Word: fahrenheit
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...whereas JFK merely spun conspiracy theories about a dead President, Fahrenheit 9/11 goes after a sitting one with the explicit goals of unmasking his supposed crimes and removing him from office. Back when political bosses picked candidates and the rules of the game were arbitrated by newspaper editors and three network anchormen, for a mere movie even to attempt such a thing would have seemed folly. Today people get their news and, just as important, their attitudes from more rambunctious sources--the polarized polemicists on talk radio and cable news channels, comedians and webmasters. That's poli-tainment...
...Moore the left wing has now found its own Falstaff of the political revels, a figure who can punch as hard and fast--and as recklessly?--as anybody the right has to offer. And Fahrenheit 9/11 may be the watershed event that demonstrates whether the empire of poli-tainment can have decisive influence on a presidential campaign. If it does, we may come to look back on its hugely successful first week the way we now think of the televised presidential debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, as a moment when we grasped for the first time the potential...
...Fahrenheit 9/11 may also be branded as the film that made an overblown case against the Bush team. Certainly defenders of the Iraq war are already casting it that way. Limbaugh calls it "a pack of lies." In the online publication Slate, Christopher Hitchens wrote that it was "a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness." Even liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, an opponent of the war, told his readers that he "recoiled from Moore's methodology." To mount fast responses to critics like those, Moore has organized a "war room" overseen by former...
Whatever the film's merits as a reliable account of recent history, for months to come pollsters and political consultants will be analyzing and focus grouping the viewer/voter response to Fahrenheit 9/11, struggling to measure its real impact on their thinking (and voting). But the R-rated film has taken the first important step toward being a political weapon of consequence by becoming an indisputable box-office phenomenon. In its first weekend, it torpedoed all predictions and earned $23.9 million, instantly passing Moore's Bowling for Columbine as the all-time top-grossing documentary (excluding IMAX spectacles). Fahrenheit 9/11 last...
...Motors boss Roger Smith about the social effects of closing a GM plant in Moore's hometown of Flint, Mich., the filmmaker has been America's pre-eminent populist pest. He has taken on Nike's Phil Knight over factory conditions and the N.R.A. and America's gun love. Fahrenheit 9/11 considerably ups his nuisance value: he is after a President's foreign and domestic policy, and Moore is not cowed. "I come from a factory town," he says, "and you don't go to a gunfight with a slingshot." Moore shoots only with a camera, but it's loaded...