Reply #4: OK I finally saw it [View All]

[PATRICK]

And as stunning as the repressed stories pictures and revelations were(like seeing Lord of the Rings reduced but resplendent in a film) a single unifying element struck me full force.

it was a mirror held up to the entire nation. If Moore can be ridiculed or criticized the same could be said(in much greater degree) for all the common and elitist people paraded before us in the storms of crisis and bewilderment.

What sort of summed it up for me was that mother facing the walled in WH, all her emotions and experiences come to a head. "I thought I knew what this this country was about and I didn't." Two older ladies were seated quietly in front and it emphasized to me how many women their own age, Iraqi and American, were delivering the most powerful messages, the clearest, bitterest truths.

The affable vignettes about Oregon, the recruiters, the breast milk could not deflate this brutally candid mirror of moral mistakes, helplessness,
arrogance, faith in the wrong things, inability to deal with the power we delegated up then were deflected from admitting it had gone as bad as already rotted fruit we had forgot to turn over when shopping. Of mistakes whose deadly consequences were utterly predictable and out there but universally denied to the absolute breaking. People protesting part time in the usual kindly ineffectual ways that must make neocons snort and squeal when not infiltrating and beating on them. People who turn to God AFTER all the sh*t has gone down.

Surprisingly the least human of all was the shifty eyed, fake face cute talking Texas oil prez himself, a riveting figure of all that ignorance, all those dumbed down beliefs and ordinary flaws lost still in a few layers of fog even Moore couldn't penetrate.

The film was us in one grand sweep taken to the cleaners, led, not particularly seduced, into a naive hell of unknowing. Two surprises. The Bin Ladens all looked alike. Next: so did all the Americans- except perhaps for Bush. In the Passion of THE America, the WH staff was a consistent Pontius Pilate down to the last fold of the toga.

A film powerful beyond itself and difficult to judge for posterity, definitely more than the sum of any of its parts or ideas.