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I just saw Fahrenheit 9/11

Schweddy

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:evil:

Facts are distorted.

Lies are abundant.

Events are twisted giving FALSE impressions of actual events and timelines.

Bush is blamed for everything and Moore trys to produce evidence out of thin air. This whole movie is an attempt NOT to re-elect Bush.

This movie is nothing but ignorant propaganda!!

Moore should be tried for teason for aiding the enemy.

This is a sad day for America :hm .
 
Bush reading to children AFTER the planes hit the building with a very slowed almost bland look on his face.

He was reading to the kids DURING and quit promptly after hearing about 911.

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Conda Leza Rice talking about weapons of mass destruction and how "he didn't have them" taken WAY out of context. She was originally refering to his army NOT WOMD.

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Powell way out of context.

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American bodies dragged in the streets of badgad with Moore exclaiming "What has Bush done"?

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The Bin Ladin's (family) are shown as being able to leave the US after flights grounded. WRONG, they were all questioned by CIA and given leave when the flights were open to everyone. Only after it was proven they had no contact with Bin Ladin. He totally distorts this fact.

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Many many opinions of soldiers and mothers of fallen soldiers presented as fact.

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Showed how the military personel in the tanks would rather listen to music than orders. (Gives the impression)


The list goes on and on and on...
 
Here is a post off slant.com I found.... interesting piece. This guy is definatly left wing, but he does try to paint a consise picture of the film..

source: Slant.com

Back in the '80s—the era of Reagan and Bush 41, when milquetoasts Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis were the ineffectual Democratic candidates and Jimmy Carter was off building houses for poor people, when Anthony Lewis was writing oh-so-temperately in the New York Times, which was then leaning neoconward under the stewardship of Abe Rosenthal, when there was an explosion of dirty Republican tricksters like Lee Atwater and trash-talking right-wingers, from Morton Downey Jr. to the fledgling Rush Limbaugh—I found myself wishing, wishing fervidly, for a blowhard whom the left could call its own. Someone who wouldn't shrink before the right's bellicosity. Someone who would bellow back, mock unashamedly, and maybe even recapture the prankster spirit of counterculture figures like Abbie Hoffman.

Yeah, I know: Be careful what you wish for.

In 20 years of writing about film, no movie has ever tied me up in knots the way Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (Lions Gate) has. It delighted me; it disgusted me. I celebrate it; I lament it. I'm sure of only one thing: that I don't trust anyone—pro or con—who doesn't feel a twinge of doubt about his or her responses. What follows might be broadly labeled as "waffling," but I hope, at least, that it is bold and decisive waffling.

Needless to say, Fahrenheit 9/11 never waffles. The liberals' The Passion of the Christ, it ascribes only the most venal motives to the other side. There is no sign in the filmmaker of an openness to other interpretations (or worldviews). This is not quite a documentary—which I define, very loosely, as a work in which the director begins by turning on the camera and allowing the reality to speak for itself, aware of its complexities, contradictions, and multitudes. You are with Moore, or you are a war criminal. The film is part prosecutorial brief and part (as A.O. Scott has noted) rabid editorial cartoon: a blend of insight, outrage, and sniggering innuendo, the whole package threaded (and tied in a bow) with cheap shots, some of them voiced by Moore, some created in the editing room by intercutting stilted images from old movies. Moore is largely off-screen (no pun intended), but as narrator he's always there, sneering and tsk-tsking.

Here are the salient points: that Bush stole the presidency from Al Gore (who, in one of the film's best scenes, must certify his opponent's election and quell a movement to stall that certification); that Bush and his family had been in bed with the Saudis, which made him less responsive to the danger of al-Qaida terrorism; that a pipeline in Afghanistan promised billions if the Taliban was on board, which was one reason that the threat of Osama Bin Laden (black sheep of a family with whom daddy did business) was swept under the rug. Better to concentrate on Iraq, the administration felt—it had unfinished Saddam business, it was rich in oil, and it was a potential goldmine for U.S. corporations.

