Okay, I've seen Fahrenhype 9/11 now, and it made me groan even more than Fahrenheit 9/11; they actually had that David Kopel guy (of Internet fame) in the movie as well, which is a favourite of some of the more rabid anti-Moore fans as far as I can remember from the old F9/11 threads.
They managed to discuss some of the biggest non-issues and non-points of Moore's movie - Moore allegedly "faked" the layout of a single newspaper article that was shown for a second (which basically consisted of enlarging the article's head and some sloppy typos regarding the article's date); they focused on single statements made by Moore rather than the point in its entirety (fans of strawman arguments will absolutely *love* this documentary); they took Moore's statements regarding "there is no terrorist threat" out of context and blew it to ridiculous proportions, filling about a third of the movie to emphasise that people *should* be scared of terrorists and that the Patriot Act is the only thing standing between the US and Total War on American soil; according to Kopel, Iraq *was* a direct threat to the US (and the invasion was "justified" in result) just because an Udai-owned newspaper had called up to rise against the US on some rare occasions (no evidence was provided by Kopel, by the way); they "disprove" the links between Bush and the Carlyle group (and, subsequently, with Saudi Arabia) by pointing out that several Democrats are involved with that group just the same (erm...); Ann Coulter wasn't as vitriolic as her usual self (I suppose part of it was cut out
), but I don't believe there were many of her lines in the movie that didn't include the word "liberals"; oh, and apparently, Michael Moore is "unpatriotic" as some alleged Hezbollah-associated filmhouses in Palestine decided to show F9/11, because Moore didn't use his "power" to disallow these filmhouses from showing it (rrrright
); there's a focus on the situation in pre-invasion Iraq, but never give a single reason why *Iraq* was invaded for that situation and not one of the countless other countries in the world violating those same international laws and committing those same "atrocities"; in an unexpected twist, Michael Moore's propaganda techniques are actually compared to Hitler's (!); Michael Moore's election fraud theories were dismissed with only a single mention of an investigation that was published a few months later, while never even going into any of F9/11's "conflict of interest" accusations (which was in my opinion - if proven to be true - the most interesting part of that entire section of F9/11 and the reason why Bush's election will be fishy until the end of times, even if it turns out he still won it by a wide margin in case everyone *was* allowed and able to cast the vote they wanted to); "the military is doing a good job because the Taliban would have eaten all the Iraqi kids instead" (or something along those lines); oh, and there's some guy who thinks he's really witty by concluding that Michael Moore has to be French (?).
Oh, and note that I don't guarantee to represent this movie fairly in the above paragraph, I'm far too much in a silly mood for fair rebuttals thanks to this movie
; this in case someone like, say, Oblivion decides to strawman my strawman impressions of this strawman documentary that claims to take on Michael Moore's strawman arguments in F9/11. [img]tongue.gif[/img]
Basically, opinions are posed as "facts", and that's pretty much it; overwhelming the few *good* points made regarding F9/11. A great movie if you want a good laugh or simply if you are in the mood to yell at some rightwing nutters and their downright bizarre concept of reality on your screen, but not much else.
Let's hope the other F9/11 rebuttal movies have more substance than just a parade of hardly related personal attacks at Moore's address.
And in addition, some words by a guy named Lobst who posted this on the SA-forums, and which I agree with to some degree:
Quote:
Massive liberal here. Downloaded it, watched it, loved getting angry -- all by illegitimate means while playing video golf. There were one or two verifiable facts that debunk major turning points in F9/11, but there's so much subjective opinion, conjecture, fallacy, semantics, and irrelevant data surrounding them that they can be difficult to get into.
Most of FH9/11's rebuttals include statements from people who, instead of pointing out and ripping apart the facts cited by their appearance, simply state "Hey! I didn't know I was in Moore's film and I don't agree with him and his terrorist-humping!" or "Hey! KKKlinton felt the same way about this shit!" (which doesn't make sense as Moore was anti-Clinton as well, though not to any staggering degree), or "Hey look at me, I'm (a mother of a soldier who died, a soldier, an army recruiter) and the individual(s) Moore put up, supposedly to represent the group I'm in, did not represent me!" -- I ended up shouting "This... this is just FILLER!" at the screen, followed by "This film is a s***stain!" Then I actually punched my screen and my downstairs neighbor pounded on my door and was all "what's all this hubjub" and i turned out the lights and stood really still for about an hour.
Not like F9/11 was a bastion of incontrivertible truth, but Moore has more good points, and I love this film because I find them validated by this film's vehement merchandising of subjectivity as objectivity. Check it out if you want, but be prepared to wade through a sea of strawmen if you want to find anything of substance.
(...)
I find it amazing how they could fill 80 minutes with semantic rebuttals to seconds-long pieces of footage in F9/11, yet they wouldn't even touch the worsening conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush's military record or his pre-1998 Bath/Carlyle/Bin Laden connections, the subject of Lila Lipscomb and her family, the compounded invasiveness and ineffectiveness of our new airport security policy, the rampant pro-war bias of the media, or the seemingly-rising-by-coincidence and improperly colored Terror Alert system.
Oddly enough, this film also takes pre-9/11 situations and puts them under a post-9/11 perspective, which is ridiculous when you consider that nobody had even considered the possibility that people would use planes as makeshift missiles. Did you know that before late 2001, the consensus from experience was that hijackers were only interested in going toward internationally volatile places and, as such, all flight crew were instructed by airline officials to cooperate with all hijackers? WHAT? BLASPHEMY! BLAME CLINTON!
I also found it disturbing that they would compare weakening-daily-by-sanctions Saddam in 2003 to rising-from-his-grave Hitler in 1937, or to a nest of copper-head snakes in Zell's backyard, or even to villainous-cyborg-Saddam in 1992. That whole segment requires that you thought a preemptive strike was a good idea, which I found rather telling of the film's nature - that this is little more than a DVD made in three months and put out to soften the release of F9/11, to be obsessively purchased by the right wing so they can have their talking points parrotted back at them and their egos massaged as such.
To be fair, I did state (in uncertain terms) I'm an easily-swayed left-wing shill, and F9/11 and Control Room compounded themselves into an anti-war argument in my head that's going to be difficult to refute. Still, if this is all the right could come up with, then I'm bewildered by their tactics. This is supposed to convince me that our neverending war was the right idea? Sorry, Dick [Morris], but you're fired.
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[ 10-10-2004, 05:08 PM: Message edited by: Grojlach ]