Memo to Kevin Carr: YOU ARE DUMB.
Astute readers may have noticed a fairly minimalist mention of Fahrenheit 9/11 in these hallowed pages. A mention of the release on Spastic Topic Monkey Friday, a brief note about the box office results the following Monday. There are a few reasons for this. First, I haven't seen it yet. And second, the general level of idiocy surrounding the opponents of the movie has been so obvious, and so covered, that there's not a lot of new material to mine.
But then I came across Kevin Carr's review of the movie, and it was as if the word MOCKWORTHY had appeared in forty-foot letters of fire, Helvetica Bold, in front of me. It caught my eye on Google News for the title: "Moore should be ashamed of 'F-9/11". This is what the Cook County News-Herald, right here in deep redneck Minnesota, slapped on it when they picked it up. In a summer that's given us Garfield, with Catwoman and I, Robot on the way, to pick out Moore as the guy who should be ashamed was an interesting move for a reviewer to make, I thought.
But the first sentence clinched it.
"What can I say about 'Fahrenheit 9/11' that you can't already guess?" In a fair world, that would also be the LAST SENTENCE of the review, because the answer is clearly NOT A GODDAMN THING. You've given it one star out of five, you've bothered to ask the question in the first place. Might as well skip the rest of the review and spend the time choosing between one of three very attractive "FUCKWIT" branding irons you'd like us to use on your skull.
Of course, if he'd done that, he'd have deprived us of some astonishing gems of movie reviewing, and singlehandedly prevented the Halley's-Cometesque return of ACTUAL QUOTE TIME.
" The movie opens with a temper tantrum about the 2000 election, where Moore accuses George W. Bush of having his brother and other buddies fix the results by locking out African American voters. However, he commits some pretty major sins of omission. I remember election night 2000 well, and my memory doesn't quite jive with what Moore says."
Well, STOP THE FUCKING PRESSES. Pull the prints! One movie reviewer and wannabe filmmaker from deep motherfucking redstate WYOMING doesn't recall any African-American voters being disenfranchised. In Florida. It therefore MUST NOT HAVE HAPPENED. Sweet merciful fuckmonkeys. How, exactly, does this amateur-hour tiddlywinks reportage slip past even a rural Minnesotan editor? If only we could explain it away as psychosomatic blindness brought on by severe political bias... oh, wait. We can.
It's also incredibly fitting that Captain Wyoming baselessly accuses Moore of racism in the paragraph before that, yet manages, in what may be a Freudian slip, to mistakenly use the word "jive" instead of "jibe" when talking about his memory of black voter disenfranchisement. Editors didn't catch that fuckup either. SHOCK AND HORROR. You're getting paid to write, Carr. That means getting all the fucking words right.
It gets "better". "Case in point, Moore shows footage reportedly shot on March 19, 2003 in Baghdad, right before the American invasion. It shows kids playing, women smiling and families eating together. Apparently Moore didn't have any footage of torture chambers, rape rooms or mass Kurdish graves to throw in as well." What is it with the need for the right to constantly portray Iraq as one giant, wall-to-wall rape and torture festival? And if it's that easy to get ahold of rape room footage, why isn't Bill O'Reilly showing it? Here's a tip for Mr. Carr on the off chance he ever finds himself under the thumb of a third-world dictator. They generally do not allow camera crews into their torture chambers. This is because they have a lot of practice with the whole torture chamber thing. Taking pictures of the torture is a strictly amateur mistake, the kind of screwup only a bunch of clueless pikers would do.
And, of course, there's the traditional swipe at the "French" Cannes festival, the Saddam-loving and Osama-loving Moore... about the only rhetorical talking point Carr failed to hit on his way around the Karl Rove Basepath is calling Michael Moore "fat". Maybe he can work that in when the DVD comes out.
At the risk of going long, just to give you a baseline, I list for your edification the star ratings of some other movies Carr has reviewed this year:
- Walking Tall: ****
- Van Helsing: ***1/2
- The Terminal: ****
- The Punisher: ***1/2
- The Passion: *****
- Home On The Range: ****
- Eurotrip: ****