Bad Subjects: Fahrenheit 9/11

Bad Subjects: Fahrenheit 9/11: "Fahrenheit 9/11 does to George Bush what John Kerry should be doing. It is a savage thrashing of the Bush administration, one that delivers humor alongside pathetic and angering Iraq War footage. While Kerry, one more Skull and Bones Yalie who supported the war, occupies himself with statesmanlike campaign speeches, Moore is busy going for the junior pledge's jugular. There is an unspoken center-left division of political labor going on here and Moore has the meat-eating role.

Michael Moore has a history of going assertively overboard on occasion, but he gains more admirers than he loses doing so. The antagonism that George Bush generates needs a cultural anti-Bush, a figure that the rotund working-class-identified Moore embodies. George may be the lean MBA-boy jogger, but Michael turns out to be much swifter on his feet. Michael Moore is the alter ego of the privileged son; he is the funny fighter who a whining Daddy Bush condemned in the New York Daily News for “a vicious personal attack on our son.” Even if some of the attacks do not hold up under scrutiny of evidence, one shrugs and grins at a film where a vicious rich-boy global bully gets his comeuppance. George W. Bush still gets more fairness than he deserves, because when was Bush fair to anyone? "

By Joe Lockard