Suburbs on Fire with Political Fervor
Posted on | June 28, 2004 at 12:35 pm | 2 Comments
Like many of you, I went and saw Fahrenheit 9/11 this weekend. First, go check out my friend Sue’s account of her viewing of the film (the 6/27 entry). I basically agree with everything she says, good and bad. My registered political affiliation is “Independent”, but the current administration and its policies has pushed me over to the left more than any previous one. I have a lot of problems with Michael Moore as a personality, and often wonder about the validity of his fact checking. But the film says a lot of important things and I think everyone should hear them. He makes some points about the environment of fear in this country (as he did in Bowling For Columbine) and how that is being generated and used to manipulate the populace. It’s kind of scary the interests that the rich who are running the country are beholden to. But y’know, if the Saudis really do own 7% of America and there would be nationwide financial collapse if they pulled out, then maybe it is a good idea to keep them happy???
My experience at the theater was very similar to Sue’s, even though I live in a much more conservative part of the country. I went to an 11am Sunday show at a stadium-seating suburban megaplex. It was playing in one of the big theaters. Though not sold out, it was probably the most full I’ve ever seen one of those big ones for a Sunday morning show. There were lots of families and teenagers. Most surprising to me was that there was a security guard stationed inside the theater. I’ve never seen that before. Of course there were no problems, as the movie was basically preaching to the converted and no one was there to cause trouble. There was wild clapping at the end, but not much in the way of a standing ovation.
It was the #1 grossing movie of the weekend, breaking all records for a documentary, though I’m sure that’s partly due to the faithful heeding the call of battle and getting out to the megaplex for the big opening weekend. I hope some of the undecided see this movie and it sways them. I don’t think that very many people on the other side will even see the movie, and fewer still will change their leanings, but there is hope. Whether you agree with Moore or not, the movie makes you think.
Latre.
Comments
2 Responses to “Suburbs on Fire with Political Fervor”
June 28th, 2004 @ 1:39 pm
I was curious whether or not you’d go see F9/11 over the weekend! So now that we’ve seen the feel-bad hit of the summer, are we all totally psyched for SPIDER-MAN 2 now? Huh?? I personally can’t wait!!!
Thanks for recommending Firefox (browser). I’ve installed it on our Mac and it seems fabulous although I haven’t figured out how to import my bookmarks from IE into it. When I try file->import, it only wants to import the favorites from Opera (the browser Joe uses). Ah well, something else to try and figure out.
June 28th, 2004 @ 2:45 pm
I am definitely psyched about seeing SM2, though I don’t know if I’ll get the chance this week or not. I am On Call (*through* the 4th!) and I would hate it if I were paged during the flick.
As for Firefox, it found my IE settings and bookmarks at installation time and copied them (both at home and at work). That’s strange it didn’t work for you. Sounds like Opera is confusing it.
One thing I’ve found is that if you have any previous version of Netscape installed, you should uninstall it after installing Firefox (or before if you don’t need anything imported from it). With Firefox as the default browser, it would also bring up the old Netscape when I clicked on e-mail (etc) links. I notice that Firefox identifies itself to scripts as "Netscape".