*Spoilers*
I went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 the Sunday after it opened fully expecting to see Bush get trashed for 122 minutes. I am a registered Democrat so it's fair to say that I was looking forward to it as I don't care for Bush or his politics. What I wasn't expecting was a film of great cinematic quality see as it is a documentary. After briefly going over the unpleasantness of the 2000 election in Florida with all his usual sarcasm and wit, Moore then moves on to the tragedy of 9/11. Here is where his cinematic genius begins to show.
Rather than bombard you with images of the planes hitting the twin towers or the pentagon he chooses to keep the screen blank for about a full minute while he plays a mixture of audio from the event. You hear the sounds of the first plane crashing and the reactions of people on the ground witnessing this. The second plane hits and you continue to see only a blank screen as you listen to the sounds of people reacting. The screen finally begins to show the faces of people looking up at the destruction; some are crying and shouting but most are stunned as most of us were watching at home. Finally the scene ends with the dust clouds and thousands of pages of paper floating in an almost beautiful but eerie way. Throughout this segment Moore never once shows the actual buildings being struck or falling and, as any one who was in the U.S. watching TV that day knows that was virtually ALL that you saw for about a week.
I, like most of us that day, was going about my usual business. I wasn't really sure what had happened that day until I got home from my college classes at about 10:30 am EST and had only really heard that there had a couple of plane crashes. I thought that perhaps this was some computer error or something like that and it wasn't until I saw that BOTH towers and the Pentagon had been hit that I realized that these had been intentional. There is a mild sorrow that you feel upon hearing about a tragic loss of life. You don't know any of the people personally but you feel sorry for the loss and the suffering that their families must be feeling. When I saw the totality of the destruction I went from the feeling I have just described to a kind of dizzy numbness. It was that feeling where you can't really believe that what you are seeing is real, like it's a nightmare that you are almost sure that you will wake up from at any moment. The idea that someone could have such raw hatred and disregard for all life that they could do such a thing was not something that I could immediately wrap my mind around.
I know that I have gone somewhat off of the subject here but I felt it was necessary to put my feelings from and about that day into words when commenting on this film.
Moore then goes on to expose the actions in the administration that contributed to the tragedy, the contradictions, mistakes, and lies of the administration in their rush to go to war wit Iraq, and the outright lack of respect for human life that went into the initial bombing and the current subjugation of the Iraqi people.
For me there are two scenes that resonate strongly. The first is the reaction of the Iraqi people to the deaths caused by the U.S. military's bombing of their cities. The second is a scene where Moore is filming a mother of a soldier who had been killed in Iraq Speaking to an Iraqi woman one the street in DC who has also lost family in her home land. As the two of them are speaking a woman walks up and begins hollering that this is staged (obviously thinking that the camera is for a news crew) and that they are lying. The Mother of the deceased soldier states that her son is dead and the woman ask her skeptically "Oh yeah? Where did he die?" the mother tells her Carbala. The skeptic then brushes it off as if she doesn't care if it's true or not.
Regardless of how you feel about Bush the cinematic beauty and the raw human emotion of this film make it a must see if only for the sake of satisfying your curiosity.
I went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 the Sunday after it opened fully expecting to see Bush get trashed for 122 minutes. I am a registered Democrat so it's fair to say that I was looking forward to it as I don't care for Bush or his politics. What I wasn't expecting was a film of great cinematic quality see as it is a documentary. After briefly going over the unpleasantness of the 2000 election in Florida with all his usual sarcasm and wit, Moore then moves on to the tragedy of 9/11. Here is where his cinematic genius begins to show.
Rather than bombard you with images of the planes hitting the twin towers or the pentagon he chooses to keep the screen blank for about a full minute while he plays a mixture of audio from the event. You hear the sounds of the first plane crashing and the reactions of people on the ground witnessing this. The second plane hits and you continue to see only a blank screen as you listen to the sounds of people reacting. The screen finally begins to show the faces of people looking up at the destruction; some are crying and shouting but most are stunned as most of us were watching at home. Finally the scene ends with the dust clouds and thousands of pages of paper floating in an almost beautiful but eerie way. Throughout this segment Moore never once shows the actual buildings being struck or falling and, as any one who was in the U.S. watching TV that day knows that was virtually ALL that you saw for about a week.
I, like most of us that day, was going about my usual business. I wasn't really sure what had happened that day until I got home from my college classes at about 10:30 am EST and had only really heard that there had a couple of plane crashes. I thought that perhaps this was some computer error or something like that and it wasn't until I saw that BOTH towers and the Pentagon had been hit that I realized that these had been intentional. There is a mild sorrow that you feel upon hearing about a tragic loss of life. You don't know any of the people personally but you feel sorry for the loss and the suffering that their families must be feeling. When I saw the totality of the destruction I went from the feeling I have just described to a kind of dizzy numbness. It was that feeling where you can't really believe that what you are seeing is real, like it's a nightmare that you are almost sure that you will wake up from at any moment. The idea that someone could have such raw hatred and disregard for all life that they could do such a thing was not something that I could immediately wrap my mind around.
I know that I have gone somewhat off of the subject here but I felt it was necessary to put my feelings from and about that day into words when commenting on this film.
Moore then goes on to expose the actions in the administration that contributed to the tragedy, the contradictions, mistakes, and lies of the administration in their rush to go to war wit Iraq, and the outright lack of respect for human life that went into the initial bombing and the current subjugation of the Iraqi people.
For me there are two scenes that resonate strongly. The first is the reaction of the Iraqi people to the deaths caused by the U.S. military's bombing of their cities. The second is a scene where Moore is filming a mother of a soldier who had been killed in Iraq Speaking to an Iraqi woman one the street in DC who has also lost family in her home land. As the two of them are speaking a woman walks up and begins hollering that this is staged (obviously thinking that the camera is for a news crew) and that they are lying. The Mother of the deceased soldier states that her son is dead and the woman ask her skeptically "Oh yeah? Where did he die?" the mother tells her Carbala. The skeptic then brushes it off as if she doesn't care if it's true or not.
Regardless of how you feel about Bush the cinematic beauty and the raw human emotion of this film make it a must see if only for the sake of satisfying your curiosity.
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