In an absolutely shocking development, Michael Moore’s latest documentarian assault on corporate and governmental greed and dishonesty saw it’s opening weekend attendance boosted by the tight-lipped crusade against it’s release. Oddly, the attack by a transparently dogmatic and partisan group, against a transparently dogmatic and partisan filmmaker, backfired and resulted in record attendance for a documentary and the highest showing for any movie this weekend. Surprising, after it worked so well with Mel Gibson’s movie!
The success of “Farenheit 9/11” certainly came as a huge shock to the makers and distributors of it’s competition – “White Chicks” and “Garfield” – who were expecting a larger turnout following the intense pre-release excitement surrounding their movies. “I don’t understand it. Garfield is so popular. I remember when I was in Junior High in 1980…I just couldn’t get enough of Garfield,” Pete Hewitt, director of “Garfield,” definitely did not say. “And we got Jennifer Love Hewitt,” the director continued to whine, “Everybody loves J-Lo. Don’t they? Don’t they?”
John Blofeld, a guy walking down the street in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, said of “White Girls”: “I just don’t get it. How could that offensive, ill-informed piece of political trash beat out a comedy about two black guys dressing up like white girls? The world just doesn’t make sense any more.”
After a whithering piece by Christopher Hitchens (Slate), and the public relations onslaught put on by freakishly tight-assed christian groups across the country, how anybody saw their way clear to dropping the 8 bones to watch this movie is also beyond the imagining of school marm Francis Fornofsky of Homer, Michigan. “It’s a mystery to me. I mean, who in their right mind would want to see something so controversial? Not me, I assure you,” scolded Fornofsky through (of course) pursed lips.
When Hitchens (Formerly of “The Nation,” nice liberal turned pro-war hawk) reduces Moore’s film to a quivering mass that by all rights owes us all very sincere apology, we all must look deep within to try and discover what it is that drives us to subject ourselves to such self-flaggelating (so-called) entertainment.
“To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of “dissenting” bravery.”
Well, it’s a good thing that he didn’t call is “dishonest and demogogic,” or “a piece of crap.” I mean, really…after reading that, who would want to see the film? You? I think not.