F** F*** Brings down the house in Cannes with Bush bash film

Hey, Moore came out a week early. It appears as though Bush's uncle is an executive at a bank that helped the 9/11 terrorists get funding.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28396-2004May14.html

 

Of course, he's apparently head of a different division in a company with over 1,400 employees (and which provides banking services for 95% of the foreign missions and embassies in Washington, D.C.). No telling how much he had to do with the other banking divisions, and there are a lot of "may haves" within the whole "money went to terrorists" charge, as well.

Another one of those things that's a tenous connection at best but it's fun to use to tar a political opponent (and I have no doubt that if this was Kerry's uncle, we'd be hearing about it from the Republican side).

 

Yes, but if Moore had known about this, he would have added a blurb to his film.

It's not tenuous. The Saudi Princess already admitted she gave money to the terrorists, she said she didn't know they were terrorists and she just can't remember which bank she used to launder her money.

 

It's a tenous connection to the Bush fella, though, even if the funds went through that particular bank (since it's unlikely they went through his division. Just as Michael Moore didn't trash Bob Iger for Disney not distributing his film. It didn't have anything to do with the President of another division, even though that division is part of Disney, for example).

 

Making them angry is easy.

Making them frustrated is hard.

 

and still don't

 

what's wrong with that? the other half of the truth is already covered to death by the main stream media otherwise you wouldn't know about it at all would you? now moore tells the other half and you jumped on him? what a load of ****. the least you can do is wait and see it.

 

First review that I've read...

'9/11': Moving, grating


CANNES, France - I was in tears when I came out of the first screening of Michael Moore's controversial "Fahrenheit 9/11."

Some of the images were so powerful I couldn't shake them: a dead, maimed Iraqi baby; a mother grieving for her dead soldier son in view of a cordoned-off White House; President Bush sitting in a kindergarten chair for seven long minutes, a vacant, baffled look on his face, after being told his country was under attack.

My tears do not mean the movie is perfect, or that Moore's filmmaking techniques aren't sometimes grating to the point where you doubt his work qualifies as "documentary."

There's a shapeless middle section that reminds us war is hell and there are digressions that need more reporting. Moore has said he may update and reedit the movie before it opens in the U.S.

But you've got to hand it to the guy.

As annoying and outrageous as he can be, he has the guts and talent to tie together various aspects of the post-9/11 era in a way that makes you question many things.

Moore has obtained priceless footage, including the full seven minutes during which Bush, in full knowledge of the World Trade Center attacks, sat in that schoolroom chair reading "My Pet Goat."

"Embedded" cameras show Iraqi parents crying over their dead, American soldiers humiliating and intimidating civilians, and soldiers voicing private doubt and disgust.

Not all of this information in the film is new. But it is packaged in an entertaining and provocative way that forces nagging thoughts to the forefront.

The acid-tongued documentary also depicts an American class system where poor neighborhoods pay the ultimate price of war with the blood of their children.

In one effective stunt, Moore tries to interest Congressmen in enlisting their own kids in the Marines to prove their support of a war they helped sign into existence. Not surprisingly, none of them take him up on it.

That moment is funny, but it's sad and depressing, too.

 

'Fahrenheit 9/11': Connecting With a Hard Left


By Desson Thomson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 18, 2004; Page C01



CANNES, France -- "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore's most powerful film since "Roger & Me," slices and dices President Bush's presidency into a thousand satirical pieces. It's a wonder the chief executive -- at least, the one portrayed in this movie -- doesn't scatter to the four winds like Texas dust.

Judging by the spirited pandemonium that has greeted this documentary at the Cannes Film Festival, "Fahrenheit 9/11" not only is the film to beat in the competition for the Golden Palm, it also has the makings of a cultural juggernaut -- a film for these troubling times.

With an ironic narrative that takes us from the Florida debacle that decided the 2000 presidential election to the current conflict in Iraq, Moore has almost endless fun at the president's expense. And he frequently uses the president as his own tragicomic scourge -- in other words, hanging him with his own words and facial expressions.

In one of the film's most dramatic moments, we watch the president attending an elementary school class on that ill-fated morning of Sept. 11. An aide whispers to him news of the plane crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The look on Bush's face is stunned, as any person's would be. A clock ticks away. The president looks as though he'll never get up from that seat. The minutes tick by.

"Was he wondering if he should have shown up to work more often?" Moore says in voice-over, this comment connecting with glimpses earlier in the movie of Bush's frequent stays in Texas to clear brush and play golf. The president stares at the children's book he's holding. It's called "My Pet Goat."

