June 15, 2004

There is nothing that fills my brain with blood tonight like the news that Michael Moore says he knew about Abu Ghraib months before the story broke and didn't say anything because he feared that people would see it as a publicity stunt.

This news makes me sick. Because before anyone laid a finger on the movie's veracity, Moore did more damage to his credibility than any bent truth in the film could have. The only salvation - and I pray that it turns out to be the case - would be that Moore knew about the scandal and also knew that the abuses had stopped by the time he found out, thus making a choice to break the news far less relevant.

But if this guy knew that there was abuse of prisoners going on and remained silent… if he remained silent in hope of breaking the news in his movie… if his arrogance has reached that level…

Well.

Then there is the non-controversy controversy over the rating. I don't recall how much foul language there was, but there were terrible open wounds, burning bodies and a long shot of a beheading in which the beheader swings at the victim repeatedly. Some of this might appear on the evening news at some point, but there were be a stern warning by Peter Jennings. Why the film can't go out unrated I do not know. It's being released by non-MPAA-signatories and surely, the majority of theaters that are booking the film are anxious to make the booking.

The main reason is probably the daily lowered expectations of screen count for the film's release a week from Friday. The 1000 screen boast has since been reduced to 700 by Moore in interviews and yesterday was turned into "more than 500" by Lions Gate's Tom Ortenberg. By contrast, the R-rated The Passion of The Christ, with every critic mentioning the intensity of the violence, opened on more than 3000 screens.

Then there is the stunningly irrelevant "Moving America Forward," which was formed a month ago, but is given credit by Daily Variety for having something to do with the Reagan mini-series moving from CBS to Showtime. The attention being paid these bad web designers seems to have been sparked almost exclusively by an e-mail floating around the web by way of Fahrenheit 9/11 supporters.

I could easily go another 1000 words on all of this. But I'm not going to continue down that trail right now. I'm going to take a long view and let this all play out as it will, without me spending my energy on all this negativity.

So I am going to give the rest of today's column over to the readers. Tomorrow, I am off to Maui… but you don't get off that easy. I will still be writing every day, covering the happiest festival on the beach. Meanwhile, MCN will start our blanket coverage of The LA Film Festival, which launches on Thursday.

So, until tomorrow…

READER OF THE DAY: HOWARD BEALE'S COUSIN writes: "am fairly right wing, but I have a serious problem with Bush. The US is now held in very low esteem by the international community. There are subjects that the US public seem incapable of addressing, such as what can we do to create an environment whereby we can withdraw troops from the holy land, what can we do to tackle global Warming, what can we do to regain the moral high ground? Why are we held in contempt? No - people are not jealous.

There is no introspection. No one is asking - what can we the consumer/voter do to make the world a safer place. People are happy to send 17 year old kids off to die in an ill considered War against the wrong primary target, to defend the citizens right not to think. There are now volumes of material out there about how this Iraq War was undertaken. There is no denying that that Bush wanted to believe certain things against all the evidence. From the moment he instructed Richard Clark to find a non-existent link to Iraq - we should all have understood that we were not being lead by a rational leader. But most people do not read. If I remember correctly people only retain about 5% of what they read. Within this environment - I can not think of a more important film for America. People remember images. Real images about the leader of the free world. How else can one get certain truths to a population with many heads in the sand. Bush would have been fine in a different era, but he never really grew up, he is ill prepared for today's problems and he is a disaster for humanity."

BURL IVES, JR. writes: "I hate to say it, but I think Michael Moore is right. If he had broken the news about prisoner abuse, he almost certainly would have been accused by right-wingers, Presidential apologists - and, yes, probably a few entertainment columnists - of exploiting a terrible situation (and maybe even exaggerating it). More important, alas, the reaction he might have generated - "Oh, there's that commie-pinko Michael Moore, lying again!" - might have persuaded other, more "respectable" news outlets to sit on the story, or ignore it altogether. We'll never know for certain, of course. But given the way the So-Called Liberal Media has been cowed into fearing an accusation of "bias," who's to say that "60 Minutes" producers might have shied away from following up on a story Michael Moore broke?"

DO THE DO writes: "I haven't even seen the (Fahrenheit 9/11). In fact, I feel that I never really need to see it (Although I will) since I am familiar with Michael Moore's style of
documentary and his personality in general. I have seen Bowling for Columbine a couple times and expect the same type of delivery from Moore in Fahrenheit. His monotone, sympathetic voice revealing some "revelation" to the PEOPLE, put over a scene of Bush making an ass out of himself. Admittedly, his style is entertaining and the film will actually have people leave the theatre thinking they were "educated" on why Bush is "bad". But I really wouldn't call it educating, more like a light brain wash that only a
one sided documentary can give. Would you go as far as to say that Fahrenheit is mere left wing propaganda?

I think the saddest part of the whole thing is that people really will gain information by watching this film. We are such an uninformed society that believes whatever we are told. It makes me mad to think that my high school buddies are going to see the movie and get tricked into believing Moore's one sided rant. But that's what Moore aimed for when he made the film, to trick young adults, unknowledgeable of politics into his world of cynicism and tomato throwing (rotten). That's not what filmmaking should be. It may sound like I'm a crazy right winger, but really I don't know what I am (left-right-middle-three fourths right??). The media today never lets you think for yourself. After watching about an hour of O'Riley I feel just as indoctrinated after watching a Moore documentary and i must admit I've wanted to hit O'Riley in the face on numerous occasions. As far as smug factor goes, O'Riley ranks right up there with Moore. Where do you turn for political news? I know its out there somewhere, It's gotta be, this is fuckin' America right?

Anyway I just graduated High School and am heading out to college in a couple months. I want to write the great American novel."

ALMOST A PORSCHE writes: "Six percent second-weekend drops will probably become the norm if the studios continue to take the approach of completely saturating the market with prints for blockbuster openings. And I don't expect they much care.

As ancillaries become a greater percentage of a film's overall revenue, and as DVD sales continue to track to opening gross and not total gross, studios will continue to try and get more bang for the ad dollars and fill the malls with as many prints as possible. These are not word of mouth films; if you want to see "Spider-Man 2" the weekend it opens, you will be able to, and you will, and you'll do something else the next weekend.

I just don't see that big second-weekend drops are a big problem; the economics have changed."

THE EXCLAMATION writes: "I'm a little nervous about the weekend drop of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." Yeah, most critics liked the movie, but there's something you haven't really considered. For one thing, it cuts a LOT from the book, and what it cuts out is crucial to the Harry Potter mythos. Die hard fans of the book are upset about that, just check out some of the Harry Potter blogs out there.

Another thing is that parents have been upset about how dark the movie is. I personally feel that this latest Harry Potter film is the best of the three, but I'm an adult who happens to like movies that have a dark side ("Irreversible" was my favorite film of 2003, if that gives you an idea). This movie appeals more to adults than children, and parents are telling other parents that the movie is too dark for kids. That combined with the die hards bitching that the movie cut too much out from the book is the cause of the big drop, I think.

This is bad news, because now, Warner Bros. is gonna make big changes. Even though the trend is that each book is darker than the one before it, we can probably expect the next one to be closer to what Chris Columbus did than what Alfonso Cuarón did.

Each book is also longer than the one before it, so Warner Bros. will have to figure out how to handle that. Either way, WB is gonna fuck it up. Their "Catwoman" movie completely shits on the history of the comic book character, and it won't be long before J.K. Rowling relents, and WB does the same thing to the Harry Potter films."

E ME: Where do you land?