Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11' Wins at Cannes
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| Sun, 05-23-2004 - 3:13am |
By A. O. SCOTT
CANNES, France, May 22 - At the awards ceremony that wrapped up the 57th Cannes Film Festival on Saturday night, the jury gave "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore's stinging critique of the Bush administration's foreign policies, the Palme d'Or, the festival's top prize and one of the most coveted honors in international cinema.
The announcement, made by jury president Quentin Tarantino, met with enthusiastic cheers from the audience in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, where Mr. Moore's film had received what many thought was the longest standing ovation ever at Cannes when it was screened here last Monday. "What have you done?" Mr. Moore asked Mr. Tarantino as he accepted the prize, looking both overwhelmed and amused. "You just did this to mess with me, didn't you?"
It was a night of many surprises: a 14-year-old boy won the award for best actor; the first Thai film ever placed in competition shared a jury prize with an American actress; and all three French films in competition were given awards.
But Mr. Moore's victory outdid all of them. For one thing, Cannes is notoriously indifferent to documentaries. "Fahrenheit 9/11" was one of only three nonfiction films allowed in competition in nearly 50 years.
The meaning of Mr. Moore's Palme, however, extends far beyond the cozy, glamorous world of Cannes. "Last time I was on an awards stage in Hollywood, all hell broke loose," Mr. Moore said in his acceptance speech, referring to his antiwar remarks at the Oscars last year. His new film, which does not yet have an American distributor, has already begun to stir passions in the United States, as the election approaches and the debate over the conduct of the war in Iraq grows more intense.
With his characteristic blend of humor and outrage - and with greater filmmaking discipline and depth of feeling than he has shown in his previous work - Mr. Moore attacks Mr. Bush's response to Sept. 11, his decision to invade Iraq, and nearly everything else the president has done.
"I did not set out to make a political film," Mr. Moore said at a news conference after the ceremony. "I want people to leave thinking that was a good way to spend two hours. The art of this, the cinema, comes before the politics."
He also said that Mr. Tarantino had assured him that the political message of "Fahrenheit 9/11" did not influence the jury's decision. "On this jury we have different politics," he quoted Mr. Tarantino as saying. It is also a film financed by Miramax, which distributes Mr. Tarantino's movies.
Mr. Moore noted that four of the nine jurors were American: Mr. Tarantino, Kathleen Turner, the director Jerry Schatzberg, and the Haitian-born novelist Edwidge Danticat. "I fully expect the Fox News Channel and other right-wing media to portray this as an award from the French," Mr. Moore said. Only one juror, the actress Emanuelle Béart, is a French citizen.
"If you want to add Tilda," he said referring to the British actress Tilda Swinton, "then you could say that more than half came from the coalition of the willing." (The rest of the panel was made up of Benoit Poelvoode, a Belgian actor; Peter von Bagh, a Finnish critic; and the Hong Kong director Tsui Hark.)
The jury's other decisions ranged far and wide over the competitive slate, recognizing both audience-friendly commercial movies, and challenging art-house films, and acknowledging the strong Asian presence at the festival this year.
The second prize went to Park Chan Wook's "Old Boy," an action-filled South Korean revenge drama. The Thai film, "Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady," a dreamy fable, irritated some critics with its slow pacing and enthralled others with its mysterious sensuality. It shared the jury prize with Irma P. Hall, the landlady in Joel and Ethan Coen's "Ladykillers."
Ms. Hall, hospitalized in the United States, was not able to attend the ceremony. Nor was Yuya Yagira, the young Japanese actor honored for his role in Hirokazu Kore-Eda's "Nobody Knows." Mr. Yagira had exams to take back home, so Mr. Kore-Eda accepted the award on his behalf.
The prize for directing, was given to Tony Gatlif, an Algerian-born French filmmaker, for "Exiles," a ragged, sexy road picture about a young couple's journey across Europe and North Africa. Agnès Jaoui, the director of the sophisticated French comedy "Look at Me," shared the screenwriting prize with her ex-husband Jean-Pierre Bacri, who appears with her in the film. The prize for best actress went to Maggie Cheung, who plays a recovering addict in Olivier Assayas's "Clean."

