Mr. Stillwater, that thing about the other half is what I haven't decided about Moore. If he changes minds, fantastic!! But that's exactly where his sloppiness (and, yes, such sloppiness has been documented plenty) bothers me the most. That people who haven't had the time or inclination to follow politics closely will watch one of his movies, say "really???" then find out well, that's not quite right, nor that... and then they're lost. They can too easily dismiss the entirety because of the sloppiness.
I really liked the New Yorker's review, agreed with most all of it, will post just the last paragraph:
Quote:Moore can't resist amusing his campus and conspiracy-nut following, along with the gleeful sophomore in all of us, but, as the man said, when you aim at the king you had better kill him. At the moment, the stakes may be too high for shenanigans. "Fahrenheit 9/11" offers the thrill of a coherent explanation for everything, but parts of the movie are no better than a wild, lunging grab at a supposed master plan. Did Bush, as Moore implies, allow Osama bin Laden to survive because of American financial ties to Osama's protectors, the Taliban? (If so, the Pentagon war planners were part of the plot.) Moore is a genuine populist, but what he can't deal with is the unpleasant possibility that Bush, as people used to say of Nixon, has made a shrewd assessment of the lack of virtue and curiosity in the American public. A lot of Americans still admire the ignorant, smirking, chest-out, crotch-forward triumphalism. Michael Moore has become a sensational entertainer of the already converted, but his enduring problem as a political artist is that he has never known how to change anyone's politics.
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/?040628crci_cinema
:wink:
