Cannes film festival

[FullGallop]

Geeee, What a shocker!




Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11' Wins Cannes' Top Prize

CANNES, France (May 22) - American filmmaker Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11,'' a scathing indictment of White House actions after the Sept. 11 attacks, won the top prize Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival.

AFP/Getty

''Fahrenheit 9/11'' was the first documentary to win Cannes' prestigious Palme d'Or since Jacques Cousteau's and Louis Malle's ''The Silent World'' in 1956.

''What have you done? I'm completely overwhelmed by this. Merci,'' Moore said after getting a standing ovation from the Cannes crowd.


Moore was momentarily flabbergasted when he took the stage to accept the award, a big difference from his fiery speech against President Bush after winning the best-documentary Academy Award for 2002's ''Bowling for Columbine.''

''You have to understand, the last time I was on an awards stage, in Hollywood, all hell broke loose,'' Moore said.


''Fahrenheit 9/11'' won the top award at a festival that sharply divided Cannes moviegoers, who found a solid crop of good movies among the 19 entries in the festival's main competition but no great ones that rose to front-runner status.


While ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' was well-received by Cannes audiences, many critics felt it was inferior to Moore's Academy Award-winning documentary ''Bowling for Columbine,'' which earned him a special prize at Cannes in 2002.

Some critics speculated that if ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' won the top prize, it would be more for the film's politics than its cinematic value.

With Moore's customary blend of humor and horror, ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' accuses the Bush camp of stealing the 2000 election, overlooking terrorism warnings before Sept. 11 and fanning fears of more attacks to secure Americans' support for the Iraq war.

Moore appears on-screen far less in ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' than in ''Bowling for Columbine'' or his other documentaries. The film relies largely on interviews, footage of U.S. soldiers and war victims in Iraq, and archival footage of Bush.

Just back in Cannes after his daughter's college graduation in the United States, Moore dedicated the award to ''my daughter and to all the children in America and Iraq and throughout the world who suffered through our actions.''

Moore said after the ceremony that he expected right-wing media outlets in the United States to characterize his prize as an award from the French, whose government opposed the U.S.-led war on Iraq. He noted that the nine-person Cannes jury that awarded prizes had only one French member and four Americans, including jury president Quentin Tarantino and actress Kathleen Turner.

Many Americans now realize the French are ''good friends of America who tried to do the right thing and tell us this was the wrong road,'' Moore said. ''We owe the people of this country an apology for the way they were debased and treated in our media.''

[Surgicalcric]

Aww shit. Who would have guessed...

Originally posted by FullGallop
...Moore said. ''We owe the people of this country an apology for the way they were debased and treated in our media.''

We owe them something, but it damn sure is not an apology.

As someone else once said, "F**k the French."

[Gypsy]

Just goes to show you...there's no accounting for taste. What a slimebag he is.

[NousDefionsDoc]

What did you expect? Its Cannes, France: not Cannes, Texas. LOL

[goat]

We just need moore to stay in france and never return to the US.

[Solid]

Interestingly, he's very open about it being an opinion piece rather than a documentary, essentially his argument against the war and the POTUS. The danger of this film, in my opinion, will be quite drastically limited if people regard it as an opinion piece rather than a documentary, although it will still do damage.

If this is released before the election, bad, bad things will happen.

Solid

[Bill Harsey]

Thanks for mentioning this award ol' mikey moore got, he said he did it for the troops. Yeah right, now I'm going out to the shop and finish a batch of pastry decoration knives.

[FullGallop]

Originally posted by Bill Harsey
Thanks for mentioning this award ol' mikey moore got, he said he did it for the troops. Yeah right, now I'm going out to the shop and finish a batch of pastry decoration knives.

LOL



(for) ''my daughter and to all the children in America and Iraq and throughout the world who suffered through our actions.''

What an arse!

I like how this is a "documentary" when like Solid said it is nothing more than opinion. It's just ashame it gets treated as fact and when it's discovered to be full of holes Moore falls back on "it's satire".

Bowling for Columbine was so full of blatant lies and factual errors I can't imagine how poorly this one was slopped together.

[The Reaper]

I think that Mr. Moore should present a copy of his collected works to Mr. Abu Mussab al-Zarkawi as a like-minded individual.

I would pay money to watch al-Zarkawi saw Moore's head off in his final screen appearance. That is my idea for Mr. Moore's next documentary.

Just my .02, YMMV.

TR

[Airbornelawyer]

Originally posted by FullGallop
Moore said after the ceremony that he expected right-wing media outlets in the United States to characterize his prize as an award from the French,... .

There were 9 members of the jury:

Quentin Tarantino, American director, President of the Jury
Benoît Poelvoorde, Belgian director
Edwidge Danticat, Haitian-American novelist
Emmanuelle Beart, French actress
Jerry Schatzberg, American director
Kathleen Turner, American actress
Peter Von Bagh, Finnish director
Tilda Swinton, British actress
Tsui Hark, Chinese director

Congratulations for doing your part to actually prove that otherwise pathologically lying sack of shit right about something.

[Solid]

I suppose that one angle here could be that it WAS a great film. From what I read, he through the film makes a very cohesive and persuasive argument. This doesn't make what he's arguing right, of course, but it might give the film the merit awarded by the Palme D'Or.

I must reinforce the fact that I think presenting this kind of polemic -especially before elections and in the guise of a documentary- is morally bankrupt and hints at the fact that for all of Moore's supposed "great attributes", he is above and beyond a hypocrite.

Solid

[DanUCSB]

That's fine. The only main effect the award is going to have is to give it a larger critical audience. And the emphasis there is on critical. All the people that would mindlessly love it were already going to see it anyways--it's those that come at it with a questioning mind that are going to be pulled in with the extra publicity.

Besides, hell, Cannes, they have the right to crown whomever they wish. If they wish to crown an idiot, that only devalues them as an institution.

[Wiseman]

This festival sounds like an event where each director gives each other a pat on the back by giving awards regardless of quality.

[Airbornelawyer]

As I said elsewhere, the main criterion for awards like the Palme d'Or seems to be the film which most allows the assembled movie industry luminaries to feel a smug sense of superiority over the people whose ticket purchases pay for their lifestyles.

[Martinez]

Originally posted by The Reaper
I would pay money to watch al-Zarkawi saw Moore's head off in his final screen appearance.

I concur with The Reaper. This Michael Moore character, I don't know much about and don't understand why he is a "celebrity." I feel that this individual is morally bankrupt. He is fat and unkempt. He is, without a doubt, one of the ugliest men I have ever seen. He is so ugly that I cannot stand viewing photos of him and when they are shown I must quickly turn away.

Jennifer Martinez sends