Notice that 2 of the 4 bad reviews use the phrase "hot air." I wonder if that will become the rallying cry of moveamericaforward.org and the film's opposition.
usatoday.com
images.usatoday.com
(flattering high school yearbook photo)
This article is labeled The truth about Michael Moore
which should generate immediate skepticism. imho, the "truth" is that Michael Moore serves Michael Moore.
Article By Gary Strauss, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — Filmmaker Michael Moore isn't into gloating or vindication. But some might not blame him if he were.
When Bowling For Columbine won the Academy Award for best documentary last year, Moore took tons of heat for abandoning the traditional air-kiss acceptance speech, instead lambasting a "fictitious president" for conducting a "fictitious war."
Five days after the start of the Iraqi war, his caustic comments ("Shame on you, Mr. Bush!") were viewed as treasonous. The backlash left Moore abandoned by skittish Hollywood liberals, vilified by angry conservatives and victimized by hate mail and death threats. Walking from his Upper West Side home to his offices was no longer safe.
"People got right in my face," says Moore, the self-professed champion of the little guy whose films and books have brought him wealth, fame and increasingly rabid scorn. "It was rough. I just thought how easier my life would be had I just thanked my agent."
Fast-forward 15 months. Fahrenheit9/11, his Bush-bashing documentary, opens this week and is stirring incendiary sentiment. Bush supporters are trashing Fahrenheit 9/11's premise. Conservatives mobilized to block theater chains from showing it. And talk show host Bill O'Reilly likened Moore to Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels.
Yet Moore gets lots of well-wishers and apologists thanking him for his anti-war stance. Celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Tony Bennett fawn over him. Moreover, swelling hype surrounding Fahrenheit 9/11 almost guarantees ticket sales above Columbine's $21.6 million, a record for a non-concert documentary.
Moore isn't seeking retribution. At least so he claims. Yet his two-hour polemic examining purported links between Bush, the Saudis, Osama bin Laden and U.S. corporate interests suggests otherwise.
Considered Moore's most slickly produced effort, Fahrenheit 9/11 is alternately shocking, manipulative, draining and humorous.
"Someone told me that this is the first movie made to justify an Oscar speech," says Moore, 50, scruffy in his ubiquitous uniform: jeans, New Balance sneakers, baseball jacket and Michigan State cap. "In essence, it's true.
"When I gave that speech, it wasn't embraced by majority opinion," he says. "Maybe I needed to clarify myself. That probably had a lot to do with making the film."
So do his political beliefs, which have transformed him from sarcastic social commentator of Roger & Me to left-leaning flamethrower behind Fahrenheit 9/11 and best-selling books Stupid White Men and Dude, Where's My Country?
Moore is listed as an independent in Michigan and isn't endorsing a presidential candidate. He backed Wesley Clark in the Democratic primaries and has almost exclusively favored third-party candidates in the past. Despite lukewarm interest in John Kerry, Moore makes no bones about his hope that Fahrenheit 9/11 will help oust Bush. "I may be preaching to the choir," Moore says. "But the choir needs a good song.
"Every day, a kid is dying over (in Iraq). For what? To secure Fallujah?" Moore says testily. "The (media) all drank the soup. They were all cheerleaders for this war. Not one asked the question that needed to be asked before we went to war. Why does a high school graduate in a baseball hat have to be the one?"
The guy in the baseball hat is a potent force. Says Adam Ruben of MoveOn Pac, which is urging its 2.2 million members to see Fahrenheit: "No celebrity on the left has his combined political message and following. When Stupid White Men was a No. 1 best seller for the better part of a year, it proved his audience was much broader."
Like the larger-than-life Moore, Fahrenheit is heavy with anti-Bush rhetoric. One disturbing vignette shows Bush in a Florida elementary school, dumbstruck upon learning of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, with a timer on the screen, clocking seven long minutes.
Always asking tough questions
Neither politics nor controversy is new to Moore, a pot stirrer as a teen in his hometown of Davison, Mich., a suburb of Flint, where his dad worked 30 years in a General Motors factory.
His activism stems from his Catholic upbringing. As a ninth-grader, he went to a seminary, questioning everything. "Yeah, but ..." was his favorite expression.
As a student interested more in drama classes and the debate team than academics, he "stood out far and above anyone in his class in terms of social issues," says Jim Shepherd, a Davison High instructor whose home Moore and schoolmates once toilet-papered.