But there's more to "Fahrenheit 9/11" than partisan ridicule. Just before that scene, we have confronted the unspeakable: When those two planes hit the twin towers in Manhattan. Moore shows only a black screen. We hear the buzzing of the aircraft. We know what's coming. We hear the impact and, a second later, the agonized cries and gasps of the witnesses.

Then comes the second crash. Only then does Moore cut to the faces of those watching. A tearful woman cries out to God to save the souls of those leaping from the windows. Another, devastated, sits down on the sidewalk. We don't see the jumpers. But we feel we do.

What's remarkable here isn't Moore's political animosity or ticklish wit. It's the well-argued, heartfelt power of his persuasion. Even though there are many things here that we have already learned, Moore puts it all together. It's a look back that feels like a new gaze forward. The movie points to social and financial connections between the Bush family and wealthy Saudis, including the royal family, Prince Bandar (the Saudi ambassador to Washington) and the bin Laden family.

It shows startling footage taken by camera crews who were embedded with the American forces in Iraq. And it spends time with such people as Lila Lipscomb, a Michigan mother who changes from patriotic support for the Bush administration to heartbroken despair after she loses a son to the war.

There are so many powerful moments to point to, all for different reasons: the visceral terror of a household in Baghdad, as young American soldiers break in to arrest someone; the candid testimony of American soldiers who express their disgust at the situation there; interviews in Michigan with impoverished African Americans, a social group that has been a breadbasket for U.S. Army recruitment.

To watch this movie yourself is to realize with dawning appreciation that the director of "Bowling for Columbine" has finally learned to put his movie where his mouth is.

 

The Bushes and the Bin Ladens: passionate anti-war film is a tale of two families

Cannes 2004

Peter Bradshaw
Tuesday May 18, 2004
The Guardian

It was strident, passionate, sometimes outrageously manipulative and often bafflingly selective in its material, but Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 was a barnstorming anti-war/anti-Bush polemic tossed like an incendiary device into the crowded Cannes festival.
It included a full-scale denunciation of the links between the Bush and Bin Laden families, the petro-commercial association which allowed dozens of the Bin Laden family to leave the country for Saudi Arabia after 9/11 and which necessitated the Iraq war as a massive diversion.

Moore also has queasy new war zone footage of US soldiers humiliating their prisoners while others snap away with their digital cameras, although he is noticeably keen to demonise the politicians, not the military.

A documentary is highly unlikely to win the Golden Palm, but this was an exhilarating and even refreshing film, especially coming at a time when political commentators on either side of the Atlantic - progressives and ex-progressives alike - are apparently too worldly and sophisticated to be angry about the war.

At Cannes this time last year, Franco-American relations were so bad and feelings so high that this movie could hardly have been shown without a riot. Now it was received in a mood of simmering, twitchy consensus. One American PR cracked: "It made me wanna burn my passport!"

There are fewer of the jokes and wacky stunts that entranced and enraged in his anti-gun documentary Bowling For Columbine; it is mostly a straight stitching together of clips and graphics with Moore's droll, faux-naif voiceover.

It does not have a big "showdown" moment, like Moore's encounter with Charlton Heston, although the director shouts out questions to the president he derisively calls Governor Bush and is rewarded by him with a snarling suggestion that he should get a real job, which takes some effrontery coming from the slacker fratboy head of state who makes Ronald Reagan's workload look Stakhanovite.

Fahrenheit 9/11 cheekily begins with "feed" footage of the major players - Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz - smirking, and preening themselves as they prepare to go on TV. Wolfowitz even has a habit of licking his comb before running it through his hair, which got a deafening "eeeuuuuuwwwww" from the audience.

Here they are, is the implication, the whole corrupt gang who fixed the 2000 election, which began when Bush's cousin John Ellis, a Fox News executive, was instrumental in "calling it" for Bush/Cheney on election night and cowed the other networks into joining in.

From there, Moore sketches out the Texan-Saudi link through the Bin Ladens. This very much involves George Bush Sr, who far from being a retired old gentleman, is a vigorous player in the business and political scene, fully availing himself of the ex-presidential prerogative of receiving intelligence briefings.

Moore has a terrifying and funny sequence when he shows the rabbit-in-car-headlights expression on the president's face when he is told about the second plane hitting the towers while at a children's literacy event. A stopwatch appears in the corner of the screen, as the minutes tick by and the president keeps reading My Pet Goat, not knowing what to do without his advisers to tell him.

