Tamara Goes to the Movies
Thumbs Up for Fahrenheit 9/11
PLUS! Thumbs Down for Andrea Mitchell Greenspan
by Tamara Baker

June 6, 2004 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (apj.us) -- Well, I finally did it.

I got to see Fahrenheit 9/11 for the first time -- on July 4, no less.

Didn't get to go earlier because
a) we couldn't get in on opening weekend -- the theaters were literally jam-packed then, and
b) The Love of My Life knew about the more gruesome images and wanted to go on a weekend show, the earlier in the day the better, so as to have a few hours to process the grue before bedtime.

We saw it at the Har Mar Mall, which had cut it back from three screens to one to make room for Spiderman 2. (That's okay: It's now on a whole bunch more screens statewide.) The 500-seat theater was about half full, mostly of people who hadn't seen the film before.

The weird thing is that, after being bombarded with promos and trailers and such (and this after we decided to show up late!), there was nothing to let us know when the film was going to start. It wasn't until we saw pics of Gore in Florida that we realized that the film had started!

General impression: I knew most of it already, and I thought that a lot of the humor and the camera stunts was A Bit Much, but Moore didn't aim this film at me. Nor did he aim it at most of the people that our wonderful corporate GOP/Media claims he aimed it at: the already-convinced hardcore anti-Bush types.

No. He aimed it at Joe and Jane Sixpack. And he has a talent for connecting with them.

I saw a lot of poor/working class people, black and white, in the theater today. It wasn't all people in Volvos with Kucinich/Dean/Kerry stickers. These were, by and large, people a lot like Lila Lipscomb.

Speaking of Ms. Lipscomb: the footage of her alone, talking about things like how she had encouraged her children to join the military because Flint's total unemployed and underemployed rate hovers around 50%, only to see her eldest son live just long enough to know that George Walker Bush sent him to Iraq for all the wrong reasons -- that footage alone, if it could be shown to every voting-age American, would guarantee John Kerry's election right there.

But wait... there's more!

We see Iraqis, happily going about their business and attending weddings right before the invasion starts -- and then we see the bodies of dead Iraqi children, bodies that the US media made sure were never shown on US TV. And we see tank soldiers talking about their favored CD to play in the tank while they were shooting away: The Bloodhound Gang's "Fire Water Burn", featuring this refrain:

The roof the roof the roof is on fire
The roof the roof the roof is on fire
The roof the roof the roof is on fire
We don't need no water let the motherf%$#er burn
Burn motherf%$#er burn

Now, what was that about winning Iraqi hearts and minds again?

Whenever Moore did a particularly brutal or gruesome sequence, he immediately followed it up with comic relief of some sort -- such as the footage of famous foreign-policy expert Britney Spears telling us why we should all trust George W. Bush.

And, over and over, he showed footage that most Americans have not only never seen, but never knew existed.

For instance: If you were like most Americans watching the Unaugural on your TVs at home, back in January of 2001, you never saw the tens of thousands of protesters, or the eggs hitting Bush's limo. In fact, CNN, during its live coverage, said that there were only five hundred protesters, total. Moore's footage shows you otherwise.

He did some minor deck-stacking (such as cutting away from Minnesota congresscritter Mark Kennedy's signing the clipboard authorizing the USMC to send recruiting literature to his house for his kids to read), but when he let the material speak for itself, it was very powerful. I was thinking that he was stretching things a bit with the whole Saudi business, when -- just as he and his camera crew have set up shop in front of the Saudi embassy in DC -- along stroll the Secret Service guys all of them VERY curious about what known troublemaker Michael Moore was doing across the street from the Saudi embassy. Their very presence lended credence to Moore's claims about the Saudis and their influence.

All in all, a remarkable achievement, and one you need to take your mom to see.

"Have WE lost the American people?"

Not "Has the Bush Administration" or "Has your side" (Lieberman being one of the biggest pro-invasion DINOs out there) lost the American people, mind you.

"Have WE lost the American people?"

She was obviously counting herself on Lieberman's side, and firmly in the pro-invasion camp.

Check it out for yourself at Busy, Busy, Busy.