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>>>"If you look up some of the "facts" that he presents in Bowling for Columbine, you will in "fact" find that they are indeed, all true."<<<
Really? Is it a FACT that Willie Horton killed again after being released from prison as was claimed in BfC? The exact, verbatim subtext from the movie in it's discussion of Horton... "Willie Horton released. Then kills again.". The FACTS of the matter are that he was charged with rape and aggravated assault, NOT murder. Is Moore just using a little theatrical license here or something?
Is it a FACT that the NRA had a "pro-gun rally" just 11 days after Columbine? The truth is that they had their annual members meeting, previously scheduled months in advance, and had cancelled all activities except for the meeting itself which was required by the laws of the state of NY for non-profit organizations. There was no rally.
So much for the *facts" being "all true". As a maker of "documentaries", he's a fraud. That the issues he addresses are "serious" doesn't legitimize his tactics of dishonesty and misrepresentation.
~mark~
<<...look up some of the "facts" that he presents in Bowling for Columbine, you will in "fact" find that they are indeed, all true. >>
You've GOT to be kidding me! It came out that MM was distorting all kinds of facts in that "documentary" and that he was purposely trying to get people to do and say things that just weren't true. Such as the bank part of that movie, where MM presents it as if when you opened an account, you walked out of the bank with
Anyway, glad you find him and his work entertaining. For myself, I don't like being lied to in the guise of "documentary", and he tends to go out of his way to do so whenever he runs into facts or a reality which just doesn't fit in with his personal agenda.
~mark~
Here's an interesting read for you.
The myths of Moore that are sold as facts
FRASER NELSON
Just ask Michael Moore, a baseball-cap-wearing comedian who has turned his hand to literature and made Stupid White Men - an anti-Bush polemic - a worldwide bestseller in an era when people were supposedly fed up with politics.
The secret of his success: his books are billed as fact, but contain myths woven together with conspiracy theory. He has discovered a powerful trick being copied by authors hungry for fortune - and, increasingly, by politicians hungry for votes.
The greatest compliment to Mr Moore is to see so many piling in behind him. Books slagging off President George Bush now stand even taller than the groaning cliff of Churchill biographies insulating bookshops across the country.
And they walk off the shelves. People may not vote much nowadays, but the number of political works on bookshelves has increased massively. And Mr Moore is resonating with millions in the way that politicians are not.
Spurned by his success, Mr Moore has swapped his luxury Manhattan flat for the Cannes Film Festival this week to preview Fahrenheit 9/11 - a film with which he says he wants to topple the US president.
It’s a work intended to expose links between Bush’s allies and the Saudi royal family and, to be fair to Mr Moore, it concludes on a staggering event. In the days after the 11 September terrorist attacks, President Bush allowed his friends in the Saudi Arabian royal family to flee America when a no-fly ban was firmly in place.
Mr Moore takes up the story: "Nobody could go up in the sky. Except the administration allowed a private Saudi jet to go to five American cities and pick up 20 members of the bin Laden family and get them out of the country. And the FBI was very upset that they didn’t get to interrogate them."
This is truly remarkable. But it is also flatly untrue - as proven by the bipartisan 9/11 Committee, which found that the planes with Saudis took off only after airspace reopened and the FBI had interviewed 22 of the 26 suspects. The White House was not involved.
This is, sadly, by no means the only myth masquerading as fact in Moore’s bestselling books. There are entire websites devoted to nailing down the parts where he’s dressed up gossip as gospel, or concocted entire arguments.
Take Bowling for Columbine, his Oscar-winning documentary about the massacre five years ago at Columbine High School in Colorado. Its title is based on the "fact" that the murderers went bowling before starting the slaughter. Except they were nowhere near a bowling alley, as is now proven. This is just the start of the little deceptions which routinely "sex up" Moore’s work. It is not sloppiness. He being deliberately loose with the facts, and it pays.
