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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I mean seriously, look at the definition of "documentary"... >>>Consisting of, concerning, or based on documents. Presenting facts objectively without editorializing or inserting fictional matter, as in a book or film.<<<
Moore not only editorializes and inserts fictional matter in his works, he *relies* on it, *depends* on it since the truth doesn't serve his purposes.
"What agenda does he have? To entertain? To inform? To bring light to a rarely seen but widely held opinion?"
To trash anyone he doesn't like and to make money doing it. That he also proves how gullible or willing to swallow anything the public is is a byproduct, unintended or otherwise.
~mark~
Edited 5/25/2004 6:06 pm ET ET by ladycourt
"What exactly gets everyone's panties in a twist? I don't get it. I tolerate right-wing bent messages all the time from sources that are supposed to be neutral. Oh no! Michael Moore made HIS POV known in HIS movie!"
This is a misconception. His point of view, out of place though it is in a "documentary", isn't the issue we take with him and his work. It's his lies, his fabrications, his misrepresentation and his manipulation of context in a "documentary" which we have problems with, and with just cause.
If he's out simply to entertain, fine, he should create and *acknowledge* his work as fiction, at best loosely based on the facts of the issues he addresses. If he's out to make people laugh, he should label his work as a comedy. But that's not what he's doing. He's creating fiction and calling it documentary, something it plainly isn't. If he's out to create a work based on the objective truths of those matters, a "documentary", then he should stick to the facts, reality, and let the viewers draw their own conclusions rather than inventing something he personally views as reality and presenting it as objective fact.
It's a simple issue of honesty and integrity, and Moore has none.
~mark~
While a documentary can be storytelling, it still requires the adherence to objective facts, to objective truths, otherwise it's not a documentary, but simply a story... fiction. And that is what Moore's work largely is. When you are forced to create "facts", to manipulate events out of proper context in order to deceive the viewer, it's not "documentary", not factual, it's fiction.
Moore and others should resign themselves to calling a spade a spade and give up this laughable attempt to legitimize a collection of fraudulent claims, fictional *facts* and gross distortions as being a "documentary". It's not. In the "real world" such tactics in the making of a work supposedly based on the truth is known as a "lie", or "fiction" at best.
~mark~
And *objective facts* depend on the directors eye? ROFLMAO! Objective facts are just that, "objective", rather than subjective and based on an individuals personal view of the issue at hand. And that's what documentaries are supposed to be based on, *objective* facts and events, not the directors "subjective" impressions of the facts and events. Impressionism is not documentary.
"Since we have yet to see the movie, I guess we'll also have yet to see what "fabrications" he has included this time."
We already know of one from the reviews and articles about it, that Bush "stole" the 2000 election. Moore obviously doesn't care about the objective facts of that matter either, a consistent trait of his he's carrying over from his other works.
~mark~
Take care of yourself...
~mark~
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