Guardian UK names "Fahrenheit 9/11" one of the 10 best films of the decade

[marmar]

via MichaelMoore.com:



December 21st, 2009 2:58 PM
Best films of the noughties No 10: Fahrenheit 9/11
It's Michael Moore's most significant film, and one whose effects are still being felt today

Guardian


It seems strange to reflect that, drowning as we are these days in campaigning documentary films, when he started out, Michael Moore was one of a kind. Ever since his 1989 film Roger & Me, in which he harassed the CEO of General Motors over the closure of car plants employing some 30,000 people in his home town of Flint, Michigan, Moore has pioneered a new kind of cinema: activist, articulate, passionate, funny – but above all, engaging. Plenty of documentarists knew more history, or were more politically committed, but Moore's special abilities lay in putting a human face on hot-potato issues. Moore pulled off the same trick with Bowling for Columbine, his 2002 film which sought to excoriate America's gun culture and place on it considerable responsibility for the high-school massacre.

But it was his decision to explore the links between the Bush and Bin Laden families that put Moore on the path to making what remains his most significant film, and one whose effects are still being felt today. It can be argued that Moore is a very American firebrand, succumbing to a certain intellectual isolationism as he focuses on primarily domestic issues. But that isn't the case with Fahrenheit 9/11. With the invasion of Iraq fresh in everybody's minds, Moore's film had an instantly global reach, a torpedo against the incompetencies of the Bush administration that had brought in the Patriot Act in the wake of the World Trade Centre attacks.

Now, of course, some of its points may be a little familiar – and some, like the failure to mention the UK's part in the "coalition of the willing", a little disingenuous. But at the time, Moore's willingness to stand up and shout against the war marked him out from what our critic Peter Bradshaw called the "cowed media consensus". The sequence where Moore grimly counts down the time taken for the president to finish listening to a reading of The Pet Goat in a kids school remains a justly-renowned cinematic coup.

The takeup was massive, and beyond anyone's expectations. After winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes, Fahrenheit 9/11 became the biggest-grossing cinema documentary of all time – with a worldwide haul of $222m (£137m) it still holds that position. (Ironically, none of that money was seen by either Mel Gibson's Icon or Walt Disney, who were two early backers of the project but who dropped out before release.) It failed to influence the result of the 2004 presidential election (held three months after it came out) but it undoubtedly crystallised the liberal opposition in the US, after a hapless decade during which the radical right had colonised the media. Can we say that Fahrenheit 9/11 brought forth Barack Obama? It's not such a farfetched idea, and one that underlines the impact of Moore's movie.


http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-in-the-news/best-films-noughties-no-10-fahrenheit-911

[tabbycat31]

1. Fahrenheit 9/11 got me involved in politics in the first place

I could care less before that. Right after I got home from that movie, I donated $20 to Kerry's campaign. Michael Moore awoke a sleeping giant.