Concettina Died and Other Stories of the East Side
PhotographsDownloadsLinksSelf-portraitContact


"Go See Fahrenheit 9/11" posted June 27, 2004 at 10:06 PM

Mark, Elizabeth, Laura, Alex, and I went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 on Friday night. We all loved it. I think it's Moore's best movie (although it's hard to top "Roger & Me"). Amazingly, even with the material being such a political hot potato, he's truly in control of the material in a way that wasn't true of "Bowling for Columbine." He's still kind of snide, and still very funny, but he's also subtler and stays out of the way of the great footage he's got and let's it speak for itself. He really refrains from taking (too many) cheap shots--of course, there are some, but they play as comedy here rather than the mean-spirited pranks in "Columbine" that turned some people off.

My friends and I all remarked afterward that there were many things revealed that we didn't know before--and we all like to count ourselves among the fairly politically aware. Now, how much one trusts Moore to deliver new ideas and facts is an open question, but in some of these cases it is a simple matter of public record (such as the House Reps who contested the verification process of the 2000 election and the failure of even one Senator to join them....I was stunned by my previous ignorance of this important sidebar to the 2000 election).

The events of September 11 were used in a respectful and solemn way. I was concerned about how he would deal with September 11th, because if mishandled it would something the right wing nuts would use against him as being "un-American." But it was handled very well--and very movingly. I suspect that sequence, which comes early on in the film, helped to set the tone for us New Yorkers in a way that is a bit more heightened than in the rest of the country.

Anyway, the film is very much worth seeing, for everyone on both sides of the political spectrum, especially because Moore's premise--which is completely distorted by the press coverage of the movie--is not to take sides between left and right, conservative and liberal, or Democrat and Republican. The movie's thesis, rather, is that the radical policies undertaken by the Bush administration--which the movie makes clear are not conservative policies at all--are symptoms of a bigger problem in the US. It's a problem about the intentions of our nation's founders and the long road that has led us so far away from those ideals. At it's most fundamental level it's about the ever-increasing power of corporations in this country which is crippling us. The movie uses very specific and very recent footage to make a point that is much more expansive than a simple indictment of Bush's failed policies. I was thrilled aesthetically and politically by the subtlety, long memory, and expansive vision of the future that this movie uses.


Comments (0)