Alphecca

Moore Wins Cannes Prize

The Cannes Film Festival in France has awarded the Palme d'Or prize to Michael Moore's anti-Bush political polemic film Fahrenheit 9/11. Well there's a shock.

And here's the "unbiased" report from Reuters:

Moore, eager to stir the disenfranchised into voting in November's presidential elections, landed the best film award for "Fahrenheit 9/11," a blistering indictment of Bush's handling of Iraq and the war on terror...

... Asked how Bush would react to Moore winning such a prestigious award, Moore said: "Would he even know what this is?"

"I hope nobody tells him that I have won this award while he is eating a pretzel," he said in reference to the time Bush choked on a pretzel and fainted while watching an American football game on television.

The international coalition jury of artsy-fartsy critics of the United States and the jury president, director Quentin Tarantino, insist that the prize is not political. Right. And just in case I haven't yet spoiled your breakfast yet, here's another quote:

Moore also took the chance to apologize to France for U.S. jibes about re-naming French Fries "Freedom Fries" and mockingly calling them "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys" for resisting the war in Iraq.

"The French are our friends," Moore said. "Without the French there might not have been a United States of America. The French helped us in our revolution.

Hey Michael, thanks for taking care of that apology for us... You know, folks, you can't make this stuff up. You don't have to make it up; the left -- aided and abetted by the media -- provides such a steady stream of anti-american blather that bloggers will have material for years to come... Listening to Moore, he sounds like a ten-year-old reading a homework assignment with lines like, "The French are our friends." He honestly doesn't have a clue.

When he was first promoting his film several months ago, he appeared on the Weekend Today Show in N.Y.C. and actually stated that "the U.S. is not under attack."

Lester Holt was doing the interview and to his credit he (rather angrily) retorted, "I beg to differ, there's a hole in the ground about a mile from here that says we ARE under attack."

I know there are filmmakers and "stars" that feel differently. But they're afraid to stand up and be counted because the "free speech" liberals and leftists of Hollywood would blacklist them and they wouldn't work again. Mel Gibson was correct to take his future into his own hands, financing and distributing his movie, The Passion of the Christ on his own.

I wonder if there were any "non-fiction" movies shown at Cannes that showed America and our efforts in a good light? Somehow, I doubt it.

To the credit of the writer of this article, there were dissenting opinions presented which said, in effect, that Moore's film was nothing but election propaganda. Look, I have no problem with people on either side of the issue making movies that only present one side of an issue. But they shouldn't be recognized as some sort of unbiased documentary that tells the truth. Michael Moore lost all claim to being an unbiased journalist when he launched into a foul-mouthed rant against Bush at the Academy Awards last year.

I don't claim to be unbiased here, I'm not a journalist either. I'm an opinionated, biased commentator, that's all. That's what bloggers do. And that's what Moore does in his movies. He's not presenting "truth", just opinion. They're not documentaries, just polemics.

Posted by Jeff Soyer at May 23, 2004 09:12 AM