Saturday, July 03, 2004
The Michael Moore Diet
Warts and all, Fahrenheit 9/11 is, indeed, essential viewing. First and foremost, it's enormously entertaining, and at the Bush administration's expense. : - ) Moore uses much live footage of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et alia saying things that are preposterous, inane, and uncannily revealing. "Fahrenheit" is brilliantly written, paced, and edited - it succeeds as superb film-making, though certainly not as balanced journalism. Moore infers that the Bush team is conspiratorially evil, motivated only by greed and gain, which is probably an exaggeration. He depicts Bush and company as even more glaringly stupid than they probably are. The French have a saying that "he who exaggerates, diminishes." Nonetheless, "Fahrenheit" does the public an enormous service in several ways: 1) It presents in vivid detail some indisputable facts that many Americans are ignorant of, such as past U.S. support of both Bin Laden and Hussein by the Reagan administration, the Bush family's close personal and financial relationship with the Saudis, and our government's flying Bin Laden family and 100 other Saudis out of the country on September 13, before the air travel ban was lifted. 2) It shows us, graphically, the human suffering inflicted on both the Iraqis and our own soldiers by this war, using footage rarely seen on network news, which showed us an "air-brushed" war from their "embedded" front-row seats.
We witness the grief of Lila Lipscomb (pictured left with her husband), a lovely community worker and proud supporter of our troops who is shattered when her own son dies needlessly in Iraq. This story is told mostly by soliders and their families, politicians, and security people, on center stage in their own words, with Moore intermittently narrating. Again, a stirring experience. See it. But see it after you see Napoleon Dyanmite.this entry's permalink
Comments:
Post a Comment
