TV Times

TV Times

US Box Office heat with Fahrenheit 9/11
By Harinda Vidanage
As controversy surrounds the international geo political policies of the Bush administration in United States, a documentary movie has contributed significantly to cinematically visulise this whole controversy.

With Michael Moore unfolding his Fahrenheit 9/11 unleashing a huge political critique on George Bush and his governance mechanism Expected to break all the records established by former hit documentaries in the lights of “The Thin Blue Line” and “Crumb” which made $1.2 million and $3 million, respectively, throughout their run. More recently, the guy who almost overdoses on Big Macs in “Super Size Me” made a respectable $8.6 mil and the basketball doc “Hoop Dreams” pulled in $7.8 mil total. The biggest opening of a documentary so far has been “Tupac: Resurrection” which made $4.6 mil after opening in 801 theaters last November.

Jonathan Sehring, president of IFC Entertainment, which is co-distributing the film with Lions Gate, says Moore’s documentary is playing 24 hours a day through the weekend and already grossed more than $80,000, beating single-day New York records previously set by “Men in Black” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” “The interest in this film is now, quite clearly, translating into unprecedented box office,” Sehring says. “Each of us who is part of the distribution team is unified and working tirelessly to bring Michael to the masses.”

“Fahrenheit 9/11” takes its title from Ray Bradbury’s Orwellian novel about a futuristic book-burning society, “Fahrenheit 451” (the temperature at which book paper burns) From beginning to end, “Fahrenheit 9/11” is told in Moore’s unmistakable voice: the deceptively casual tones of a wisecracking gadfly never happier than when he faces down or questions some person of great power or wealth whom he feels, knowingly or not, betrayed the public trust.

Moore comments on the disputed Florida election, the Bush family’s close ties to Saudi Arabian oil interests, the president’s frequent pre-9/11 vacation romps and his pained bewilderment on 9/11. Then, Moore relentlessly presents his own take on Iraq a conflict that in his eyes is born of fear, deception and confusion and realized in blood, death and tears, diminishing the American dream it purported to defend.

Moore pointedly questions the premises, goals and “selling” of the war, its relevance to 9/11 and, most of all, its fearsome costs both in national resources and human lives.

He introduces 11 September with a blank screen and chilling audio of planes hitting the Twin Towers and the cries of those on the ground. Moore also has footage of Bush sitting in a school classroom, reading a children’s book with pupils, for more than 10 minutes after being told the second plane had hit. The filmmaker said this full footage had not been seen before because no one had asked the teachers at the school whether they had captured it on camcorder.

Television adverts for the film have prompted conservative advocacy group, Citizens United, to call for a ban on the grounds they are “electioneering communications”. In its complaint to the Federal Election Commission the group said: “Moore produced the work for use as a political weapon against President Bush in the November 2004 presidential election.”

He refutes the allegations made against the movie as an effort to politically victimize the US President already under siege at home and abroad. “If you told me this movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, ‘it’s just an anti-Bush movie’, I don’t know if I would go see it. Why would I waste two hours in the theatre to learn that Bush is bad if I already feel that way?” questions Moore. But “Fahrenheit 9/11” received both the first prize (Palme d’Or) and the longest continuous standing ovation (25 minutes) in the history of the Cannes Film Festival.

Fahrenheit symbolizes a new trend in documentary movie making parallel to geo political shifts. The remarkable feature is that they even outgun most box office movie features. The element of controversy is its inherent dynamic, which is also its primary propellant.

In the time of the cold war it became the major theme for most of the blockbuster hits in the calibre of Rambo, Rocky and Commando, later on the focus shifted from Russian villains to Russian Mafia with the political disintegration of the Soviet Union. Thus presently the global battle against terrorism and US foreign policy based on this has become a large market for movie makers with Moore striking gold first.

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