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Palme d'Or to "Fahrenheit 9/11" by Michael Moore


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The Palme d'Or of this 57th edition of the Festival de Cannes was presented by Charlize Theron to Michael Moore for his film, Fahrenheit 9/11.

 

 

"I can't begin to express my appreciation and my gratitude to the jury, the Festival, to Gilles Jacob, Thierry Frémaux, Bob and Harvey at Miramax, to all of the crew who worked on the film. [...] I have a sneaking suspicion that what you have done here and the response from everyone at the festival, you will assure that the American people will see this film. I can't thank you enough for that. You've put a huge light on this and many people want the truth and many want to put it in the closet, just walk away. There was a great Republican president who once said, if you just give the people the truth, the republicans, the Americans will be saved. [...] I dedicate this Palme d'Or to my daughter, to the children of Americans and to Iraq and to all those in the world who suffer from our actions. "

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Guest imported_Tesseract

As you can clearly understand, after the distribution problems michael moore encountered the cannes award comes to make sure that the film will be distributed/played in the US just before the elections...

 

BUSH-MOORE



0-1

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there are a probably alot of disgruntled directors of some great films who view this as i do....the french telling the bush admin to kindly fuck off...its too bad...

 

 

i mean i like moore, but it seems rather contrived that given the current state of foreign affairs that he wins...

 

 

frank rich in yesterdays new york times wrote a good opinion piece on the movie if any one is interested...

 

 

i am looking forward to seeing it....

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Originally posted by mental invalid

there are a probably alot of disgruntled directors of some great films who view this as i do....the french telling the bush admin to kindly fuck off...its too bad...

 

 

i mean i like moore, but it seems rather contrived that given the current state of foreign affairs that he wins...

 

 

 

You're wrong on this one, it aint the French, its a jury of directors with chief for 04' Quentin Tarantino...yeah, the worlds most important intellectuall people tell the Bush admin to fuck off, fuck yeah.

 

As far as this being contrived, it could be. Art is meant to play a pollitical/social role and i'm really glad that by handing an award at a euro festival, a film that the Bush admin tried to bury is now the center of attention internationally and will be used against them.

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Guest BROWNer

i'm just glad it's going to come out cuz the official

lid on 9/11 is garbage and needs some serious mainstream

consideration..

 

i was pretty surprised with godard's comments...

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Originally posted by BROWNer

i was pretty surprised with godard's comments...

 

HUD on that please

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Guest BROWNer

http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/news...re20040521.html

 

Jean-Luc Godard, the legendary French director who helped to launch the New Wave movement in the 1960s, had harsh words for Moore this week. Godard's latest film, Notre Musique, premiered on Monday, the same day as Fahrenheit 9/11. Later in the week, Godard lashed out at Moore at a press conference, calling him "halfway intelligent."

 

Godard, who hadn't seen Fahrenheit 9/11, compared it unfavourably to the work of American documentarian Frederick Wiseman. "It's like two different worlds," Godard said.

 

Moore's film criticizes U.S. President George W. Bush's handling of the Sept. 11 attacks, and also highlights the links between Bush's family and the family of Osama bin Laden. But Godard said Moore's film was an ineffectual piece of work.

 

"He's not even hurting Bush," Godard said. "He's helping him in an underground way. Bush is either less stupid than he looks or so stupid you can't change him."

 

Godard went on to say that the Flint, Mich.-born director lacks subtlety. "Moore doesn't distinguish between text and image," Godard argued. "He doesn't know what he's doing."

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Guest imported_Tesseract

Makes sense from Goddard's viewpoint..its like a quarrel between a painter and a graphic designer that does nike ads...

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I was a huge Mike Moore fan untill i heard of his over abundant use of editing to stress his point of view, as well as blatent misquotations. i struggled with my opinion of this approach for a bit. After reading all the posts on his work on the spinsanity site i decided even if this isnt the best approach, its kind of fighting fire with fire, afterall the biggest liars around are some of (what should be) the most trusted positions in our government.

As of late i am cool with it, if for no other reason than the fact no one else with such a high social position is willing to stare down the barrel of the Bush admin. cannon aimed at the heart of our nation.

 

I WILL BE IN LINE THE DAY IT COMES OUT !!!

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There might not be much of a line, but I will be in what's there of it..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Originally posted by Tesseract

You're wrong on this one, it aint the French, its a jury of directors with chief for 04' Quentin Tarantino...yeah, the worlds most important intellectuall people tell the Bush admin to fuck off, fuck yeah.

