:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 5.17.2004 ::

:: Fahrenheit 911: Cannes Do ::

Grom News.Telegraph.co.uk:
Moore unveils his anti-Bush tirade to wild applause
By Hugh Davies

Michael Moore, the maverick director from Michigan, finally unveiled his inflammatory anti-war documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 to sustained applause at the Cannes film festival yesterday.

The audience chortled at the depiction of the Bush administration as cowboys riding into Iraq to the theme tune from the television show Bonanza. Tony Blair is portrayed as their Stetson-wearing sidekick, bowlegged and clad in full Western gear with six-guns at his hip, jumping up and down like a puppet.

Moore, who won an Oscar for Bowling for Columbine, was cheered as he entered a press conference but had difficulty explaining why Mel Gibson's Icon pictures, the original financiers, had dropped the project, suggesting that the actor was pressured by the White House. Icon denies this.

The financing was taken over by Harvey Weinstein's Miramax, which is owned by Disney. The studio is now refusing to handle the distribution, fearing that the film, with its liberal bias and sly one-sided portrayal of Bush might affect his re-election run in November.

Moore confessed that he let Blair off lightly as he was mainly aiming "to fix" what was happening in Washington. "The problem is in the White House, and not at No 10 Downing Street.

"Although I have to say that what has always depressed me about Tony Blair is that he knows better. At least, one thing you can say about Blair is that he's smart. What's he doing hanging out with a guy like George W Bush? I have just never understood that. They are the weirdest couple."

Taken from Ray Bradbury's book Fahrenheit 451, the temperature needed to burn books in an anti-Utopian society, Moore says his film is about the temperature in which freedom burns.

posted by me

:: 9:38:00 PM [+] ::
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