Geoffrey O’Brien has a wonderful piece in the New York Review of Books on Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Regardless of your politics, I think it is an important movie and O’Brien expresses the reason why:
Fahrenheit 9/11 serves as a necessary reminder that, to put it in the simplest terms, we need to see and hear more than the government and the various news channels allow us to see and hear. We need to play back the tapes to refresh our memory of what seems consigned to instant oblivion even as it unfolds. We need to see those images —of Americans and Iraqis alike wounded and dying, for example— that American television tends to withhold, as if the reality of the war could thereby be kept at bay. Michael Moore’s version of what has been happening lately is only one possible narrative; but by its very existence it encourages a more active, more confrontational approach to the images that surround us, anything to break through the numbing effect of the endless flow of TV news broadcasts and official bulletins that has become something like the wallpaper of a distorted public reality, a stream of images that moves forward without ever looking back.
I think that most people know I am fairly liberal. I don’t care for Bush or his administratin. I don’t like the war. So I admit I am biased. But I think everyone should see this movie. Not to convince them about Bush, but so that everyone can see what the media has done. How they have manipulated and filtered what we see every day. How we have no real good source for news anymore. How biased they are one way or the other. I think Moore’s movie, regardless of the politics, and the record numbers of attendence, show that Americans are willing to deal with hard hitting news. We do not need or want to be pandered to nor coddled. We want the honest facts so we can make up our own minds.
So read the above article for an honest assessment of Moore’s movie.
Bookdwarf 