May 18, 2004

The New Michael Moore Film: “Misleading”

The NY Post Online Edition has this today.

NEW ‘9/11’ FLICK HAS FAR ‘MOORE’ FIZZLE THAN SIZZLE
bq. By LOU LUMENICK

May 18, 2004— CANNES, France – President Bush need not lose any sleep over Michael Moore’s much-hyped “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which turns out to be a wet firecracker.

...”You will see things you haven’t seen before and learn things you have not learned before,” he vowed on Sunday.

Well, maybe if you spent the last three years hiding in a cave in Afghanistan.

...Mostly Moore dusts off a litany of old accusations against the president – whom he portrays as both a buffoon and a world-class conspirator – and lands few solid blows as he takes on targets like the Patriot Act and supposed war profiteering by the politically connected Halliburton Corp.

The sheer scope of the material he’s trying to cover in a two-hour documentary – the Sept. 11 attacks rate maybe five minutes – leads to incredibly superficial and misleading treatment at times.

As a critic who awarded Moore’s Oscar-winning “Bowling for Columbine” four stars, I was particularly disappointed with “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

The left is trying to test Lincoln’s dictum that you can’t fool all the people, all the time. And my money’s on Lincoln.

Update, 5-23-04:

From Fred Barnes at The Weekly Standard:

A FEW YEARS AGO Michael Moore, who’s now promoting an anti-President Bush movie entitled Fahrenheit 9/11, announced he’d gotten the goods on me, indeed hung me out to dry on my own words. It was in his first bestselling book, Stupid White Men. Moore wrote he’d once been “forced” to listen to my comments on a TV chat show, The McLaughlin Group. I had whined “on and on about the sorry state of American education,” Moore said, and wound up by bellowing: “These kids don’t even know what The Iliad and The Odyssey are!”

Moore’s interest was piqued, so the next day he said he called me. “Fred,” he quoted himself as saying, “tell me what The Iliad and The Odyssey are.” I started “hemming and hawing,” Moore wrote. And then I said, according to Moore: “Well, they’re . . . uh . . . you know . . . uh . . . okay, fine, you got me—I don’t know what they’re about. Happy now?” He’d smoked me out as a fraud, or maybe worse.

The only problem is none of this is true. It never happened. Moore is a liar. He made it up. It’s a fabrication on two levels. One, I’ve never met Moore or even talked to him on the phone. And, two, I read both The Iliad and The Odyssey in my first year at the University of Virginia. Just for the record, I’d learned what they were about even before college. Like everyone else my age, I got my classical education from the big screen. I saw the Iliad movie called Helen of Troy and while I forget the name of the Odyssey film, I think it starred Kirk Douglas as Odysseus.

And from Junkyard Blog:

So we live in a world that chooses to honor liars and frauds. Michael Moore, Oscar winner a year ago for making a “documentary” full of half-truths, exaggerations and outright lies, this weekend won top honors (and I use that term very loosely) at the Cannes film festival for another “documentary” full of half-truths, exaggerations and outright lies.

Queried about the falsehoods in his films, Moore offers a knowing wink and says “How can satire be inaccurate?” The question is, how can inaccurate satire win best documentary awards?

The sad fact is that there was some documentary producer who last year deserved the Oscar, but Michael Moore stole it from him. This year some deserving filmmaker should have won Cannes, but Michael Moore lied his way into that award too.

The sadder fact is that Moore is both the Leni Reifenstahl and Joseph Goebbels of this war: He is using his skills as a filmmaker to create nothing less than enemy propaganda, and the enemy he aids is ideologically a twin of Goebbels’ and Reifenstahl’s boss—anti-Semitic, brutal, a cult both of personality and radical supremacist creed. Yet another sad fact is that Reifenstahl’s Nazi flick Triumph of the Will also won top honors at a French film festival, in 1937. Does the European elite ever learn?