Boston.com: Movie details / Fahrenheit 9/11

Boston.com / A&E / Movies / Search / Movie details / Fahrenheit 9/11: "But Moore got his hands on all the footage, and he time-lapses us through the entire seven minutes that the president sat in that classroom and, knowing terrorists were using passenger planes as missiles on innocent Americans, stared like a stuffed deer into space. We've recently learned that this was around the time Vice President Dick Cheney was ordering fighter planes to shoot down the hijacked jets and our government's emergency-response mechanisms were convulsing with chaos. You look at Bush, whose circuitry seems quite simply to have overloaded, and think, 'This is the leader of the free world?'
Moral scorn can be a beautiful thing. Beautifully patriotic, too -- one thinks of Joseph Welch asking Senator Joseph McCarthy, 'Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?' And for many people who are deeply unhappy with the current administration and the war it has chosen to wage, the wish for someone to come along and articulate that scorn has acquired desperate proportions.
Of such things are 15-minute standing ovations and top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival made, as well as cheering premieres in New York and Los Angeles. 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' which opens to-day in New York and locally on Friday, has been so feverishly anticipated, in fact, that some audiences will be willing to ignore the film's lapses, the better to embrace its energizing rhetoric."

By Ty Burr
Bosten Globe

Three Stars (out of 4)