Moore ranges far and wide: He apes Apocalypse Now (1979) with footage of bucolic Baghdad before the bombings, then cuts to soldiers explaining the way they hook their iPods to the tank speakers: "You have a good song playing in the background, it gets you really fired up." (I'm surprised he didn't go ahead and play "Ride of the Valkyries.") Then there's graphic footage of dead Iraqi women and small children killed in what the Pentagon said were surgically precise bombings. A grieving old woman shrieks curses at the United States, while U.S. soldiers with missing limbs rail at the administration. On the home front, Moore suggests that the Patriot Act was unread by the legislators who passed it and harps on its absurd applications, like the agent who infiltrated a septuagenarian cookie-baking peace collective in Fresno, Calif. Then he chases hawkish congressmen outside the Capitol. Would they send their own sons and daughters to fight in Iraq? he asks—often to their backs, as they flee.

As I watched California Congressman John T. Doolittle take off from Moore's camera, arms and legs bobbing spastically, I was troubled by the cheapness of Moore's interviewing techniques. But I laughed my ass off anyway. And I felt better about laughing when I checked the warlike congressman's Web site, which mentions his graduation from high school* in 1968 but, predictably, no Vietnam service.

All right, you can make anyone into a goofball with a selection of unflattering shots and out-of-context quotations, but it is so very easy to make George W. Bush—with his near-demonic blend of smugness and vacuity—look bad. Or is this in eye of the beholder? Perhaps when Bush speaks of hunting down terrorists, then gets down to the real, golfing business—"Stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive"—you see an honest, plainspoken leader unfairly ridiculed. But what can even Bush partisans make of those seven minutes in the elementary school classroom after he received the news that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center and the nation was under attack? In one of the few lapses in an otherwise virtuoso rant, Christopher Hitchens argues that Moore would have made sport of a martial, Russell Crowe-like response. Nice try, but that blow wouldn't have landed, and this one does, spectacularly. It is downright spooky to watch the nominal commander in chief and "leader of the free world" behave, in a moment of crisis, like a superfluous man.

Moore is best when he doesn't stage dumb pranks (like broadcasting the Patriot Act in D.C. out of an ice-cream truck) but provokes with his mere presence. When he interviews the author of House of Bush, House of Saud in front of the Saudi embassy and the Secret Service shows up to ask what he's doing, it's a gotcha moment: What's the Secret Service doing protecting non-U.S. government officials? He has a light touch there that's missing from the rest of the Fahrenheit 9/11. In one scene, his camera homes in on a Flint, Mich., woman weeping over a son killed in Iraq, and the effect is vampirish. After the screening, a friend railed that Moore was exploiting a mother's grief. When I suggested that the scene made moral sense in the context of the director's universe, that the exploitation is justified if it saves the lives of other mothers' sons, my friend said, "When did you become a relativist?"

I'm troubled by that charge—and by the fact that we nearly came to blows by the end of the conversation. But when it comes to politics in a time of war, I think that relativism is, well, relative. Fahrenheit 9/11 must be viewed in the context of the Iraq occupation and the torrent of misleading claims that got us there. It must be viewed in the context of Rush Limbaugh repeating the charge that Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster murdered in Fort Marcy Park, or laughing off the exposure of Valerie Plame when, had this been a Democratic administration, he'd be calling every day for the traitor's head. It must be viewed in the context of Ann Coulter calling for the execution of people who disagree with her. It must be viewed in the context of another new documentary, the superb The Hunting of the President, that documents—irrefutably—the lengths to which the right went to destroy Bill Clinton. Moore might be a demagogue, but never—not even during Watergate—has a U.S. administration left itself so open to this kind of savaging.

Along with many other polite liberals, I cringed last year when Moore launched into his charmless, pugilistic acceptance speech at the Academy Awards. Oh, how vulgar, I thought—couldn't he at least have been funny? A year later, I think I might have been too hard on the fat prick. Six months before her death in 1965, the great novelist Dawn Powell wrestled in her diary with the unseemliness of political speech during an "artistic" event: "Lewis Mumford gave jolt to the occasion and I realized I had gotten as chicken as the rest of America because what he said—we had no more right in Vietnam than Russia had in Cuba—was true but I did not think he should use his position to declaim this. Later I saw the only way to accomplish anything is by 'abusing' your power." Exactly. Fahrenheit 9/11 is not a documentary for the ages, it is an act of counterpropaganda that has a boorish, bullying force. It is, all in all, a legitimate abuse of power.

