Fox News gives 'Fahrenheit 9/11" a favorble review

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

You mean like Bush and Cheney do now on the rare occasion that any of the public or press gets to ask them a question?

Once again, you do not like it when they do it. Yet, when MM does it, it is okay

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

I am happy for it. I think you all are once again getting all upset about things I am not saying

Please note the emoticon at the end of my post.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

As someone who lived here during the tragedy, visited the scene shortly after and knew many people involved in the school district and resuce efforts, let me tell you that no amount of sensationalism was necessary. Moore did his best to drive home his point which a lot of the folks at home wathcing the glass teat simply don't get. Do you know why they called it Bowling For Columbine? Because a few days after the tragedy, there was a fundraiser where people went and bowled to raise money for the survivors and their families. I sat at home while this was going on and watched people I KNEW going into the school. The initial aerial shots from the news helicopter showed a kid LAYING DEAD ON THE GROUND. It didn't need to be sensationalized. It was that dramatic.

I AM NOT TAKING AWAY FROM THAT

I AGREE WITH YOU

ALL I AM SAYING is I did not like the way MM chose to portray it. Bless youe peoples' hearts, I am unsure why you all seem to think I am taking away from the tragedy of this event or that I do not in theory agree with MM is saying.

Again, ALL I AM SAYING is I did not like the way the film was produced, etc. I think a more literal approach would have been better SHEEBUS!!!!

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

Please note the emoticon at the end of my post.

I know - I was using "upset" in a general sense, not in a literal sense. I do not think people are angry with me, etc.

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

you are reacting to me offering my somewhat negative opinion of the way MM portrays things in his films, which apparently is a sacreligious event for the far left.

And I'm telling you my first hand experience with the Columbine incident. That said, I feel that the way Michael Moore portrayed things in BFC was accurate. Now you can counter it with websites etc., all you want. But I'm HERE. I experienced this tragedy on a much more personal level than you did.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

And I'm telling you my first hand experience with the Columbine incident. That said, I feel that the way Michael Moore portrayed things in BFC was accurate. Now you can counter it with wesites etc., all you want. But I'm HERE. I experienced this tragedy on a much more personal level than you did.

I know that. Again, I am not talking about the way he portrayed the dead people, etc., It was his sarcasm, etc., in other parts of the film. I mean and please correct me if I am wrong, but there was nothing humorous or sarcastic about this event. Yet, his film has that tone. That is all I am saying.

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

I AM NOT TAKING AWAY FROM THAT

I AGREE WITH YOU

ALL I AM SAYING is I did not like the way MM chose to portray it. Bless youe peoples' hearts, I am unsure why you all seem to think I am taking away from the tragedy of this event or that I do not in theory agree with MM is saying.

Again, ALL I AM SAYING is I did not like the way the film was produced, etc. I think a more literal approach would have been better SHEEBUS!!!!

And what I'm saying to you in all sincerity is literally, that's what happened. BTW, how specifically did you want him to portray it?

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

I know that. Again, I am not talking about the way he portrayed the dead people, etc., It was his sarcasm, etc., in other parts of the film. I mean and please correct me if I am wrong, but there was nothing humorous or sarcastic about this event. Yet, his film has that tone. That is all I am saying.

He never played the event as humorous or sarcastic. Give it up already.

[dissention]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

http://www.bowlingfortruth.com/bowli...cko/heston.htm

I won't choke because I'm not reading anything from bowlingfortruth.com, pal.

That site was debunked last year as being an NRA site and if anything is a terrorist organization, it's the NRA.

[dissention]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

I know that. Again, I am not talking about the way he portrayed the dead people, etc., It was his sarcasm, etc., in other parts of the film. I mean and please correct me if I am wrong, but there was nothing humorous or sarcastic about this event. Yet, his film has that tone. That is all I am saying.

Which is why he didn't portray the event or anything to do with it in a sarcastic or humorous light. I don't see why you don't understand that. Surely you don't believe that the film was soley about Columbine. It was about this country's obssession with guns and violence. Now, if you can't see the humor in banks giving away a gun with a new account, you don't have a pulse. But he did not have that tone when dealing with the Columbine incident in the documentary. Surely his passion and emotions about what happened there came through in the documentary. They did to me.

[gldstwmn]

Thursday, June 18th, 2004
Some People Still Don't Want You To See My Movie... From Michael Moore

Friends,

We're a week away from the nationwide opening of "Fahrenheit 9/11" and not a day goes by where we don't have some new battle to fight thanks to those who are still working overtime to keep people from seeing this film. What's their problem? Are they worried about something?

