Orcinus has a nice post highlighting some of the documentaries that will be coming out this year. The mysterious "charlie" and I will going to see Fahrenheit 9/11 on Friday and will perhaps be one of the 40,000 bloggers to comment on it (and by that I mean that charlie will be posting thoughtfull, witty commentary on it and I will be quoting other clever people that happen to agree with me about it- it's kind of our schtick). Ornicus summed up my feelings about Micheal Moore fairly well (although he is more forgiving):
Actually, I find Moore's films to be guilty pleasures. I'm well aware that sprinkled throughout most of them are various factual errors, mostly minor ones, but enough to bring out the censurious editor in me. At the same time, Moore is not only an imaginative filmmaker with astonishing narrative skills, he's also a very clever political provocateur who concocts really hilarious stunts that have the virtue of making his point incisively. I expect 9/11, which hits theaters Friday, will be more of the same.
I was encouraged by
Christopher Hitchens' review of it today in Slate. Most of his criticisms boiled down to what he saw as inconsistencies in the films narratives with Moore's previous statements about his own idealogy. He also notes that Micheal Moore is fat. No real criticisms of any factual errors. If that is all you've got, Hitch, you and your war mongering buddies are in trouble.
Ornicus also brings up
The Hunting of The President and a couple that I had not heard of before:
The Letter and
Gunner Palace.
One that Ornicus did not mention that I am looking forward to seeing is
Control Room. I tend to read the "reader comments" at IMBD (a nasty habit) and couldn't help but chuckle when I ran across this:
The Al Jazeera reporters may vow to be neutral, indeed many claim to have inherited the mantle of the best aspects of Western journalism, but they have a daily reality that the other news services wholly lack: each reporter and on-screen commentator is a Moslem and many are Arabs As one young reporter responds to the gentle urging of a senior colleague that he must be neutral, he replies with obvious distress that it is very difficult when his ethnic and national ties can't be shed, a problem U.S. and European reporters often don't have.
Get back to me when you start to notice that most of the reporters on CNN/ABC/CBS/NBC/MSNBC/CNBC are white Judeo-Christian westerners. You may even notice that most of the reporters on Fox News happen to be conservatives.