Addendum, June 25, 2004: It is now apparently part of the Secret Service's mandate to protect foreign diplomats in the nation's capital. Why they'd have dispatched an agent to quiz Michael Moore on camera is a mystery, though. They knew who he was. Did Prince Bandar just want to let him know he was being monitored?

Correction, June 25, 2004: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly stated that U.S. Rep. John T. Doolittle graduated college in 1968. He graduated high school that year. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
 
One more worthy read:

Source:New York Post

For all its clever slickness, Michael Moore's "Fahren heit 9/11" does not stack up to such brilliant but evil art as Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda films for Hitler. But it is art in the sense that any piece of effective political propaganda — Julius Streicher's "Der Sturmer" magazine, the famous Che poster from Alberto Korda's photo, even the anti-Goldwater mushroom-cloud TV ad put out by LBJ — can be taken as art.

Alert critics will doubtless point out its artistic flaws. For example, its most moving sequence — which features audio from the World Trade Center attacks played over a black screen — is a direct ripoff of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's 11-minute segment in the 2003 film "9/11/01"

What makes "Fahrenheit 9/11" notable is that feature-length movie-house agitprop is a relatively rare and new thing, and that so far it has been treated (for instance by the Cannes Film Festival jury) as something more than the clever (if breathtakingly sleazy) political propaganda that it is.

And the film does offer some valuable lessons for everyone — though not in its topics: 9/11, Osama bin Laden, Iraq, the "stolen" 2000 election, the Bush administration's fondness for the Saudis, the U.S. armed forces' supposed recruiting from the "starving" unemployed masses or any of the mutually exclusive conspiracy theories the movie puts forward.

No, the lessons of "Fahrenheit 9/11" have to do with the general degradation of our political discourse, the gross dishonesty of our most feted "documentary" filmmaker and with what Michael Moore's super-popularity in Hollywood and France adds to what we already know about the ignorance and intellectual poverty of the movie industry and the pathetic, spiteful hostility of our French "allies."

That said, the Bush administration might want to consider how the Department of Homeland Security's silly color-coded terror alerts play neatly into the hands of its most paranoid or devious opponents (especially when those alerts coincide with adverse poll results).

And the "forgotten" soldiers who have lost arms and legs in the Iraq and Afghan wars (there's some moving footage of amputees) should neither be forgotten nor remembered only by people like Moore, who would use that suffering for their own ends.

But you certainly don't have to be a fan of Bush or his policies to be offended by "Fahrenheit 9/11" lies, half-lies and distortions, or by Moore's shockingly low expectations of his audience:

* Moore's favorite anti-administration interviewee is former National Security Council aide Richard Clarke. Yet the film never mentions that it was Clarke who gave the order to spirit the bin Laden family out of America immediately after 9/11. Moore makes much of this mystery; why didn't he ask Clarke about it ?

* At one point of the film, he portrays GIs as moronic savages who work themselves up with music before setting out to kill. Later, he depicts them as proletarian victims of a cynical ruling class, who deserve sympathy and honor for their sacrifice.

* The film's amusing (if bordering on racist) Saudi-bashing sequences rely for their effect on the audience having forgotten that President Bill Clinton was every bit as friendly with Prince Bandar (or "Bandar Bush," as Moore calls him) and the Saudi monarchy as his successor. In general, the movie is packed with points that Moore assumes his audience will never check, or are either lies or cleverly hedged half-lies:

* Moore says that the Saudis have paid the Bush family $1.4 billion. But wait —the Bushes aren't billionaires. If you watch the film a second time you'll note Moore saying that they paid $1.4 billion to the Bush family and (added very quietly and quickly) its friends and associates.

* Moore asserts that the Afghan war was fought only to enable the Unocal company to build a pipeline. In fact, Unocal dropped that idea back in August 1998. Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan are looking at the idea now, but nothing has come of it so far, and in any case Unocal has nothing to do with it.

* In a "congressmen with no kids at war" stunt, Moore claims that no one in Congress has a son or daughter fighting in America's armed services, then approaches several congressmen in the street and asks them to sign up and send their kids to Iraq. His claim would certainly surprise Sgt. Brooks Johnson of the 101st Airborne, the son of Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.). And for that matter the active-duty sons of Sen. Joseph Biden and Attorney General John Ashcroft, among others.

