Customer Reviews

Fahrenhype 9/11

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(33)

 

 

The good news is that this DVD does enable one to be more critical of Michael Moore's movie, "Fahrenheit 911."

The bad news is that this DVD is at least as deceptive as Moore's movie. Even if leftist orthodoxy were not involved, this amalgam would be at no risk of getting any award at Cannes or anywhere else. Honest conservatives will admit that this was an election campaign rush job and a Rush job.


I ordered the combination DVD and companion book. I was disappointed even by the covers of each. The book cover has a tasteless, juvenile cartoon beneath even "T V Nation." The DVD package features incomplete biographical labels that will be used slyly in the actual film. For example, Dick Morris was a consultant to and image guru for Bill Clinton, but before that he worked for multiple Republicans and after 1996 (he left the service of President Clinton over Mr. Morris's peccadillos, remember!) he became a conservative author, debunker, and contributor to and analyst at Fox News. Identifying Morris as advisor to Clinton represents Morris as much as calling Ronald Reagan a New Dealer would. Where's the rest of him?

One reads, for a second example, that Steven Emerson has uncovered many of the plots since 9/11, but one is not told that Mr. Emerson authoritatively attributed the Oklahoma City bombing to jihadists. I don't blame the producers of this DVD for leaving out that juicy tidbit, but I do fault them for attacking Moore for similarly partial, partisan incompleteness. Sauce for the goose, baby! If you're going to attack Moore for being selective and deceptive (as you do and should), then you should redouble your efforts to be as forthcoming as you can. Clever labels incline the skeptical, attentive viewer to ask who is more deceptive, Moore or you.

That the makers of this pastiche resort to such misleading tactics led me to conclude that, when they analyze propaganda and partisan bilge, they certainly know whereof they speak. Who would cite Ann Coulter's views on any subject and expect to be taken seriously? How dare the makers of this movie degrade serious thinkers and writers (such as conservative intellectual David Frum) by juxtaposing them with Zell Miller? Who but an ideologue would regard Bill Sammon as adding credibility to the film from his perch at the Washington Times?

Inside both the companion monograph and the DVD, I encountered a decidedly desultory mix. Excellent points (for example, that Moore was dead wrong about the pipeline through Afghanistan) lie cheek by jowl alongside vilifications of Moore, post-911 solidarity-speak, emotion-laden irrelevancies, and more digressions and irrelevancies than a book report recited by a third-grader who had not gotten around to reading the book.

(...)

Worse, those who assembled this extended campaign commercial imitated some of the very tactics for which they excoriate Moore. How important is Moore's utterly decontextuallized statement "There is no terrorist threat!" to his film? If one believes that Moore's personal beliefs are fair game (and I suppose they are, despite the fact that this is a textbook example of an ad hominem), then why isn't it as unfair to rip his statement from context as it was to parody President Bush's remarks out of the context in which and to which they pertained?

And if this or that person plunked into Moore's film disagrees with Moore's message or hates Moore, so what? That Moore is at best a scamp and a blowhard and at worst a scalawag and a bloviator (thank you, Bill O'Reilly, for reviving Menckenesque adjectives!) is admitted even by the Left. That those whom Moore selected to dramatize and to hype Moore's points disagree with his points seems to me inconsequent. Did Dick Morris and Ed Koch miss a certain polemmical edge to Moore's work over the last 15+ years? Do they imagine that many on the Left actually resemble their or Ann Coulter's slanders?

In sum, this DVD, when viewed alongside Moore's DVD, might make for a fascinating study of how crass, childish name-calling supplanted intelligent debate in our times. Neither DVD, when viewed alone, will adequately inform or enlighten.

Hype, indeed!

As an American soldier currently serving overseas, I am so glad to finally have my copy of FarenHYPE 9/11. I've now watched both Moore's video and this response to it. I came to the conclusion that Michael Moore is a big dumb animal! He seems to hate America. This video clearly shows how deceitful he really is. The most moving part was watching the wounded soldier discuss how upset he was that Moore exploited his injury to make Bush look bad. Everyone should see this.

The book starts out by defending George Bush by claiming he wasn't reading the goat book to the children. He was just looking at the pictures. It then goes on to try to convince us that Bush didn't use 9-11 as an excuse to invade Iraq. Dick Morris is a hoot. It ends up moving away from the Moore film to become a "Support the Troops" flag waver in an attempt to fill in the other 60 minutes.

After seeing Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11, I wanted to see something that was giving a different perspective to his claims -- this film was not it. All it is is a series of interviews with Ann Coulter and many other Conservatives. There is no actual evidence shown. If you are looking for films to give an alternate opinion on Michael Moore's work try Michael Moore Hates America instead.