After brashly winning election to the Davison school board as a long-haired 18-year-old in 1972, "he pushed people's buttons," Shepherd says. "He asked questions nobody asked. He was willing to take the heat." That theme continued after Moore, who briefly attended college, launched the alternative weekly Flint Voice. Ben Hamper, a Voice columnist who also appeared in his films and TV shows, says Moore was "driven, opinionated and always trying to save the world."
The Voice's finances were so precarious that Moore once barreled past security guards at a Harry Chapin concert, buttonholing the folk singer to hold benefit concerts. "He talked Chapin into doing concerts that kept us afloat for years," Hamper says. "He's the kind of guy who could talk Hitler into hosting a bar mitzvah."
Moore later moved to San Francisco to edit counterculture magazine Mother Jones. After a dispute with the publisher, Moore soon left, winding up in Washington, D.C., where he briefly edited newsletters for activist and presidential candidate Ralph Nader.
Joanne Doroshow has been friends with Moore and his wife, producer Kathleen Glynn, since the mid-1980s. Despite his wealth and notoriety, Moore hasn't changed, she says. "He cannot sit by and let world events go by without responding," says Doroshow, director for the Center for Justice & Democracy public interest group and a Fahrenheit co-producer. "He does what he thinks is right, no matter the consequence."
Moore may spur warm and fuzzy feelings among some, but he draws contempt from others. While wealth from films and books has allowed him to donate substantial sums to charitable and political groups, some question whether his money and celebrity status have transformed him from a champion of the common man into a self-righteous shrew.
Former Film Comment magazine editor and occasional USA TODAY contributor Harlan Jacobson concedes Fahrenheit is powerful. But he says Moore's ambition often overshadows his films. "It's one thing to have a strong political view, it's another to savage people using questionable tactics and making fun of people while portraying yourself as a man of the proletariat," he says.
Even fans of Moore's felt sorry for actor Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine, who as president of the National Rifle Association is confronted by Moore with a photo of a 6-year-old killed by a handgun. Moore says if Heston appears feeble, it was because he insisted on the timing of the interview, which took place just five days after hip replacement surgery.
Moore-basher David Hardy, who created the mooreexposed.com Web site, plans to show how Moore manipulates facts and his editing tricks in the soon-to-be-released book Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man.
"He's the master of the crockumentary, not the documentary," says Hardy, a Tucson-based lawyer with NRA ties. Moore dismisses the book as a quick-hit vendetta against him by publisher ReganBooks, which initially refused to release Stupid White Men in 2001.
Also due out: Michael Moore Hates America, a documentary by Michael Wilson, who says he wants to counter Moore's political agenda. "He's devolved from someone who cared about people to someone who became obsessed with a socialistic viewpoint," Wilson says. "I just don't like what Moore says about my nation."
Less is Moore?
Moore is aware he is a polarizing force. While he is ever-present in Roger & Me and in big chunks of Bowling for Columbine, he appears only sporadically in Fahrenheit. "It was a conscious decision," he says. "The material was so strong that a little bit of me goes a long way."
When he isn't promoting films, books or making speeches, Glynn and Moore — mellower and nicer in private than his prickly public persona suggests — live a largely quiet, unassuming life.
The couple split time between New York and Michigan, where both still have family. In New York, they entertain at home with friends, go to movies and favor HBO's The Sopranos. "Don't tell us how the season ends," says Glynn. "We've been too busy to see the last three shows."
They considered quitting film after Columbine but decided to make Fahrenheit, whose premise is largely blueprinted in 2003's Dude, Where's My Country?
There's talk that Fahrenheit could be nominated for best picture, a first for a documentary. And Steven Spielberg has said the film could reap $100 million.
"Having America's greatest living filmmaker say that, I'm honored," Moore says. "We've made an important film that seems to have transcended cinema. That's something you could only wish for."
Energized by the early response to Fahrenheit, Moore and Glynn are plotting their next undoubtedly provocative documentary. Sicko, a look at America's malfunctioning health-care system, is due in 2006.
Should Fahrenheit 9/11 provide a second Academy Award, what will his acceptance speech say?
Casting a bemused look at Glynn, Moore says he isn't sure.
"But I'm not going to say 'I told you so.' " |