The Afghanistan war comes and goes without the capture of Osama bin Laden, although Moore stops short of saying the Bush administration doesn't want the embarrassment of catching him. Terrorism licences the big war on the diplomatically safe target of Iraq, in whose reconstruction the big companies have a vested interest, and Moore's overall narrative arc takes us to the homeland security issue, its concomitant politically profitable culture of fear, and the US military's recruiting grounds of blue collar America, getting poor blacks and whites to fight Mr Bush's war as the body count ratchets upwards.

Moore centres a big emotional moment on a bereaved military mom mourning her son outside the White House. This explains his reluctance to emphasise the issue of torture.

Moore's big omission is Tony Blair and the UK. He has a clever pastiche of the opening title-sequence of the old TV western Bonanza, with Bush and Blair mocked up to look like cowboys. But in a section about the ramshackle "coalition of the willing" which was supposed to lend international legitimacy to the invasion, there is no mention of the part played by this country. This can only be because of Moore's insistence on America's international isolation and arrogance. It's a strange, skewed perspective.

Meanwhile wrangling about corporate pressure on Moore goes on. The director claims that Mel Gibson, head of Icon films, was told "don't expect any more invitations from the White House if you fund this film". Gibson made a lot of money with The Passion of the Christ tapping into an international network of Christian cinemagoers. There are millions of anti-Bush people all over the world. The Passion of Michael Moore could yet be a hot ticket.

 

Monday, May. 17, 2004
A First Look at "Fahrenheit 9/11"
Controversy aside, the new Michael Moore film is a fine documentary
By MARY CORLISS/CANNES
A few years ago, Michael Moore spoke with then-Governor George W. Bush, who told the muckraker: “Behave yourself, will ya? Go find real work.” Moore has made trouble for so many powerful people he has become a media power of his own. He can even make celebrities of mere movie reviewers: When his latest cinematic incendiary device, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” had its first press screening Monday morning, American critics emerging from the theater were besieged by a convoy of TV and radio crews from networks around the world who wanted to know what they thought of Moore’s blast at the Bush Administration.

Disney, for one, was not impressed. Earlier this month, the company ordered its subsidiary, Miramax Films, not to release the film. Moore says that his lawyer was told by Disney CEO Michael Eisner that distributing it would harm the company’s negotiations for favorable treatment for its Florida theme parks from that state’s governor, one Jeb Bush. Harvey Weinstein, co-chair of Miramax, is now trying to buy the film back from Disney and to fashion his own coalition of the willing — other distributors happy to profit from Disney’s timidity. The result of this internal agita will be to raise the profile and, most likely, the profitability of Moore’s film, which he still hopes will open on the July 4th weekend.

So much for the controversy. How is it as a movie? “Fahrenheit 9/11” — the title is a play on the Ray Bradbury novel (and Francois Truffaut film) “Fahrenheit 451,” about a future totalitarian state where reading, and thus independent thinking, has been outlawed — has news value beyond its financing and distribution tangles. The movie, a brisk and entertaining indictment of the Bush Administration’s middle East policies before and after September 11, 2001, features new footage of abuse by U.S. soldiers: a Christmas Eve 2003 sortie in which Iraqi captives are publicly humiliated.

Though made over the past two years, the film has scenes that seem ripped from recent headlines. Last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Iraq and, to the cheers of his military audience, defiantly called himself “a survivor” (a word traditionally reserved for those who have lived through the Holocaust or cancer, not for someone enduring political difficulties). In the film, a soldier tells Moore’s field team: “If Donald Rumsfeld was here, I’d ask for his resignation.”

Moore’s perennial grudge is against what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex: the collusion of big corporations and bad government to exploit the working class, here and abroad, for their own gain and in the process deprive citizens of their liberties. The Bush Administration’s Iraq policy is handmade for Moore’s grievances. Bush and his father have enjoyed a long and profitable relationship with the ruling families of Saudi Arabia, including the bin Ladens. The best-seller “House of Bush, House of Saud” by Craig Unger, whom Moore interviews, estimates that the Saudis have enriched the Bushes and their closest cronies by $1.4 billion.

