June 10, 2004

A Reader Writes: "I generally enjoy your reviews. However, I do not see the point in your "reviewing" Fahrenheit 911 when you have already expressed displeasure towards it (and Michael Moore) prior to even seeing it. It would be like asking Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel to review Clinton's new autobiography. How can you produce a fair and balanced review? By the way, rottentomatoes shows mostly positive reviews as of now."

I have to admit, I have some concern about this issue. Of course, on the face of it, the argument is absurd. We all go into every movie with opinions of our own, not just when it is a political or controversial film. To compare me to Sean Hannity or Fox News is insulting and doesn't stand the smell test, given my long history of positions on political films of all stripes. A few months ago, I was too liberal for taking issue with Mel Gibson's sales methods for The Passion of The Christ. Now I am accused of being a closet conservative because I don't have a great deal of faith in Michael Moore's commitment to truth when it gets in the way of his posturing.

But still, I have to answer the question of validity to myself, if to no one else. How big is the chip on my shoulder when I walk into the theater? How high is the bar because it's Michael Moore and not "Gina Wisconsin" behind the camera? And how strong is my contrarian streak?

It would help, I suppose, if I loved this film as much as I loved Roger & Me or Bowling For Columbine. Or perhaps, it would be helpful if I saw some of Moore's public inconsistencies before I embraced those films.

I bring this up not just because I am writing my own column and can afford to be relentlessly self-indulgent, but because I think we all have to bring these questions to the cinema if we want to look at a movie from anything other than just our gut. The phrase you will hear most often regarding Fahrenheit 9/11 in the coming months, after "anti-Bush attack" will be "preaching to the converted."

The hope of Fahrenheit 9/11 for the converted is that it will convert others, mainly the group of "undecideds" out there who may be the key to the next election. The other hope is that the film will further energize Democrats who might not vote out of sheer disinterest or laziness.

There is also some hope on the other side of the aisle regarding Fahrenheit 9/11. They hope that the film is seen as so partisan and so unfair that it will serve to compel Republican voters and some "undecideds" to defend their side from this perceived onslaught and energize their base.

To my eye, the reality is that Fahrenheit 9/11 is going to be a tempest in a teapot.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is the vast right wing conspiracy and Clinton shaking his finger at America when he did not have sexual relations with that woman and the ad with the little girl and the flower before the a-bomb explodes and America's Funniest Home Videos and Robert Smigel's Saturday TV Funhouse and the terrorist montage & speech that accompanied Daniel Pearl's beheading all in one overlong package.

What is scariest about Fahrenheit 9/11 - for those of us who are waiting impatiently for our Democratic Party to deliver an affirmative argument for a change of leadership instead of just waiting for Bush to nail his own coffin shut on the evening news - is that Moore, The Liberal Most Likely to make the argument with wit and insight and facts that may border on falsehood but which compel nonetheless, has come up with little more than a recruiting film for people who are still bitter about the election of 2000.

There is a sequence in the film that really resonates for me in perspective. There are some young soldiers - a group that Moore constantly says he supports in voiceover and constantly bashes in the body of the film - who play loud, obnoxious heavy metal when they are out in their armored vehicle, ready to kill. They talk about how the music gets them all riled up and focused on their inhumane mission. (Let's not get into fights about whether war - any war - is necessary… let's just agree that any activity that includes an objective of killing others is inhumane by its nature... okay?)

It's not bothersome so much because it is a weak echo of Kubrick and Coppola, who added a little drama while reporting the facts of preparing for a fight and who actually, brilliantly, forced audiences to consider their own excitement as participants in the musical charge. Moore has a tendency to lean more towards Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange than his Full Metal Jacket, prying our eyes open and showing us ugly images to force an emotional association, as opposed to allowing the audience to make its own associations and find its own answers.

What is really bothersome about Moore's smug attitude about the ways soldiers have to focus to stay within their mission is that his movie is very much the same loud "heavy message" assault on the senses, sending viewers into a wave of excited enthusiasm for their Bush-is-a-moron predisposition. But like the heavy metal music, once you turn off the noise, there is very little left to nourish one's passions.

