New Zealand News - World - Coming of the anti-Bush

New Zealand News - World - Coming of the anti-Bush: "GRAHAM REID unravels the complex political environment of Michael Moore's controversial documentary.
Michael Moore's controversial documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 - being shown in Auckland to a sold-out film festival audience on Tuesday - makes no secret of being an anti-Bush polemic intended to sway voters in the forthcoming American election.
He's not the first film-maker to try to persuade the American electorate. PT109 - the bio-flick of the wartime heroics of a young John F. Kennedy aboard a Navy patrol boat off the Solomon Islands - arrived in cinemas while Kennedy was in the White House in early 1963, giving him a good lead-in for the 1964 election.
Assassination bullets mean we will never know how effective it might have been as political leverage, but it couldn't have harmed his electoral chances for Kennedy to be seen supporting and towing his 10 surviving crew members to safety after their boat was rammed by a Japanese destroyer.

But they were just movies; Moore and his documentaries have become so much more. Lena Cohen, a 22-year-old Democrat, was asked in the Village Voice exit poll whether she had learned anything new from Fahrenheit 9/11. She said she hadn't, and while she didn't think Moore was honest or straight, he was brilliant.

"He knows the power of image and cinema. Even though I hate Bush, I thought doing this on Bush is easy ... I saw 200 people come out of the theatre shocked. People couldn't talk. He's using shocking images.

"A lot of Americans' minds will be changed. Moore is dangerous."

* Fahrenheit 9/11 opens for general release on Thursday, July 29."