Shortly after Farenheit 9/11 hit the theaters back in 2004 there were quite a few articles, some not even in obviously conservative publications, that questioned and exposed much of what was seen, and the conclusions reached, in Moore's political documentary.

Sadly it was like I was the only one who noticed this. Most everyone I knew just lined up to pay money to see a manupulative piece of propaganda and they just came out of the theater bleating the same bleat, "Bush is baa-aaa-aad". It seems there are many people these days who think Hollywood and the movie theater is the first and best source of information about the real world. It's scary to watch this phenominon in action.

So, I performed an experiment and I watched Faharenheit 9/11 and this documentary back-to-back. Sure, this could have been better. I sure would have gone with a different title, but still I would recommend this for anyone who has seen Faharenheit 9/11 and still has any desire to think critically and question what they see on a movie screen. At least it does directly address and expose some specific scenes in Faharenheit 9/11 and shows how they twisted reality. That alone is worth a look.

Good to watch so as to see different views on the subjects. And like average reviewers, I do not have time to launch my own research so I watch both Fahrenhype and Fahrenheit with equal skepticism.

Something I like: Arguments on the Afghan pipeline and the Pantagraph

Not a very good rebuttal in terms of justifying the war on Iraq. Too much time spent on arguing the statement "There is no terrorist threat." Michael Moore also questions the insufficient effort in Afghan taken by us on hunting down those terrorist. The main messages he carries are summarized in the very last narration: how the underprivileged have given us their great gifts by serving the country, which protects the very system which had left them with not many choices other than the military. And all they ask for is that they don't have to sacrifice until it's absolutely necessary. In this regard, Fahrenhype 9/11 does not offer a good rebuttal. In my opinion having a couple military people stand up for their opinions and challenging Moore does not represent everyone from the military. This makes Fahrenhype 9/11 an equal propaganda.

Rebuttal regarding our president response at the school: THANKS to Fahrenhype 9/11 now I understand that in fact our president acknowledged the 1st plane hitting the tower before he even stepped into the classroom. [Note that when he was informed by the agent within the classroom that's when the SECOND plane hit] And he sat for another 6, 7, 8 minutes.... If Fahrenhype 9/11 argued that he was told not to do anything at that point - what's our president for? (He is supposed to do whatever he was told to do?) And if Fahrenhype argues that the 6, 7, 8 minutes are insignificant. How much time did the 9/11 victims have? About 15 minutes between the second and the first plane hit. And about 50 minutes before the tower collapsed.. That's all the time they had, and we're talking about thousands of human lives. Fahrenhype 9/11 does not offer any better explanation for our president/agency response on that day.

And sorry my brain does not register whenever Ann Coulter speaks. Fahrenhype would have been better off without her opinions.

After all, Fahrenhype is still worth watching in my opinion. But we need to watch it with caution and skeptcism. Try to look for the FACT, and know that it only offers just another side of the story.

This movie was a decent response to Fahrenheit 9/11, but only decent. It mostly talked about the film techniques Moore used, such as changing the relative size of newspaper headlines and showing parts of interviews (and as I have studied documentaries a lot, it is a simple truth that both sides of the aisle use these techniques. all documentaries are biased in some way). They don't really go after his argument at all, which would have been the only common-sense thing to do. Plus, the quality of the film itself is poor, as it is mostly talking heads and not much else.

I'm so glad that I rented this movie from Netflix instead of actually buying it.

This movie barely does much rebuttal of "Fahrenheit 9/11," and is almost laughable at certain parts. Indeed, this documentary proves that Michael Moore perhaps did not give the ENTIRE story in Fahrenheit 9/11 in certain parts. But what this documentary does is it totally botches the story of Election Night 2000, by merely mentioning that certain "liberally biased" newspapers confirmed the recount was in George W. Bush favor. What they did not mention (and what Michael Moore DID mention) was how thousands of black voters (and we all know how 90% of blacks vote) were wrongfully knocked off the voters list, and how many ballots were faulty, and how Katherine Harris and George W. Bush's buddies on the Supreme Court stopped the recount. Al Gore's biggest mistake was not ordering a statewide hand recount.

Also, this documentary is EXTREMELY heavy on opinion and conjecture. Merely 15 minutes is dedicated to people talking about their experiences in Manhattan on September 11th. And merely 70% of the documentary is opinion anyway, perhaps 40% of it from Dick Morris, Clinton's fired advisor. I can only remember them using and citing actual documentation and news sources twice, the first one to show that Michael Moore allegedly misrepresented a news article, and one quote from the 9/11 Commission Report, an organization of which Bush tried to prevent the formation (an undisputed fact from Michael Moore's documentary not mentioned here).

