mithriltabby | (no subject) (Reply)

It turned out my parents and my mother-in-law (who was in town, visiting from Oregon) all wanted to see Fahrenheit 9/11, so

obsessivewoman and I took them to a matinee showing yesterday.

I’ve been following the actions of the Bush administration since the election, from electoral fraud to the whole Mess o’ Potamia, and had figured the film would be largely redundant to what I’d already read. Having perused the Yea and Nay reviews at Salon.com, I kept my expectations low.

I was pleasantly surprised: there was much data in there that was new to me. I agree with Andrew O’Hehir (author of the Yay review) that this is not a political documentary. and with Stephane Zacharek (author of the Nay review) that much of Moore’s humor was jarring. (Toward the end, though, when Moore is asking Congresscritters to have their children join the military and serve in Iraq, one flabbergasted lawmaker’s expression is priceless.) But I don’t think I’m a member of this movie’s target demographic.

To me, the film feels like a distillation of highlights from a liberal version of Fox News from some parallel universe— and to his credit, Moore doesn’t claim this is anything other than an opinion piece. For people who only get their news from the television, it will serve as a balance to the slant on supposedly “fair and balanced” channels; for people who do their homework, it gives a large number of data points to be looked up and placed in proper context.

I found myself wishing for a hypertext version of the movie with annotations from groups like factcheck_org or spinsanity, but I recognize that would be a different production, and targeted at a different demographic. But for people who do want to do their homework before voting, it would be very interesting to see. Ralph Nader made a very interesting point on last night’s Daily Show: if people pay attention to the fine details of statistics on sports figures, why not pay similar attention to the actions of the people who run our country, instead of just listening to their promises?