A Republican PR firm has formed a fake grassroots front group called "Move America Forward" to harass and intimidate theater owners into not showing "Fahrenheit 9/11." These are the same people who successfully badgered CBS into canceling the Reagan mini-series a few months ago. And they are spending a ton of money this week to threaten movie theaters who even think about showing our movie.

As of this morning, a little over 500 theaters have agreed to show the movie beginning next Friday, June 25. There are three national/regional theater chains who, as of today, have not booked the movie in their theaters. One theater owner in Illinois has reported receiving death threats.

The right wing usually wins these battles. Their basic belief system is built on censorship, repression, and keeping people ignorant. They want to limit or snuff out any debate or dissension. They also don't like pets and are mean to small children. Too many of them are named "Fred."

This new nut group is the Right's last hope in limiting how many people can see this movie. All of their other efforts have failed. Let's recap:

1. Roger Friedman at FOX News reported that the head of the company which first agreed to fund our film “got calls from Republican friends” pressuring them to back out. And they did. But... Miramax immediately picked up the film! Except...

2. Michael Eisner, the chairman of Disney, then blocked Miramax (a company owned by Disney) from releasing the film once it was finished. But... public attention and embarrassment forced Disney to let the Weinstein brothers of Miramax find another distributor! But...

3. Instead of a new distributor stepping right in -- as all the media predicted would happen -- it took another month to find distributors who would take on this movie. A number of other distributors, thanks to various pressures, were afraid to get involved. It looked for a while that we would be distributing this ourselves. But then Lions Gate and IFC Films rode in to the rescue!

So, we have beaten back all attempts to kill this movie, and the only thing in the way of you now seeing "Fahrenheit 9/11" is this Republican big-money front group trying to force theaters not to show the movie.

Please, contact your local theaters and let them know you want to see "Fahrenheit 9/11." Tell them that some people don't know that this is America and that we believe in freedom of speech and the importance of ALL voices being heard. (The members of MoveOn.org—an ACTUAL grassroots organization—have done a very cool thing. They are pledging to send a message to theater owners and are planning to attend a showing of the film on its opening weekend.)

I appreciate their efforts, but you don’t have to be a member of MoveOn to help stop this effort to keep “Fahrenheit 9/11” from making it to screens across the country. If a theater in your area is planning to show the film, just give them a call and thank them for standing up for the freedom of speech. If your local theater isn't showing the film, call them and let them know that you would like to see it and you'd like them to show it.

The White House and their minions in our media have presented one distorted version of the truth after another for the past four years. All we are asking for is the right to show what they HAVEN'T shown us, the real truth. The truth that ain't pretty (and is, sadly, damningly hilarious).

On top of all this, the MPAA gave the film an "R" rating. I want all teenagers to see this film. There is nothing in the film in terms of violence that we didn't see on TV every night at the dinner hour during the Vietnam War. Of course, that's the point, isn't it? The media have given the real footage from Iraq a "cleansing" -- made it look nice, easy to digest. Mario Cuomo has offered to be our lawyer in appealing this ruling by the MPAA. Frankly, I would like to think the MPAA is saying that the actions by the Bush administration are so abhorrent and revolting, we need to protect our children from seeing what they have done. In that case, the film should be rated NC-17!

However it turns out, I trust all of you teenagers out there will find your way into a theater to see this movie. If the government believes it is OK to send slightly older teenagers to their deaths in Iraq, I think at the very least you should be allowed to see what they are going to draft you for in a couple of years.

Finally, some very sophisticated individuals have been hacking into and shutting down our website. It is an hourly fight to keep it up. We are going to find out who is doing this and we are going to pursue a criminal prosecution. I'm preparing lots of cool stuff for the site so watch for new items on it next week (www.fahrenheit911.com and www.michaelmoore.com).

Thanks again for your support and I hope to see you at the movies on opening night, June 25.

Yours,

Michael Moore

PS. I am sponsoring a number of benefits around the country next week for local and national peace and justice groups, including Military Families Speak Out and September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Please check your local papers and my website next week for further details.

PPS. Also, I am going to be on the “Late Show with David Letterman” on Friday night. It's on CBS at 11:35 PM Eastern and Pacific. And on Monday morning (June 21) I will be on “The Today Show” on NBC. Next week, Jon Stewart and Conan. I'd go on O'Reilly but, like a coward, he walked out on a screening we invited him to (with Al Franken just a few rows away!). I personally caught him sneaking out. Embarrassed, he tried to change the subject. He said, "When are you coming on my show?" and I said, "Turn around and watch the rest of the movie and I will come on your show." He walked out. Fair and balanced.

