Michael Mooooore-eee-oooo
Thinking about Michael Moore with the imminent release of Fahrenheit 9/11
I am delighted that he has as thick a skin as he does, because the ooo-eee-ooo terror his targets have for him prompts them to slander, defame, and otherwise verbally attack him until he's coming up to a close second behind Bill Clinton as the object of Republicans playing out their Oedipal fear-fantasies ("Bad daddy! Bad daddy! Making mommy moan and cry out.") There's even a website set up solely to attack and diminish any and everything the man says. They even call him fat. And white.
He terrifies his targets.
He stepped fully into media history at the 75th Academy Awards ceremony. Same as every other person who walks up to receive the award, he was trying to say (or do) something memorable, but when it was Michael Moore's turn, he created one of the most memorable moments of Oscar Night ever.
Even those who know how the movie game is played (Make waves, get publicity.) were screaming at his comments. (Don't, for the love of God, make REAL waves! You're trying to change things. What are you, crazy? You'll get us all blacklisted again!) Hell, the day after the show, other than Adrien Brody's near-rape of Halle Berry, no one remembered anything that happened other than Michael Moore's comments.
And today, still, no one remembers anything that was said other than "Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you." Very few even remember the entirety of that brief speech, which began with an extraordinarily gracious gesture.**
That was then and this is now.
Among other intents and effects, this new film will underscore a major difference between Richard Nixon and George W Bush. This documentary (which will come to be abbreviated as simply "9/11," the film becoming the historical memory instead of the event and/or the self-serving crap about it spewed out in massive amounts by political poseurs of all parties), will cause George W Bush to cower, hiding behind his closed curtains even as Richard Nixon did in the face of opposition to his war in Vietnam.
The difference? It took 500,000 angry people yelling at him to make Nixon cringe in fear. This time, just one fat white guy wielding a camera and a mike and doing his best to speak truth to power will do the job for Dubya. Because, as Roger Ebert explained, he argues the case eloquently and powerfully -- as a documentarian should -- supporting his point of view that America should send Dubya packing in this next election, back to the ranch in Crawford he bought and on which he built a brand new house just before the presidential race, in order to support his pretense of being an outdoorsie fellow chopping wood, thereby emulating either Ronald Reagan or Kaiser Wilhelm II after WWI. Fahrenheit 9/11 may well decide where Dubya lives next year.
Those people are right to be scared of him. Michael Moore smiles a lot but is probably not what most people would call a nice guy. Then again, neither was Tom Paine.
** Those comments he made at the 75th Awards ceremony?
Link
I am delighted that he has as thick a skin as he does, because the ooo-eee-ooo terror his targets have for him prompts them to slander, defame, and otherwise verbally attack him until he's coming up to a close second behind Bill Clinton as the object of Republicans playing out their Oedipal fear-fantasies ("Bad daddy! Bad daddy! Making mommy moan and cry out.") There's even a website set up solely to attack and diminish any and everything the man says. They even call him fat. And white.
He terrifies his targets.
He stepped fully into media history at the 75th Academy Awards ceremony. Same as every other person who walks up to receive the award, he was trying to say (or do) something memorable, but when it was Michael Moore's turn, he created one of the most memorable moments of Oscar Night ever.
Even those who know how the movie game is played (Make waves, get publicity.) were screaming at his comments. (Don't, for the love of God, make REAL waves! You're trying to change things. What are you, crazy? You'll get us all blacklisted again!) Hell, the day after the show, other than Adrien Brody's near-rape of Halle Berry, no one remembered anything that happened other than Michael Moore's comments.
And today, still, no one remembers anything that was said other than "Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you." Very few even remember the entirety of that brief speech, which began with an extraordinarily gracious gesture.**
That was then and this is now.
Among other intents and effects, this new film will underscore a major difference between Richard Nixon and George W Bush. This documentary (which will come to be abbreviated as simply "9/11," the film becoming the historical memory instead of the event and/or the self-serving crap about it spewed out in massive amounts by political poseurs of all parties), will cause George W Bush to cower, hiding behind his closed curtains even as Richard Nixon did in the face of opposition to his war in Vietnam.
The difference? It took 500,000 angry people yelling at him to make Nixon cringe in fear. This time, just one fat white guy wielding a camera and a mike and doing his best to speak truth to power will do the job for Dubya. Because, as Roger Ebert explained, he argues the case eloquently and powerfully -- as a documentarian should -- supporting his point of view that America should send Dubya packing in this next election, back to the ranch in Crawford he bought and on which he built a brand new house just before the presidential race, in order to support his pretense of being an outdoorsie fellow chopping wood, thereby emulating either Ronald Reagan or Kaiser Wilhelm II after WWI. Fahrenheit 9/11 may well decide where Dubya lives next year.
Those people are right to be scared of him. Michael Moore smiles a lot but is probably not what most people would call a nice guy. Then again, neither was Tom Paine.
** Those comments he made at the 75th Awards ceremony?
Whoa. On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan from Canada, I'd like to thank the Academy for this. I have invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and we would like to — they're here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it's the fictition of duct tape or fictition of orange alerts we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. And any time you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up. Thank you very much.
Link
posted by Saintperle at
9:35 AM