Moore's film is, essentially, a series of Chris Rock-ian "It ain't right!" jokes that strike the viewer as true. And many of them are. But a stand-up concert, while sometimes meant to make you think, is about the wondrous involuntary reaction of laughter. When the effort becomes primarily about making you think, you turn into Dennis Miller, boring too much of your audience and ending up with a conservative chat show on CNBC.

Last I checked, I was not a moron, but after many minutes of screen time about George Bush and his personal and familial relationship with the Saudis, I'm still not sure what the accusation is other than that the Bushes are money grubbing poli-whores. That might have been a revelation in 1970, but today, it is expected from every politician.

The plight of the poor in this country, which includes military service for many, is a compelling issue. But instead of exploring the intricacies of joining the service and ending up fighting when you didn't really expect to - in a war you support or don't - Moore focuses and refocuses on the issue as one of class struggle… a struggle that Hollywood types don't want to think about for too long, lest their hypocrisy at mocking others for doing just as they would melt their brains.

Moore is even handed in mentioning the passage of the Congressional act that was voted on by Democrats and Republicans allowing Bush to take us to Iraq. He also leaves open the fact that neither Democrats or Republican Senators were willing to sign off on the Congressional Black Caucus' effort to contest the election back in 2000. But neither issue is addressed directly.

Meanwhile, The Patriot Act is addressed with troubling hyperbole. Forget about whether Democrats should be excused from responsibility by Chuck Conyers' wizened old insight that no one reads the bills that Congress passes. Does anyone really believe that Congresspeople did not know what they were voting for in the Patriot Act?

The truth, it seems to me, is that in both the case of passing The Patriot Act and the act allowing Bush unilateral discretion about going to war with Iraq, that smart people got caught up in the frenzy of the moment and allowed themselves to act faster than they could think, while some felt that they were doing the right thing in good conscience. The "printing it in the dark of night" crap is nothing but propagandistic finger pointing. Is it so hard for Democrats to say, "We were part of this huge mistake and now John Kerry is our only chance to correct that error of judgment?"

When Michael Moore puts on a parade of quick cut images of Republicans repeating the message about Weapons of Mass Destruction, he is ironically doing exactly what those Republicans were doing… building a case with repetition of a message. What is frustrating for me is that he then cuts to the heroic Democrats who are also repeating party line messages for mass consumption.

The idea that the rich and powerful should be willing to send their children to war is not new, but it is compelling. But why does Moore have to goose the game? If you are going to ambush Congressmen (and he never finds a female member of Congress to harass) on the street to ask them to enlist their kids, wouldn't it be nice to know how many members of Congress have children on traditional enlistment age, say 18-25? If that number is only, say, 100, and they have a total of 150 eligible sons and daughters, I guess that is less interesting than 535 members having only one child fighting in Iraq. But it shouldn't be. Every great story starts with a willingness by the storyteller to be supremely honest.

Michael Moore used to be about shutting down the game. Of course he always leaned left. It's where you usually find underdogs. But has it occurred to anyone else that a big part of Rush Limbaugh's success was his weight and his mega-ditto geekiness? Have you noticed that O'Reilly is only rarely seen standing up so that his intimidating size doesn't thin out his underdog status? It's hard to make a conservative into an underdog. You may even have to wear a stupid bowtie.

But Moore, with this film, takes sides that are not ideological but political. Instead of stirring the pot, which often leads to the result he wants, he targets with a specificity that makes him a man only of some of the people.

I will always remember the huge ruckus at Sundance when the Moore-produced Blood In The Face showed Neo-Nazis without screaming that they were evil and left viewers enraged because the constant spewing of hatred and ignorance wasn't enough, in their minds, to clarify the issue to "the public." My bet is that what those screaming art film lovers were really upset by was that they saw humanity in these people whose political beliefs meant that they could not, emotionally, also be human beings. But that film was a template for what I have always loved about Michael Moore.