[gldstwmn]

June 18th, 2004 2:00 pm
The New York Times: Fact-Checking Fahrenheit 9/11


By Philip Shenon / The New York Times



Michael Moore is not coy about his hopes for "Fahrenheit 9/11," his blistering documentary attack on President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. He wants it to be remembered as the first big-audience, election-year film that helped unseat a president.

"And it's not just a hope," the Oscar-winning filmmaker said in a phone interview last week, describing focus groups in Michigan in April at which, after seeing the movie, previously undecided voters expressed eagerness to defeat Bush.

"We found that if you entered the theater on the fence, you fell off it somewhere during those two hours," he said. "It ignites a fire in people who had given up." The movie's indictment of Bush is nothing if not sprawling. Moore suggests that Bush and his administration jeopardized national security in an effort to placate Bush family cronies in Saudi Arabia, that the White House helped members of Osama bin Laden's family to flee the United States after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that the administration manipulated terrorism alert levels to scare Americans into supporting the invasion of Iraq.

Moore's previous films generated a cottage industry of conservative commentators eager to prove sloppiness and exaggeration in his films; a handful of mainstream critics have also found flaws. But if "Fahrenheit 9/11" attracts the audience Moore and his distributors are predicting, Moore may face an onslaught of fact-checking unlike anything he - or any other documentary filmmaker - has ever experienced. After all, White House officials and the Bush family began impugning the film even before any of them had seen it.

So how will Moore's movie stand up under close examination? Is the film's depiction of Bush as a lazy and duplicitous leader, blinded by his family's financial ties to Arab moneymen and the Saudi Arabian royal family, true to fact? Moore and his distributors refused to circulate copies of the film and its script before the film's release on Friday; his production team said recently there was no final script because the film was still undergoing minor editing - for clarity, they said, not accuracy.

After a year spent covering the U.S. commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, I was recently allowed to attend a Hollywood screening. Based on that single viewing, and after separating out what is clearly presented as Moore's opinion from what is stated as fact, it seems safe to say that central assertions of fact in "Fahrenheit 9/11" are supported by the public record.

Moore is on firm ground in arguing that the Bushes, like many prominent Texas families with oil interests, have profited handsomely from their relationships with prominent Saudis, including members of the royal family and of the large and fabulously wealthy bin Laden clan, which has insisted it long ago disowned Osama.

Moore spends several minutes in the film documenting ties between the president and James Bath, a financial adviser to a prominent member of the bin Laden family who was an original investor in Bush's Arbusto energy company and who served with the future president in the Air National Guard in the early 1970s. The Bath friendship, which indirectly links Bush to the family of the world's most notorious terrorist, has been well documented.

Moore charges that Bush and his aides paid too little attention to warnings in the summer of 2001 that Al Qaeda was about to attack, including a detailed Aug. 6, 2001, CIA briefing that warned of terrorism within the United States. In its final report next month, the Sept. 11 commission can be expected to offer support to this assertion. Moore says that instead of focusing on Al Qaeda, the president spent 42 percent of his first eight months in office on vacation; the figure came not from a conspiracy-hungry Web site but from a calculation by The Washington Post. The most valid criticisms of the film are likely to involve the artful way that Moore connects the facts, and whether he has left out others that might undermine his scalding attack. A great many statistics fly by in the movie - like assertions that 6 percent to 7 percent of America is owned by Saudi Arabians, and that Saudi companies have paid more than $1.4 billion to Bush family interests. Moore and his team say they have news reports and other evidence to back up the numbers, and that it will be posted on his site, www.michaelmoore.com, after the release of the documentary. Moore may also be criticized for the way he portrays the evacuation of the extended bin Laden family from the United States after Sept. 11. As the Sept. 11 commission has found, the Saudi government was able to pull strings at senior levels of the Bush administration to help the bin Ladens leave the United States. But while the film clearly suggests that the flights occurred at a time when all air traffic was grounded immediately after the attacks ("Even Ricky Martin couldn't fly," Moore says over video of the singer wandering in an airport lobby), the Sept. 11 commission said in a report this April that there was "no credible evidence that any chartered flights of Saudi Arabian nationals departed the United States before the reopening of national airspace," and that the FBI had concluded that no one aboard the flights was involved in Sept. 11.