 

As far as this being contrived, it could be. Art is meant to play a pollitical/social role and i'm really glad that by handing an award at a euro festival, a film that the Bush admin tried to bury is now the center of attention internationally and will be used against them.

 

 

 

i should have said the international community as well as the location of being in france...

 

 

like i said though, i bet you could find atleast a few films that are better then this...and i like mike moore...but im just not sure if i buy that this was an even horse race from the get go...

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Originally posted by mental invalid

there are a probably alot of disgruntled directors of some great films who view this as i do....the french telling the bush admin to kindly fuck off...its too bad...

 

 

i mean i like moore, but it seems rather contrived that given the current state of foreign affairs that he wins...

 

 

frank rich in yesterdays new york times wrote a good opinion piece on the movie if any one is interested...

 

 

i am looking forward to seeing it....

 

 

agreed

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Originally posted by ODS-1

Micheal Moore is one of the few who tells the truth in film and anyone who says otherwise can fuck themselves.

 

I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about Moore, but this statement is definitely not true. Moore brings light to a lot of things that deserve attention, but a truth-teller is not a title that he deserves....usually.

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i think moore could be far more effective if he took his self rightesous grand standing and left it on the shelf when he went out to make his movies. all of the points he makes are good ones, and there is almost always a huge amount of fact at the base of any of his claims, but i think in an attempt to be as outspoken as the right, he does the whole left a bit of a diservice with his presentation. i don't know a single left wing person that completely agrees with how he goes about his shit. he makes it way too easy for the right to cast off, and then 'we' have to spend as much time defending him, or atleast listening to the rights whining about him, than we do discussing what he brings up. it's counter productive and the only people who are real 'gung ho' about him, are die hard leftists anyway, so it's not as if that level of pagentry is needed to convert anyone. if he would have not chopped up the charlton heston speech, which really made no difference, people would have had a lot less to criticise of him. i'm glad he exists, and ultimately i think he does more good than harm, but i think he could do twice as much good if he took a little more level headed approach. you can't make an acurate 'documentary' if you sensationalize things.

 

this might not have been the best movie at the festival, but it will turn out to be 100 times more important than anything else and thats why he was given the award. if you make the worlds greatest expose on a start up muffin company, and really manage to capture the essence of what it means to be a muffin maker... no matter how good it is, it's still a movie about muffins, nah'mean?!

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this may be too long for some....here was the piece i was refering to...

 

FRANK RICH

Michael Moore's Candid Camera

 

Published: May 23, 2004

 

 

But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that? And watch him suffer."

— Barbara Bush on "Good Morning America,"

March 18, 2003

 

 

SHE needn't have worried. Her son wasn't suffering. In one of the several pieces of startling video exhibited for the first time in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," we catch a candid glimpse of President Bush some 36 hours after his mother's breakfast TV interview — minutes before he makes his own prime-time TV address to take the nation to war in Iraq. He is sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. A makeup woman is doing his face. And Mr. Bush is having a high old time. He darts his eyes about and grins, as if he were playing a peek-a-boo game with someone just off-camera. He could be a teenager goofing with his buds to relieve the passing tedium of a haircut.

 

"In your wildest dreams you couldn't imagine Franklin Roosevelt behaving this way 30 seconds before declaring war, with grave decisions and their consequences at stake," said Mr. Moore in an interview before his new documentary's premiere at Cannes last Monday. "But that may be giving him credit for thinking that the decisions were grave." As we spoke, the consequences of those decisions kept coming. The premiere of "Fahrenheit 9/11" took place as news spread of the assassination of a widely admired post-Saddam Iraqi leader, Ezzedine Salim, blown up by a suicide bomber just a hundred yards from the entrance to America's "safe" headquarters, the Green Zone, in Baghdad.

 

"Fahrenheit 9/11" will arrive soon enough at your local cineplex — there's lots of money to be made — so discount much of the squabbling en route. Disney hasn't succeeded in censoring Mr. Moore so much as in enhancing his stature as a master provocateur and self-promoter. And the White House, which likewise hasn't a prayer of stopping this film, may yet fan the p.r. flames. "It's so outrageously false, it's not even worth comment," was last week's blustery opening salvo by Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. New York's Daily News reported that Republican officials might even try to use the Federal Election Commission to shut the film down. That would be the best thing to happen to Michael Moore since Charlton Heston granted him an interview.

