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The Inevitable Fahrenheit 9/11 Review

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by Jason Roth

The conservatives have let me down again. For several months now, I've had this movie in the bottom of my subconscious (right next to a mental note to buy a new shower curtain), knowing that eventually I would see this movie and it would piss me off to no end. The hype behind this movie, half or more of which was generated by conservatives, was sufficient to convince me that I would need to spend weeks or months behind a LexisNexis-linked computer in order to refute every deception subtly conveyed by the skillful hands of a master propagandist.

Little did I know what a truly terrible movie this would be. Not terrible in the sense of "misleading and dishonest" (which of course, it was), but terrible in the sense of "tedious, badly edited, and incompetently directed". Michael Moore is far less than a dishonest, fat, disheveled slob. He's a terrible filmmaker. Now I know why he was incapable of smiling during that marathon of forced applause he received at Cannes. He knew the audience was full of shit.

Michael Moore is like a kid who sticks his hand in front of a projector and picks the actors' noses with the shadow of his hand. The difference is that Moore thinks he's making an argument. He thinks that showing video of Paul Wolfowitz spitting into his hand and rubbing his hair is a way to argue against waging a war. Or showing Britney Spears voicing her mindless support of whatever the President does is a way to refute George Bush's words and actions.

"Hey, if Britney Spears is for it, it must be wrong!"

The number of minutes in this movie devoted to George Bush getting his hair combed and twitching his facial muscles is more than inordinate. First of all, it's boring as sin, though I guess if you hate Bush with a passion, you'd be laughing uncontrollably. But it's in the movie for a reason. It's there because something needs to fill the vacuum when Moore has no intellectual arguments to raise. It's the equivalent of a kid calling someone a "big poopy head" when he's just been intellectually cornered and doesn't know how else to deal with it.

Easily the most glaringly obvious element of incompetent propaganda was the scene showing Iraqi children laughing and playing in the peaceful, utopia of Iraq before the US invasion. I guess Moore thought that including a shot of Hussein's thugs torturing parents in front of their children wouldn't have been a proper backdrop to a soundtrack of the Go-Gos "Vacation" and R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People".

Moore's use of these bubble gum pop songs showed the seriousness with which he takes terrorism, rights violations, and national security. It's one thing to depict Adolf Hitler as a buffoon in a Monty Python skit. It's another thing to make a Holocaust documentary and play a song called "Life's a Gas". If Moore honestly thought what George Bush has done is evil, would he really want people constantly to laugh at him in the context of a documentary?

A large portion of the movie is devoted to showing a connection between the Bush family and the Saudi Arabians. This was the most plausible part of the movie to me. It always bothered me that the bin Laden family members were allowed to leave the country so soon after September 11. (Of course, by "family members", we mean members of a very large family.) But Moore should have interviewed Richard Clarke, who said elsewhere:

"Somebody brought to us for approval the decision to let an airplane filled with Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, leave the country," he told Vanity Fair magazine. Mr. Clarke said he checked with FBI officials, who gave the go ahead. "So I said, 'Fine, let it happen'."

But whatever. Before we talk about unproven conspiracy theories, can't we at least look at the central, undisputed facts? Here's a few: terrorists bombed the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 (a year which John Kerry couldn't remember in the second presidential debate by the way; he said "1993 or 1994"), the USS Cole was bombed on October 12, 2000, and the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania were bombed on August 7, 1998. Oh, then there's that September 11 stuff.

Clearly, something needed to be done about these events. What should have been done? Moore doesn't say. At least, not in his movie with "9/11" in the title. This is the most dishonest and inept aspect of the movie. Unlike a slob like Michael Moore, a president needs to do something about terrorism. A president needs to make decisions and act. Those decisions may be right or wrong, but something must be done. The fact that any decision can be ridiculed by any Monday-morning quarterback does not an argument make.

How about showing some balls and telling us specifically what we should do about terrorism, Moore?

This guy should be filming himself eating French fries, not doing something as complicated as stringing two pieces of news footage together and adding a voiceover track. It's fitting that that Michael Moore ripped off the title of his movie from Ray Bradbury. It would have been a shame if there had been some aspect of this movie that wasn't unrespectable.

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