Roger & Me was about corporate greed and its insidiousness in every day life. Yes, many of the people who are at the top of those food chains are conservative. But the film was about what their actions, not their ideas. Bowling For Columbine was, primarily, about keeping America in a constant state of fear as a way to keep people docile, politically and otherwise. Sure, there is a long litany of misreportage by Moore that has since been connected with the film. But those details are, actually, somewhat beside the point. As a documentarian, those lies may mark him as a (Oscar-winning) failure. But Moore is a satirist, not really a documentarian. I am not one of those who was upset with Moore's treatment of Charlton Heston. Heston invited an NRA-bashing wolf in and he got no less than what he should have expected. He tried the open door approach instead of hiding, for which he also would have paid probably a price, and he just wasn't up to it. I can't hang that responsibility on Moore, even if chasing him into the house and leaving the child's picture was more than a little heavy handed.

Yes, my political feelings are in play when reacting to this movie. I am waiting for a Democrat to stand up and say, again, "Democrats helped get us into Iraq… Democrat support for Gore was so weak that the last election came down to Florida, which it never should have… Democrats can be games players too… I disagree with George W. Bush in a hundred ways and I can discuss them all in detail with you, but he is not the devil and even though he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, I respect what he has achieved and will give every ounce of energy I have to keep him from ever holding public office again… I have a better vision for America… America deserves better."

Conservative readers will disagree with that paragraph. But that's not the point. The point is, Democrats have to stop throwing eggs, take responsibility for themselves, and start explaining why they are better if they want to have a chance of taking the White House.

What Michael Moore has created with Fahrenheit 9/11 is perhaps the best compendium of accusations about George Bush in the last four years. But there is nothing new… nothing revelatory. In both his earlier feature docs, Moore took you by surprise. Agree with him or not, you had to leave the theater thinking about something you forgot to think about for a while. Do rich people know the price of a loaf of bread? Why are Americans so busy arming themselves?

The basic response to seeing Fahrenheit 9/11, if you are in the coalition of the willing viewer, is to think about George Bush being dumb, his cabal being evil and war being bad. And sadly, we have been listening to that for four years now. It is enough to get a non-Academy crowd on its feet in the Academy theater here in Los Angeles. And maybe the film will help keep California from becoming a state the republicans think they can win under The Governator's leadership. But preaching to the converters is not going to help in the Midwest. And while a total domestic gross of $14 million for Y Tu Mama Tambien is great and $16 million for Far From Heaven is good, both of those excellent films still reached only an elite audience of movie voters who are too smart to let any movie decide how they are going to vote. "Just" $22 million in box office for Fahrenheit 9/11 would make the film the highest non-IMAX doc grosser in history.

But Michael Moore rightly understands that his film needs to gross more like $60 million, reaching 10 million moviegoers or more, which would likely lead to another 20 million or so seeing the film on DVD/Video in October for it to have any impact on the election… the film needs to get out of the bubble.

But more than anything yet seen in Moore's career, this film was made in the bubble and breathes truly rarified air. If someone wants to tell you that a commercially-made non-IMAX documentary that costs $6 million is anywhere close to the norm, they would be wrong. I won't get into rumors about how much of that money went into Michael Moore's pockets. But for all the anti-Disney spin, this film was never in danger of being squashed… except when no one wanted to give Moore this large sum of money for a political doc and put up with Moore's tendency to publicly bash his benefactors. Disney made a decision that every single other major studio in Hollywood made without having guys like the Weinsteins - to their credit, in many cases - willing to take the heat with the hierarchy. The film will be released in more theaters than any documentary ever has, it looks like. None of which should be held against it. But neither should anyone be getting any kudos for bravery under fire. You want to see brave documentarians, go to LAFF's excellent line-up of competition docs and see films from filmmakers who don't drive half a block in a chauffeured town car from the Music Hall to Kate Mantellini's. (Note: Harvey walked the 250 yards.)

