June 25, 2004
MOORE WON CANNES AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY REVIEW:
Howard Zinn: You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train (Movie Review, Boston Globe, 6/25/2004)
If Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" leaves you hungry for another movie about someone fighting the government on behalf of truth, justice, and the average American, "Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train" might hit the spot....The film ... [is] short enough to get you back out on the streets, challenging the system....
If Zinn weren't such a compelling, compassionate figure, and if his dedication to ideas of governmental honesty and human equality weren't so ineffable ...
His words ... are the gentle, temperate writings of a statesman. It's hard to find invective in them....
The ideas are generous and inclusive rather than divisive ...
So true. Remember when he was generous and inclusive to Sauron? Posted by Paul Jaminet at June 25, 2004 4:34 PM
When I want "to challenge the system," I pick up the Boston Globe.
Let's put it this way: I bet Harry Eagar has performed actual journalism this year than the entire BG staff has in the last 5.
Posted by: Brian (MN) at June 25, 2004 4:48 PMI'm reposting this from another comments section because I'd really like to know the answer. Not just for his latest work, but for all of them--
What I'd like to know is how does Moore get permission to use all those news clips and outtakes? Does he actually pay for the rights? If I tried to use that material for profit, I'd be inundated with lawyers waving "cease and desist" orders for my copyright violations long before I got to the screening stage. And are those new organizations really that willing to license their material, especially the stuff (like the makeup outtakes) that was never meant to be shown pubically?
(Once tried to get permission from a syndicate to reprint a cartoon strip in a non-profit 501(c)3's newsletter that would go to at most 200 people. They wanted an amount that would have exceeded the entire year's budget for publications.)
Raul: Why do you persist in asking stupid questions?
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at June 25, 2004 5:10 PMIt's not stupid. It scares me to think that I can figure it out on my own...
It's just that, just one, I'd like to hear the networks, or other defenders of "American's right to know", explain this without giving up their pretense at objectivity and non-partisanship.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at June 25, 2004 6:31 PMHere's a couple of lines from Mr. Zinn's People's History of the United States regarding World War II:
By certain evidence, [World War II] was the most popular war the United States had ever fought. [...] It was a war against an enemy of unspeakable evil. [...] And yet, did the governments conducting this war -- England, the United States, the Soviet Union -- represent something significantly different, so that their victory would be a blow to imperialism, racism, totalitarianism, militarism, in the world?
To state the obvious: You have to harbor an almost pathological hatred for America to postulate that the United States did not represent something "significantly different" from the Nazis.
Posted by: Matt at June 26, 2004 1:28 AMAlmost pathological?
Not our Howard. He is most definitely, morbidly so.
And you ain't seen nothing yet. Cuz he and his cohorts are on the way out. The kicking and screaming will be delicious.
Posted by: Barry Meislin at June 26, 2004 4:05 PMAs for how Moore got his film clips, he stole some of them:
http://www.azcentral.com/ent/movies/articles/0626burn26.html
Some of NBC's biggest news personalities, Tom Brokaw, Katie Couric and Tim Russert, also appear in "Fahrenheit 9/11," even though NBC said it did not license any footage of its anchors and correspondents.