F-911
By Saw Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday afternoon. Lots of people outside the Neptune selling anti-Bush paraphenalia, a few gathering signatures. One guy wandering around with a display trying to convince Dems to stiffen their backbones.
Crowd was altogether enthusiastic. I suspected that we might get some sort of anti-Moore demonstration; frat row is only a few blocks away. Nothing, though. Fair number of loud cheers during the movie, some of which made dialogue difficult to hear. I can’t confirm, but I suspect that many in the crowd didn’t recognize Jim McDermott, even though he must represent just about everyone there.
The film was pretty solid. Moore wandered a bit at times, and lingered too long on the Carlyle Group and the various connections between Saudi and Bush money. That’s not entirely right; it’s certainly good to talk about those connections, but I think the relationship is more complex than the point Moore was trying to get across. If anything, that part of the film demonstrated that anyone who thinks of America as a meritocracy is sadly deluded. Got a bit off track with the discussion of the Afghani pipeline, although the images of Taliban representatives in DC and Texas were outstanding. Aside from these quibbles, the film was very good. Moore does us a favor by letting the images and subjects speak for themselves. He doesn’t need to spend time trying to get politicians into embarrasing situations, because they’ve already put themselves there.
The star of the film is GW. I think Moore should have stayed on GW for the full time that he sat, dumbfounded, in the Florida classroom trying to deal with what he had just learned about the attacks. Deer in the headlights. Bush does his best in the rest of the film to look like a Class 1 asshole who’s over his head in his new job.
The film was good enough to embarass its critics. Hitch’s meandering smear job barely touched upon the matter of the film; he must have known that he needed to attack the director instead of the flick itself. Sully has avoided this problem by simply refusing to watch the movie. I suspect that most conservatives will follow Sully’s lead, as it’s pretty clear they’re doing with Clinton’s book.