Politicians reward their biggest contributors, and the Bushes are no exceptions. Fifteen of the 19 September 11th hijackers were Saudis; but when Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador who is close to the First Family, dined with the President in the White House two days after the attacks, the mood was collegial, not angry. In the Iraqi ramp-up and occupation, the Administration has rewarded its Saudi and Texas supporters with billions in rebuilding contracts. As Blaine Ober, president of an armored vehicle company, tells Moore: the Iraqi adventure is “good for business, bad for the people.”

Bad for the people of Iraq, Ober means. But, Moore argues, bad for Americans as well. As he sees it, 9/11 was a tragedy for America, a career move for Bush. The attacks allowed the President to push through Congress restrictive laws that would have been defeated in any climate but the “war on terror” chill. “Fahrenheit 9/11” shows some tragicomic effects of the Patriot Act: a man quizzed by the FBI for casually mentioning at his health club that he thought Bush was an “*******”; a benign peace group in Fresno, Cal., infiltrated by an undercover police agent.

Two Bush quotes in the film indicate the Administration’s quandary in selling repression to the American people. One: “A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, no doubt about it.” The other: “They’re not happy they’re occupied. I wouldn’t be happy if I were occupied either.” Moore’s argument is that the U.S. is currently being occupied by a hostile, un-American force: the quintet of Bush, Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Paul Wolfowitz.

Moore is usually the front-and-center star of his own films. Here, his presence is mostly that of narrator and guiding force, though he does make a few piquant appearances. While chatting with Unger across the street from the Saudi embassy in Washington, he is approached and quizzed by Secret Service agents. Hearing from Rep. John Conyers that no member of Congress had read the complete Patriot Act before voting for it, he hires a Mister Softee truck and patrols downtown D.C. reading the act to members of Congress over a loudspeaker. Toward the end, he tries to get Congressmen to enlist their sons in the military. Surprise: no volunteers.

The film has its longueurs. The interviews with young blacks and a grieving mother in Moore’s home town of Flint, Michigan, are relevant and poignant, but they lack the propulsive force and homespun indignance of the rest of the film. “Fahrenheit 9/11” is at its best when it provides talking points for the emerging majority of those opposed to the Iraq incursion. In sum, it’s an appalling, enthralling primer of what Moore sees as the Bush Administration’s crimes and misdemeanors.

“Fahrenheit 9/11” may be seen as another example of the liberal media preaching to its own choir. But Moore is such a clever assembler of huge accusations and minor peccadillos (as with a shot of Wolfowitz sticking his pocket comb in his mouth and sucking on it to slick down his hair before a TV interview) that the film should engage audiences of all political persuasions.

In one sense, Michael Moore took George W. Bush’s advice. He found “real work” deconstructing the President’s Iraq mistakes. “Fahrenheit 9/11” is Moore’s own War on Error.



Mary Corliss has covered the Cannes Film Festival for Film Comment and other publications since 1974. This year she is reporting for TIME.com.

 

This appears in Farenheit 9/11.

http://www.thememoryhole.org/911/bush-911.htm

On the good side, he's relentless on message for his photo op.
On the bad side, good thing he got permanently grounded from being a pilot. There's no telling how poor his reactions were back then when he was drinking and snorting coke.

 

I am waiting to see this movie too.

 

I have never understood Bush's reaction when he finds out about the plane hitting the North Tower, and I won't if I live to be 84, Master Baiter's limit on life expectancy. Why didn't he just tell the children that he had to do the Nation's business, apologize, and go take care of business?? Instead, he sits there and reads "My Pet Goat". I'll never understand it.

I'll go see the film just to see that footage. Then I'll probably get up and walk out.

edit: I just saw Woofer's post. Maybe I won't have to wait. Thanks, Woofer.

God, it's worse than I thought. We have a Stepford President.

 

I cannot wait to see this movie.

 

Nonsense.

A documentary should show the truth, not one side's truth.

If the Bush's profited from the Saudis and allowed that to influence public policy, then there's an issue there.

Showing only the Iraqis and American soldiers who are upset, or only/mostly images of soldiers mistreating civilians, then it is deceptive.

 

2 things.

A) How do they know what the card said. It could have said, planes have hit world trade center, since at the time, that is pretty much what we knew.

B) Its not rally prudent to run out on a bunch of children, what was he going to do in that 5 minutes, I mean seriously.

 

IIRC, it has been documented that "Sir, we are under attack" is exactly what Card said at that time as it had been reported to Bush already that a plane had hit the first of the towers.

What are the children going to do? Vote him out of office? We are talking about national security and the nation being under attack and Bush sat there with a children's book.

 

Perhaps he was not surprised.