Moore defended the scene, saying his goal was to show how the White House was eager to bend and break the rules for Saudi friends, in this case the extended family of the terrorist who had just brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon. And as reporters have found, the White House still refuses to document fully how the flights were arranged. "I don't want to get lost in the forest because of a single tree," Moore said. "The main point I want people to go away with is that these people got special treatment because they were bin Ladens or Saudi royals, and you and I would never have been given that treatment."

Moore is readying for a conservative counterattack, saying he has created a "war room" to offer an instant response to any assault on the film's credibility. He has retained Chris Lehane, a Democratic Party strategist known as a master of the black art of "oppo," or opposition research, used to discredit detractors. He also hired outside fact-checkers, led by a former general counsel of The New Yorker and a veteran member of that magazine's legendary fact-checking team, to vet the film. And he is threatening to go one step further, saying he has consulted with lawyers who can bring defamation suits against anyone who maligns the film or damages his reputation. "Any attempts to libel me will be met by force," Moore said. "The most important thing we have is truth on our side. If they persist in telling lies, knowingly telling a lie with malice, then I'll take them to court."

Joanne Doroshow, a public interest lawyer and filmmaker who shared in a 1993 Oscar for documentaries and who joined the fact-checking effort last month, said, "We have gone through every single word of this film - literally every word - and verified its accuracy." That said, Moore's fact-checkers said they did not view the film as straight reporting. "This is an Op-Ed piece, it's not a news report," said Dev Chatillon, the former general counsel for The New Yorker, adding, "The facts have to be right, yes, but this is an individual's view of current events. And I'm a very firm believer that it is within everybody's right to examine the actions of their government."

Besides, it may turn out that the most talked-about moments in the film are the least impeachable. For the White House, the most devastating segment of "Fahrenheit 9/11" may be the video of a befuddled-looking Bush staying put for nearly seven minutes at a Florida elementary school on the morning of Sept. 11, continuing to read a copy of "My Pet Goat" to schoolchildren even after an aide has told him that a second plane has struck the twin towers.

Bush's slow, hesitant reaction to the disastrous news has never been a secret. But seeing the actual footage, with the minutes ticking by, may prove more damaging to the White House than all the statistics in the world.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by dissention

I won't choke because I'm not reading anything from bowlingfortruth.com, pal.

That site was debunked last year as being an NRA site and if anything is a terrorist organization, it's the NRA.

and that means everything on it is a lie - I don't think so I mean you cite to far left sites/sources and accept them as true no matter how venomous they may be AND - you know MM ised editing to make the people he did not like look the worst they could and many more sites and pundits have said that. So, do not hand me that

Again, ALL I am saying was I did not like the tone of the movie. That is all. I am not saying I do not like MM or that the movie is not in general factually accurate or even good. I think it was. I am just saying I did not like the what I saw as a condescending and smug tone, which I thought parts of were funny, just not all parts. Yet, all you all can see is I am, however slightly, attacking a far left god named MM and demeaning the horrible events of Columbine and for that I should be punished, humiliated, castrated, and my tongue cut out (BTW - if you like MM's sarcasm, you ought to have loved that last sentence )

Shhesh - you far left liberals sure can dish it, but when it comes to taking it

AND mind you - I was praising MM in the initial topic of this post. I complimented him on his apparently accurate portrayal of the 9/11 events and his doing so without smugness.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

He never played the event as humorous or sarcastic. Give it up already.

It is called bowling for COLUMBINE - Hello!!!!!!!!! Yes, the movie is about more than Columbine, but clearly he used the horrific events of Columbine to sell a movie which I and many found to be smug and condescending I mean if he had called it America's Fascination with Guns and Why That is Wrong - and not included anything about Columbine in it - do you think half of the number of people would have seen it? The answer is no.

[gldstwmn]

See post # 27 for my response.

This is my favorite part of Moore's letter:

PPS. Also, I am going to be on the “Late Show with David Letterman” on Friday night. It's on CBS at 11:35 PM Eastern and Pacific. And on Monday morning (June 21) I will be on “The Today Show” on NBC. Next week, Jon Stewart and Conan. I'd go on O'Reilly but, like a coward, he walked out on a screening we invited him to (with Al Franken just a few rows away!). I personally caught him sneaking out. Embarrassed, he tried to change the subject. He said, "When are you coming on my show?" and I said, "Turn around and watch the rest of the movie and I will come on your show." He walked out. Fair and balanced.