Well, I finally got to see the movie yesterday, and I have a number of
personal impressions to report. These are really just preliminary notes
while the event is fresh in my mind.

At 11 a.m. there was a long line extending several hundred meters from the
ticket lobby in Ebisu Garden Cinema. My friend had arrived when the ticket
window first opened at 9 to validate the pre-purchased tickets. He thought
he would be able to waltz through to the front, but there were already a lot
of people ahead of him and he had to wait, and his tickets were eventually
validated around number 130 for the 12:30 (third) showing. They had changed
the schedule to use both of their screens for Fahrenheit 9/11, but the
second screen is only about 100 seats. At that time there were a lot of
media people taking pictures of the line (and I took some). Some people were
also setting up for a little straw vote presidential election for people
coming out of the first showing.

When we came back for the showing itself, they let the first 10 validated
tickets go in first, then the next 10, etc. We still had plenty of good
seats to choose from when we got in, and we got a block pretty near the
front. The theatre was soon full, and I could see no empty seats anywhere,
so I  believe it was sold out. The advertisements were mostly for French
movies, so I felt like it's an "arts" theatre.

I had three main impressions of the movie itself:

There didn't seem to any real justification for the R rating. Though there
were some gruesome images, they were the kind of thing regular TV news could
include and they flashed by quickly enough. I think I'm rather squeamish
about these things, but I was able to watch all of it.

There were no material errors of fact. I was listening very closely for ANY
mistakes. This was not naive searching, but based on various reported
criticisms of the movie, mostly from devout Busheviks who certainly seem to
be quite sincere about wanting to find flaws in the movie. Having read their
claims, I was listening very closely at those points--and I could not spot
anything that supported their criticisms. The closest thing was in the
section about the post-9/11 evacuation of the Bin Ladins, where Michael
Moore juxtaposed the closed air space very closely--but the movie did not
actually say when the Saudis first received their special permissions to get
out of the US--and of course the REAL issue there and the REAL focus of the
movie was on whether or not the Saudis should have been allowed special
treatment in comparison to the other "suspicious" "Arabic" people who were
rounded up and interrogated. Around 1/4 of the way into the movie, I
actually thought I did hear a one-word mistake that I had never read about,
but it was a minor item. Not sure if that's sufficient justification to go
again next week when it opens in my local theater. Kind of expensive just to
try to catch a one-word glitch. (However, I'm at least going to visit the
theater to see how big the "pure" Japanese crowd is.)

Notwithstanding all of the noisy criticisms, it was a very balanced and even
moderate documentary. It certainly mentioned a lot of the smoke around
BushCo, and even showed a few of the fires, but it stuck quite ploddingly to
the facts. It did ask a lot of really rude and pointed questions, but they
all seemed to be questions for legitimate public discussion. Especially as
regards the questions about the real justification or lack of justification
for the Saddam-removal war, these are life-and-death questions that should
have been answered much more definitively before anyone died. It's really
hard for me to understand what all the violent criticism is about. Well,
actually I think I sort of understand some of it, but it's a complicated
question of push propaganda. When you ask questions and show the available
evidence, some people will leap to conclusions--and in this case most of
those conclusions are NOT favorable to Bush.

I did see LOT of examples where the critics were willfully misinterpreting
scenes from the movie. For example, there were a few pre-war scenes of life
in Iraq, but nothing suggesting that there was any sort of Iraqi paradise
under Saddam. It showed normal human beings living their normal lives--and
they just happened to be Iraqis. Michael Moore's obvious goal was to
juxtapose those images against what ALWAYS happens in REAL war, which is
that some innocent people also die.

After the movie, there was no big reaction from the crowd, though I've heard
of reports of standing ovations and such. I should have looked to see what
percentage of the audience were foreigners. The Japanese in our group liked
the movie, but had no strong reaction to it. There was one pro-Bush American
in our group, and he wasn't particularly offended or upset, though he wanted
to defend Dubya by diffusing the responsibility, especially for the seven
minutes of sitting. (By the way, I'm now sure the movie did say "My Pet
Goat" as the title of the book, which is a known mistake, but obviously
irrelevant to the significant question of Dubya's inaction and lack of
leadership.) We did stand around talking about the movie for a while
afterwards, but it wasn't a big long discussion.

My overall conclusion is that the movie was pretty good, but not really
great--but maybe that's just because Michael Moore knows his target audience
very well and I'm not in the target. My initial reaction to Dubya was to see
him as a kind of sick political joke, not a REAL politician who could
possibly wind up in the White House. Michael Moore wants this movie to reach
the people who have initial doubts about Bush, but my doubts are WAY past
that stage. I can see where someone who had never heard about any of this
stuff would be surprised--but to me it seemed that Michael Moore was only
showing the tip of the iceberg. For example, he only scratched the surface
of the material covered in _House_of_Bush,_House_of_Saud_, even though he
spent a fair bit of the movie interviewing Craig Unger, the author of that
book.

From the amount of crying and screaming from the BushCo side and the sheer
number of violent ad-hominem criticisms directed against Michael Moore, I
really expected the movie to be MUCH stronger. I think Michael Moore did
what he could with the editing of the pre-existing stock film that was
available, but that kind of documentary footage is fundamentally limited.
The specially produced footage (like the ice cream truck) was not really
that compelling or powerful. I think it would be a legitimate candidate for
best documentary, but I have trouble seeing how it could win in the best
picture category. Also, if it were nominated in the best director category,
I don't see how the judges could make fair comparisons, because it would be
like comparing apples and oranges.

On the other hand, Michael Moore's criterion for the success of this movie
is simple. If it helps remove Dubya from the White House, then he (and I)
will be happy. The question of Dubya-removal will soon be resolved, but it
may never be absolutely clear what part this movie played in real life.

-- 
We don't know if 9/11 could have been stopped--but we do know Dubya failed
to stop it. That's the FACT.

Do you agree that democracy is good and depends on serious discussion of the
issues? If so, don't reply to off topic, ad hominem garbage. Send it to "The
vile spewers of mindless blather thread".