 

Whatever you think of Mr. Moore, there's no question he's detonating dynamite here. From a variety of sources — foreign journalists and broadcasters (like Britain's Channel Four), freelancers and sympathetic American TV workers who slipped him illicit video — he supplies war-time pictures that have been largely shielded from our view. Instead of recycling images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center on 9/11 once again, Mr. Moore can revel in extended new close-ups of the president continuing to read "My Pet Goat" to elementary school students in Florida for nearly seven long minutes after learning of the attack. Just when Abu Ghraib and the savage beheading of Nicholas Berg make us think we've seen it all, here is yet another major escalation in the nation-jolting images that have become the battleground for the war about the war.

 

"Fahrenheit 9/11" is not the movie Moore watchers, fans or foes, were expecting. (If it were, the foes would find it easier to ignore.) When he first announced this project last year after his boorish Oscar-night diatribe against Mr. Bush, he described it as an exposé of the connections between the Bush and bin Laden dynasties. But that story has been so strenuously told elsewhere — most notably in Craig Unger's best seller, "House of Bush, House of Saud" — that it's no longer news. Mr. Moore settles for a brisk recap in the first of his film's two hours. And, predictably, he stirs it into an over-the-top, at times tendentious replay of a Bush hater's greatest hits: Katherine Harris, the Supreme Court, Harken Energy, AWOL in Alabama, the Carlyle Group, Halliburton, the lazy Crawford vacation of August 2001, the Patriot Act. But then the movie veers off in another direction entirely. Mr. Moore takes the same hairpin turn the country has over the past 14 months and crash-lands into the gripping story that is unfolding in real time right now.

 

Wasn't it just weeks ago that we were debating whether we should see the coffins of the American dead and whether Ted Koppel should read their names on "Nightline"? In "Fahrenheit 9/11," we see the actual dying, of American troops and Iraqi civilians alike, with all the ripped flesh and spilled guts that the violence of war entails. (If Steven Spielberg can simulate World War II carnage in "Saving Private Ryan," it's hard to argue that Mr. Moore should shy away from the reality in a present-day war.) We also see some of the 4,000-plus American casualties: those troops hidden away in clinics at Walter Reed and at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Fort Campbell, Ky., where they try to cope with nerve damage and multiple severed limbs. They are not silent. They talk about their pain and their morphine, and they talk about betrayal. "I was a Republican for quite a few years," one soldier says with an almost innocent air of bafflement, "and for some reason they conduct business in a very dishonest way."

 

Of course, Mr. Moore is being selective in what he chooses to include in his movie; he's a polemicist, not a journalist. But he implicitly raises the issue that much of what we've seen elsewhere during this war, often under the label of "news," has been just as subjectively edited. Perhaps the most damning sequence in "Fahrenheit 9/11" is the one showing American troops as they ridicule hooded detainees in a holding pen near Samara, Iraq, in December 2003. A male soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the sexual humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib at that same time. Besides adding further corroboration to Seymour Hersh's report that the top command has sanctioned a culture of abuse not confined to a single prison or a single company or seven guards, this video raises another question: why didn't we see any of this on American TV before "60 Minutes II"?

 

Don Van Natta Jr. of The New York Times reported in March 2003 that we were using hooding and other inhumane techniques at C.I.A. interrogation centers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. CNN reported on Jan. 20, after the Army quietly announced its criminal investigation into prison abuses, that "U.S. soldiers reportedly posed for photographs with partially unclothed Iraqi prisoners." And there the matter stood for months, even though, as we know now, soldiers' relatives with knowledge of these incidents were repeatedly trying to alert Congress and news organizations to the full panorama of the story.

 

Mr. Moore says he obtained his video from an independent foreign journalist embedded with the Americans. "We've had this footage in our possession for two months," he says. "I saw it before any of the Abu Ghraib news broke. I think it's pretty embarrassing that a guy like me with a high school education and with no training in journalism can do this. What the hell is going on here? It's pathetic."

 

We already know that politicians in denial will dismiss the abuse sequence in Mr. Moore's film as mere partisanship. Someone will surely echo Senator James Inhofe's Abu Ghraib complaint that "humanitarian do-gooders" looking for human rights violations are maligning "our troops, our heroes" as they continue to fight and die. But Senator Inhofe and his colleagues might ask how much they are honoring soldiers who are overextended, undermanned and bereft of a coherent plan in Iraq. Last weekend The Los Angeles Times reported that for the first time three Army divisions, more than a third of its combat troops, are so depleted of equipment and skills that they are classified "unfit to fight." In contrast to Washington's neglect, much of "Fahrenheit 9/11" turns out to be a patriotic celebration of the heroic American troops who have been fighting and dying under these and other deplorable conditions since President Bush's declaration of war.

