sit way up front. At one point we temporarily escaped to grab a pen, and on the way back into the theater we overheard Harvey Weinstein express his pleasure at the attendance, then lament the lack of seating. “I’m sure they’ll save a seat for you,” we told him as if we knew the guy, to which he responded, “No matter – I’ve already seen it a few times.”
Once the audience settled, Weinstein took the microphone in the front of the room and offered his condolences to the family of Ronald Reagan. He then introduced Ari Emmanuel, Michael Moore’s agent from Endeavor, who made a few laudatory comments about the film and pointed to Michael Moore, standing off to the right side in the aisle. Emmanuel spoke briefly, ending his introduction by mentioning Moore’s birthplace of Michigan and then raising his fist, taunting, “Go Lakers!”
It’s easy to see how Fahrenheit 9/11 so sharply divided the critics, not over its political message, but over its cinematic qualities. The film alternates between long periods of slow, boring dialogue with incredibly insightful and well-crafted montages that dumbfound the viewer. We heard many sighs of exasperation around us and heard quite a few jaws dropping and knocking over bags of popcorn. A critic might easy focus on either the tedious aspects or the engaging aspects to support his opinion that the documentary deserved its Palm D’Or or did not. The slower bits suffered mainly because Moore tried to pack in colossal amounts of evidence of Bush administration deception. These portions had an almost academic quality, well-intentioned to educate the American people, but coming off with all the excitement of a Ph.D. dissertation on military history. Moore clearly did his homework - as best he could given that most of the information he truly would have liked to get his hands on remain classified or locked somewhere in a corporate safe.
Some of the more fluid portions of the film include archival news footage strung together to tell the compelling story of the President’s relationship with domestic terrorism. One of the most absorbing segments details the lackadaisical nature in which Bush approached his early days in office. Bush spent 42% of the time before September 11th on vacation, digging up the soil of his ranch looking for bugs and then going fishing, and the picture highlights the intelligence reports regarding Al Qaeda that Bush and his administration simply ignored during this time off. Moore does not argue that the Bush administration knew about or caused the attacks on the World Trade Center, but when viewed in this fashion the President himself appears guilty of gross, intolerable negligence. That was our first jaw-dropping moment.
Another impacting section featured roughly forty-five minutes of video from the Iraq war, the vast majority of which we had never seen before, and we consider ourselves information junkies. Such clips are not for the faint of heart - several shots feature bloodied and mangled Iraqi children (spliced with Donald Rumsfeld calling it a “humane” war), as well as the charred remains of U.S. soldiers dragged from the back of a jeep and hanging from wooden posts. The culture of modern warfare and the personality of the American military does not appear to have changed much since Vietnam, and much of the footage bears a striking resemblance to scenes from Apocalypse Now. More than half of Fahrenheit deals with the Iraq war, and Moore spends a good deal of time with the family of a serviceman killed in action. The soldier’s mother makes a heart-wrenching journey to Washington near the end of the film in order to vent her devastated frustration at the White House. Sequence such as this are a favorite theatrical device of Moore’s; he did something similar in Bowling for Columbine, bringing victims of the school shooting to K-Mart to protest their selling of bullets. Unlike the K-Mart mission, however, in Fahrenheit, there is no resolution to be found for the victim’s pain.
The audience gave Moore a partial standing ovation at the close of the film, not quite matching the one he received in Cannes - roughly half of the theatergoers rose to their feet at the Laemmle. Michael Moore took the microphone and thanked Harvey and Bob Weinstein, to whom he offered apologies for possibly causing them to lose their company. Harvey Weinstein yelled out, “It was worth it.” Moore then began to field questions from the audience, but by this time it was close to 1:00 a.m. and people were tired. The only interesting revelation to be heard was that Moore had been surprised to hear Ray Bradbury’s comments about the title of the film and that he intended to call the author on Wednesday. We all left the theater and congregated outside for a few minutes, then Moore and Harvey Weinstein departed for a late-night snack at Kate Mantilini’s.
On our way back to the car, we discovered that Jack Black had parked, illegally, next to us in the rear unlit lot of a Wilshire Boulevard retail store. “Hey Jack,” we asked. “Can I get a picture?” “No way, scary dark alley guy!” he replied.
“Quick, get in the car!”
[ The pictures displayed above show, in the order from top to bottom, the following: (1) the Laemme Music Hall Theater Marquee, (2) Harvey Weinsein and Chris Rock, (3) Michael Moore, (4) Harvey Weinstein, (5) Jack Black and fans ]
[ We apologize for the blurriness of some photos - having sneaked our Olympus C-700 digital camera into the theater, we promptly sat on it and busted the zoom lens so that it stayed totally extended ]
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