On Thursday morning, the morning after seeing F9/11, I saw an LAFF entry called Up for Grabs. It is the story of the two men who claimed ownership of the baseball that Barry Bonds hit for the record 73rd home run in a season. Documentary is a hard subject to criticize these days because the notion of the difference between a TV doc and a feature doc has become awkward. The subject matter in this film is not important in a big picture way. But the film's insight into human nature… the skill with which filmmaker Michael Wranovics handled the narrative thread, keeping the audience anticipating each turn while still not falsifying the actual story… the sheer movie going joy of seeing the film…makes it a tiny masterpiece. It recalled Fahrenheit 9/11 for me because it deals with many of the same subjects - people who are delusional, people who lie, avarice, arrogance, and losing the trees for the forest. But it is a much better movie.

If you want insight into how demented and charming a politician can be, go see Imelda, a doc that does a great job of letting the audience decide for itself. Director Ramona Diaz allows Mrs. Marcos to try to seduce the audience with all of her charms, the way the Neo-Nazis did in Blood In The Face, never having to resort to outtakes that made her look stupid, trying to tell is what to think.

If you want to see real filmmaking courage, watch Jon Caouette's Tarnation, in which he lay bare his entire painful life for audience's to judge.

Or do you want to see a heroic figure at a time of great historic unrest? Just go see Negroes With Guns, the Sandra Dickson and Churchill Roberts doc about Rob Williams, a black man in the south (supported tirelessly by his wife and family) who just said "no."

The ultimate truth about Fahrenheit 9/11 is that there are probably three really good in-process documentaries in there. There is a reason why there was a 13 year gap between Roger & Me and Bowling For Columbine… and it's not just failed TV gigs, Canadian Bacon and The Big One. Good documentaries almost always take a long time to find their focus. If you are narrowing in on a single event or moment, especially one that is already well documented, you can move a bit faster sometimes. Bukowski took 7 years to come together and something like the Robert Evans doc took, I believe, less than 2 years. The result, unfortunately, for Fahrenheit 9/11 is that the movie is really a handful of interesting, comedic 60 Minutes (or TV Funhouse) segments with a strong political point of view. The greatest effect it can have is if applied topically, which is to say, if you want to convert a potential Bush voter, show this movie to them an hour before they vote, because you don't want them lingering on it for too long or they might get angry and vote for Bush in spite.

Perhaps, F9/11: The Director's Recut will come out someday. If I were Harvey Weinstein or whomever, I would want Moore out shooting more for a "Redux" and for the DVD right now, because right now, his film really is a work-in-progress. And all the standing ovations at the Academy theater and film festival awards don't change that.

I hope that those of you reading this will do me the honor of adding to my perspective, before you have seen the film and after. I suspect that I will see the film again a couple of more times myself and will surely keep discussing it with people. Please contribute.

READER OF THE DAY: UNEASY READER writes: "10 FASTEST WAYS FOR ONLINE ENTERTAINMENT COLUMNISTS TO PISS OFF THE CASUAL READER

10. Take anything Jeff Wells says personally.

9. Write about actors/actresses of the future who go on to nothing.

8. Talk about the profitability of a film without reporting the numbers: box office, overseas profits, costs of prints and advertising, profits of DVDs, percentage going to various players (stars, directors, studios, etc.) to finally determine what is actually profitable and what is really a flop.

7. Take a simple disagreement of taste with other critics and turn it into a soul-searching debate about the plight of the modern critic.

6. Passionately defend a company or executive with the express purpose of countering the one-sided-reporting by only reporting the other side.

5. Say 'I don't feel like writing a column today.'

4. Talk about sit down interviews with very little of the actual interview printed.

3. Say that 'Enough has been said about [Blank]' before you actually say anything about [Blank].

2. Stop reviewing all but a handful of films (and even then the reviews are nothing more than focused in on one thing that works or one thing that doesn't without talking about the rest of the film, the plot, the acting, the writing, etc.) but still call yourself a film critic.

1. Write about the relationship between publicist and journalist as though it were something that more than a handful of readers care about or want to waste five minutes reading, and only one person takes as a serious issue.

E ME: Interesting. I'd have to plead "not guilty" to four or five of the items. But interesting….