There are two interviews in particular that were just awful. One of them was by Peter Damon. He was the amputee at Walter Reed. Moore merely had him in his documentary for 5 seconds, but Peter Damon went on to say that Michael Moore quoted him out of context and portrayed his interview as though he was against the war. The fact is if you look at Moore's documentary, he quoted Damon verbatim, when Damon simply said that he had his limbs shot off but that he was fine with the drugs they gave him. I respect Damon's service to the country and his sacrifice, but he was way out of line in accusing Michael Moore and attempting to sue him for inaccurately quoting him.

Another interview that was extremely fishy was an interview right at the end. I do not remember the lady's name. But the documentary claimed that Michael Moore "exploited the tragedy" of a family who lost their son in Iraq, and were angry about Bush and war in general. They claimed that this was one of the members of that family who were in Moore's documentary. But closer inspection shows that she was not, and that she's not even related to them.

All in all, while this documentary perhaps taught me to see if Michael Moore is telling the WHOLE story, it does nothing to prove him wrong. Too much opinion, not enough rebuttal. And next time, if you are going to accuse Michael Moore of collaborating with Hezbollah, PROVE IT, with either a video tape or documents. Those are the sources Michael Moore used and showed us, and you, Dick Morris, used nothing but opinion.

When I finished watching Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, I was accutely aware of two things:

1. Moore is a populist propagandist who will twist facts to serve his agenda.

2. While the lines between truth and propaganda may blur, Moore tapped into an undeniable core of truth.

I was very happy to see FahrenHYPE 9/11 on the video shelf. I was hoping it would help me figure out where Moore took his liberties and, more importantly, dispell my intuitive feeling that he had tapped into a core of truth.

In some ways, it did. Moore is called to task on a number of twisted details and half-truths that bring to light his agenda over facts, and I appreciate the movie for doing that. I also appreciate it for not trying to compete with Moore with regard to humor, wit, and engaging cinematography. Unlike other reviewers, I just wanted the facts.

However, this is exactly why HYPE ultimately fails. Rather than simply dispelling Moore, it not-so-subtly pushes upon the viewer a blatant right-wing agenda just as propagandized as Moore's left. It uses worn-out emotional tales of heroics, clips of President Bush in his finer moments, and images of the dangerous fundamental extremism that stems from the Middle East. It seems to all be there to lull the viewer into ignoring the core idea presented by Moore: that there may not be as clear cut a line between the good guys and bad guys as our black-and-white ideals would lead us to believe.

I wanted more from this movie - I wanted Michael Moore to be made a fool once and for all. I wanted less right wing mouths and anti-Moore authors pushing their talk-radio style agendas and more objectivity. I wanted the movie to admit when Moore was undeniably right - to take on the bigger issues such as the failure of the black caucus to gain one senate signature (Democrat or Republican); the dangerous problems of the Patriot Act in light of its benefits (which were beneficial for me to hear in this movie); the administration contradicting itself for months (and even years) to justify attacking Iraq before WMDs ever even came into the vernacular, and then continuing to change the reason why we're there.

By ignoring the bigger issues and simply resorting to a tired rehashing of the right-wing ideology, I felt an overwhelming feeling that the filmmakers were overcompensating, reassuring their political base and themselves as a way to ignore the deep rooted questions and insecurities that have to plague anybody who looks at the facts of 9/11 objectively (outside of these two movies).

Maybe the biggest lesson we need to learn from both these movies is there is an unspeakable corruption we as a society must address that capitalizes on power - irregardless of whether that power is manifested in Republicans or Democrats.

Unfortunately, when all was said and done, I walked away from FahrenHYPE 9/11 still accutely aware of two things:

1. Moore is a populist propagandist who will twist facts to serve his agenda.

2. While the lines between truth and propaganda may blur, Moore tapped into an undeniable core of truth.

To form an intelligent, balanced opinion, you have to view all points of view on a given subject. Given the biased, manipulated manner in which Michael "Bush eats babies!" Moore presents his case, the only way to get an alternate opinion is to view a movie such as this, which not only presents a counterpoint to Moore's arguement, but also talks to the very same people that Moore claims to have interviewed for his movie. The best part, for me, is that FahrenHYPE 9/11 doesn't even go in to the manipulative movie-making tactics that Moore employes to fool the audience, it simply lays out the statements given by the people in Moore's movie and let's the viewer decide.
And for the record, I'm not a Republican.