Ok first things first… I am a Moore fan. So a certainly disagree with most of the things you may say here. Nervertheless, I am a big fan of freedom of speach. So I guess I can help you guys :)

See, I’m a french canadian from Montreal (you knew there are french down there right ? Because, come on, where neighbors aren’t we ?) and I translated the french review you asked for. My english is good but not perfect so you may want to correct some grammatical errors.

Since I can post only a maximum of characters, I will post the review within multiple posts. Hope you won’t find it to hard to regroup…

Title :  The anti-Bush crusade of an engaged filmmaker.

By Jean-Luc Drouin

After a Palme d’Or at Cannes movie festival and a huge success in the USA, Micheal Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, strong but simplistic and somewhat demagogic, begins in France.

Documentaries, whether they are about ethical problems or conspiracy, are always looking for “the right place”. Where to put the camera, where to film the witnesses, where to put the microphones. Those questions create new ones: what are the limitations of the documentaries? At what point can we recreate the reality and when begins the private life ? All the G.W Bush movies bring out another notion, the “right time”. 

Probably no presidential election had provided that much visual evidences questioning candidate honesty.

Because of its admitted objectives and it tract tone, Fahrenheit 9/11 is seen as a militant – if not a propaganda – movie, which is not bad as you may thought like it was proven by Dziga Vertov, Mikhail Kalatosov or Joris Ivens. Besides what the Festival de Cannes jury chairman, Quentin Tarentino, may say, the symbolistic award given to the movie just confirmed that fact. Let’s say that the reasons this movie gets such a great honor has nothing to do with the fact that Tarentino and Moore share the same distributor (Miramax), saying that the movie has been rewarded for its cinematographic values, as the creator of Kill Bill said, is whether a sign of a big incompetence, a big lie or a cynical gesture.

Collage of televisual archives and hard news reports, Fahrenheit 9/11 has been crowned for political reasons. The style Michael Moore had developed since Roger and Me is closer to Mad Magazine, Karl Zero or small budget investigation movies than what we would expect from a solid documentary movie.

That doesn’t mean that Fahrenheit 9/11 is a bad movie. That doesn’t mean either that we look without a certain pleasure at that preacher piece of art created to influence the next elections. Moore begins his movie with images from the voting that put Bush in the White house after a shocking recount of the votes in the state of Florida, followed by images of elected black people at the senate protesting against the election irregularities. Then, Moore put some shots of the President looking like a fool and saying that, at the beginning of his time as a President, Bush were on vacation 42% of the time.

It’s funny and then, it isn’t. To present the 9/11 attacks on the US, Moore gives the only cinematographic piece of art of the entire movie: a minute and ten seconds of a black screen. We just hear the sound.

Then, Moore put some evidences that are shocking even if it’s some kind of soft: The easy past of a daddy’s son, links between the Bush and the Texas oil industry, the Saudis, the Bin Laden family evacuated out of the US without any interrogations and while all the airplanes are grounded, how the Bush administration made believe that Iraq was related to terrorism, how they create a fear climax in the country with the help of the media, why TV stations don’t show any coffins coming from Iraq.

All of that, we can read it, and in a better way, in the book of William Karel on George W. Bush. What we can see in Fahrenheit 9/11 and we don’t see anywhere else is how the government uses the poor citizens as human bullets. We can also see how the Marines recruits young unemployed kids in a supermarket parking and follow a mother whose kid has been killed in Iraq protest in front of the Capitol.

Street-microphone style lover, Moore tries to get the representatives of the senate to enroll their own children in the war. The scene where George Bush stays still on a school chair while the attacks occurs in New York has been shown again and again. The strength resides in the fact that we can see all the sequence of Bush at that very moment: demonstration that this guy can’t run the United States.

Not only Moore had created Fahrenheit 9/11 to show it “at the right moment”, just before the next presidential election, but also to shock the good people who come to the theater on the weekend and eat a pop corn. This movie called “non fiction” instead of documentary by Moore itself is to be seen by the average citizen. The Micheal Moore of Fahrenheit 9/11 is the same that we have seen in The Big One where he offered to Nike’s chairman an airplane ticket to Indonesia to visit “their factories and to see the kids who are working down there.”

Rambo antimondialistical, he uses all he can to reach is goal beginning with putting himself as a dispenser of justice. Indeed, Fahrenheit 9/11 is not a documentary, it’s a devastating entertainment, sometimes demographic (the images he uses to show the coalition countries : a vampire for Romania, a pot smoker for Netherlands etc.) and using a lot of funny clips (Paul Wolfowitz spitting on his comb to get rid of his rebellious hair).

After the Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ fundamentalism where Jesus yells against his fanatical hangmans, and Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy which shows the Greeks landing on the beach just like the Normandie debarquement during WWII, Fahrenheit 9/11 is a new symptom on how Americans films are using the entertainment as a denunciation of the Evil axis

THE END !!!