The most offensive sequence in "Fahrenheit 9/11"'s long two hours lasts only a few minutes. It's Moore's file-footage depiction of happy Iraq before the Americans began their supposedly pointless invasion. You see men sitting in cafes, kids flying kites, women shopping. Cut to bombs exploding at night.

What Moore presumably doesn't know, or simply doesn't care about, is that the building you see being blown up is the Iraqi Ministry of Defense in Baghdad. Not many children flew kites there. It was in a part of the city that ordinary Iraqis weren't allowed to visit — on pain of death.

And if Moore weren't a (left-wing) version of the fat, bigoted, ignorant Americans his European friends love to mock, he'd know that prewar Iraq was ruled by a regime that had forced a sixth of its population into fearful exile, that hanged dissidents (real dissidents, not people like Susan Sontag and Tim Robbins) from meathooks and tortured them with blowtorches, and filled thousands of mass graves with the bodies of its massacred citizens.

Yes, children played, women shopped and men sat in cafes while that stuff went on — just as people did all those normal things in Somoza's Nicaragua, Duvalier's Haiti and for that matter Nazi Germany, and as they do just about everywhere, including in Iraq today.

Moore has defended deliberate inaccuracies in his prior films by claiming that satirists don't have to tell the exact truth. Fair enough. But if you take the lies, half-lies and distortions out "Fahrenheit 9/11," there isn't much of anything left.
 
I ask for examples, and talk about getting what you asked for. :-o
I have no desire to see this movie.

Everything is slanted to the left or the right. The movie that HBO? did regarding the days shortly after 9-11 pictured Bush as the heroic saviour of the USA. In short, it was as right slanted as could be. It's not too hard to imagine a left slanted movie like this one coming out, to "paint the truth".
 
IF you have just watched F-911 but did not see the special features i would recomend renting the dvd and watching the special feature of the swedish journalist. Tell me that that is a lie.

As for an unbiased movie i think your right in saying that everything is slanted left or right. I would personaly watch a foreign film. Many people over seas have a better understanding of us politics than we do.
 
Sorry vague, I'm wayyyy too lazy to read all that. However, most of those things Moore doesn't say directly, he IMPLIES them and lets the viewer come to the conclusion themselves. Everything said by a extremely right or extremely left wing person should be taken with a grain of salt.

Moore is just a fat guy who makes documentaries that bash the Republican party. Good. Call it what you like, but it worked on some people. (Apparently not enough though). I hate it, though, how people find one or two things "wrong" about the movie, and disavow all the facts in it as lies. I haven't seen the movie in awhile so I can't give you examples. I wish he didn't put all that garbage about that woman who's son died. That part was propoganda. Oh well.
 
Moore is very good at bringing a lot of emotion to the surface in his documentaries. Whether you agree with him or not, you WILL have an emotional reaction to what he does. That’s the sign of an effective film maker.

Sure he plays a little fast and loose with the facts, but he doesn’t spin things any more than Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, or O’Rielly. BTW, the fat jokes are cheap and demean you more than him.

If you really want to watch a significant documentary, check our “The Power Of Nightmares” which was run by the BBC in October. The three part series that exposes how the US Neoconservatives have used fear to manipulate the United States electorate starting during the 1950s. You can watch all three shows via Real Player online. The links are below.

The Power of Nightmares - Part I - Baby It's Cold Outside
Broadcast on BBC 2 10/20/04

Watch it:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1037.htm

Read the summary:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3755686.stm


The Power of Nightmares Part II – The Phantom Victory
Broadcast on BBC 2 10/27/04

Watch it:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1038.htm

Read the summary:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3951615.stm


The Power of Nightmares - Part III – The Shadows In The Cave
Broadcast on BBC 2 11/03/04

Watch it:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1040.htm

Read the summary:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3970901.stm
 
:duel :fu It is true that Moore is bias but he makes several good points. In fact, I won't even argue with you on the movie but is this hasty, dependent, half wit fool the person we want as president? He can't make a decision of his own and if a country is important to his personal and cabinet cash income then they are granted a free pass. ( I love these little smiley faces)
 
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I notice you go back and edit posts for spelling.

I dislike bush. I think he is stupid to a degree. But he had to be smart to a certain extent for if he were to stupid he would not be able to make it to the current position he holds.
 
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