 

In particular, the movie's second hour is carried by the wrenching story of Lila Lipscomb, a flag-waving, self-described "conservative Democrat" from Mr. Moore's hometown of Flint, Mich., whose son, Sgt. Michael Pedersen, was killed in Iraq. We watch Mrs. Lipscomb, who by her own account "always hated" antiwar protesters, come undone with grief and rage. As her extended family gathers around her in the living room, she clutches her son's last letter home and reads it aloud, her shaking voice and hand contrasting with his precise handwriting on lined notebook paper. A good son, Sergeant Pedersen thanks his mother for sending "the bible and books and candy," but not before writing of the president: "He got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I am so furious right now, Mama."

 

By this point, Mr. Moore's jokes, some of them sub-par retreads of Jon Stewart's riffs about the coalition of the willing, have vanished from "Fahrenheit 9/11." So, pretty much, has Michael Moore himself. He told me that Harvey Weinstein of Miramax had wanted him to insert more of himself into the film — "you're the star they're coming to see" — but for once he exercised self-control, getting out of the way of a story that is bigger than he is. "It doesn't need me running around with my exclamation points," he said. He can't resist underlining one moral at the end, but by then the audience, crushed by the needlessness of Mrs. Lipscomb's loss, is ready to listen. Speaking of America's volunteer army, Mr. Moore concludes: "They serve so that we don't have to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free. It is, remarkably, their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is that we never send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. Will they ever trust us again?"

 

"Fahrenheit 9/11" doesn't push any Vietnam analogies, but you may find one in a montage at the start, in which a number of administration luminaries (Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Powell) in addition to the president are seen being made up for TV appearances. It's reminiscent of Richard Avedon's photographic portrait of the Mission Council, the American diplomats and military figures running the war in Saigon in 1971. But at least those subjects were dignified. In Mr. Moore's candid-camera portraits, a particularly unappetizing spectacle is provided by Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of both the administration's Iraqi fixation and its doctrine of "preventive" war. We watch him stick his comb in his mouth until it is wet with spit, after which he runs it through his hair. This is not the image we usually see of the deputy defense secretary, who has been ritualistically presented in the press as the most refined of intellectuals — a guy with, as Barbara Bush would have it, a beautiful mind.

 

Like Mrs. Bush, Mr. Wolfowitz hasn't let that mind be overly sullied by body bags and such — to the point where he underestimated the number of American deaths in Iraq by more than 200 in public last month. No one would ever accuse Michael Moore of having a beautiful mind. Subtleties and fine distinctions are not his thing. That matters very little, it turns out, when you have a story this ugly and this powerful to tell.

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Originally posted by seeking

if you make the worlds greatest expose on a start up muffin company, and really manage to capture the essence of what it means to be a muffin maker... no matter how good it is, it's still a movie about muffins, nah'mean?!

 

 

so theres two muffins in the oven....

 

one muffin turns to the other muffin, and says "well, pretty hot in here huh?"

 

the other muffin says, "holy shit a talking muffin"

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Guest imported_Tesseract

For once more, i completely agree with seeking. One could say that Moore uses a far right way to express left opinions and i can see how that can be annoying and quite an oxymoron at the same time. When i saw bowling for columbine there where parts that annoyed the fuck out of me but in the end i judged the whole thing and saw that despite the flaws he makes a damn fine point in the movie. I think the same thing will happen with this movie aswell. Whats important to keep in mind is that Michael Moore is not the guy that will take Bush's place in the white house, he's not the guy that will pass a law concerning guns, he's here to point out some issues for concideration and he brings it up in an unavoidable way, it takes courage and it takes balls to be in his shoes and, for the most part, thats what pisses me off with the whole anti-moore thing...people behave like his movies should be the absolut leftist guide where you can just quote a line and shut everyone up, that will never happen. In that case all off us would look like these narrowminded religious people that have a quote from the bible ready to toss in every situation. I'm feeling happy that his stuff can make some people feel uncomfortable, and furthermore highlight dumbness(the attempts to ban the film) and i'm happy he brings some thoughts to a wide audience.

 

Thats about it for me.

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the problem with that, is that moore doesnt lie. everything he says is based in researcahble fact. i don't care for the way he portrays alot of things, and i think he sometimes sensationalizes, but he doesn't lie.

 

 

roe,

thanks for that. i'm very glad to hear that this isn't bowling for columbine 2 (which i have not yet seen, surprisingly enough). like dude said, IMO, you don't have to dress this story up or put a spin on it, the facts speak loud enough on their own.

 

any word on a release?

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