A while ago, he was challenged by CNN about "glaring inaccuracies" in Stupid White Men. "This is a book of political humour. So, I mean, I don’t respond to that sort of stuff, you know ... How can there be inaccuracy in comedy?"
A wonderful caveat. Mr Moore makes his money from people who think the facts he presents are true. His Oscar was for documentary, not fiction. Yet his policy, it seems, is to make ’em laugh - even if that means bending the truth.
Mr Moore is neither venal nor stupid. He has become the world’s richest comedian by taking a political theme, sexing it up with a few deliberate distortions and then dressing it all as fact: even if this means misleading his audience.
And he has made a fortune, as he likes to boast about: "Those who run your life live in my neighbourhood. I walk in the streets with them each day." Several people want more of the same.
Hence the avalanche of anti-Bush books. But, more seriously, the lure of Moore-style fortune has bent several serious commentators who have found they can treble their sales with a few salacious details. Serious economists such as Paul Krugman and former ministers such as Paul O’Neill, President Bush’s first Treasury secretary, have been on the same money trail discovered by Mr Moore. Noam Chomsky, the linguist and conspiracy theorist, has long been churning out books blaming the US and Israel for everything that’s wrong in the world - backed up by footnotes often found to be spurious. His reward: a poll last week found him to be the US commentator most read by Europeans. Both he and Mr Moore portray Washington as a force for evil in the world - and several million are ready to believe it.
The sadness is that both hit strong themes which deserve strong attention. Fahrenheit 9/11 is based out the outrage of the West propping up the House of Saud - which, in turn, houses the most fanatical regime in the world now that the Taleban have left Afghanistan.
It deserves to be lambasted: but a comedian who is misleading his audience with twisted and bent facts is doing this far more effectively than politicians, with whom a higher bar of truth is required.
So is the moral of the story that truth is superfluous? Or that politicians should stop presuming that the voter’s IQ sinks to room temperature at election time?
A look at the campaigns for the 10 June elections in Britain suggests that Moore-style populism is winning over. The Liberal Democrats are asking voters to make the European Parliament into a plebiscite on the Iraq war.
The European Parliament is all about clean-air initiatives and employee legislation: it has nothing at all to do with foreign policy or defence. Iraq is no concern of the MEPs. But the Lib Dems who knock on your doorsteps over the next few weeks will tell you otherwise because they’re the only one of the three main parties voting against the war - and they want to cloud the issue.
The Lib Dems are not alone in their mendacity. Labour is fighting the European Parliament and English local government elections slagging off Michael Howard, as if the Tory leader is in any way relevant to any of the seats up for grabs.
As for the Tories, they are suggesting that Labour policies will so impoverish the elderly that pensioners will be forced to dig up the road to earn extra cash. This is just as untrue as Mr Moore’s bogus evacuation of the Saudis.
This is not a new game - in literature, at least. From Froissart’s Chronicles to John Prebble’s works on Scottish history, fact has for centuries been mixed with fiction to make the end result more entertaining.
But fighting lies with even bigger lies is no recipe for political success. Tell some tall stories in books, and you can make lots of cash, as Mr Moore has proved so successfully. But mislead voters and the result will be millions who will not bother to vote at all - and start to believe comedians in baseball caps instead.
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=569002004
Edited to add: this article was "borrowed" from cl-mifskie79's post
>>>"I'm lied to every night by the news when they distort the facts to make it seem like the Iraqis want us there, are glad to have us totally running their country and don't want us to leave."<<<
That's the mews media, and they of course put their own spin on things since they long ago gave up simply reporting the facts to the public. A documentary (and that is what BfC and the others are supposed to be, and the category BfC won it's Oscar for) is supposed to avoid editorializing and such spin, being based on the objective facts of the matters being addressed.
~mark~
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