Movies
Excellent: Movies this great are rare, so don't miss it. Good: At least worth the price of admission. Okay: See it if you have nothing better to do. Bad: If you absolutely have to see it, wait for the DVD. No stars: Frickin' terrible; give us our two hours back, you director from hell.
Silver screen politics
Fahrenheit 9/11
(★★★1/2)
R, 116 minutes, DVD Now to President Bush's war; Michael Moore's brilliant kaleidoscope of the first four years of the $21^{\mathrm{st}}$ Century has been newly released on DVD. The disc boasts 80 minutes of additional material, including six deleted scenes (one cryptically titled "Outside Abu Ghraib Prison") and three featurettes.
Ghraib Prison") and three features.
Moore's direction can be downright sinister; at one point he employs digital trickery to zoom way in on President Bush as Jeff Gibbs's brooding score plays over the soundtrack. But his despair is genuine and wide-ranging, covering everyone from the Democrats who were bulldozed over by the Bush war machine to the mainstream media. Despite their efforts to frame Fahrenheit 9/11 as factually questionable, the media could never shake one of
ually questionable, the could never quite shake one of the film's irrefutable assertions: that they laid down during the run-up to the war in Iraq and the results were disastrous.
Once Moore gets to the war, the film leaves the director's trademark humor behind and turns into a real-life horror story, complete with grieving mothers and dying children. His film becomes a sanctuary, a place where you
can go and feel bad about America's long journey, from Vietnam to Iraq. Stephen Shupe
Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
(☆☆)
aggression."
Director-producer George Butler's commanding documentary Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry asks you to contemplate the atrocities of Vietnam and, at the same time, marvel at Kerry's courage to speak out against them. An impressive collection of home movies, war footage and interviews with Kerry allies, Butler's film is a partisan but inspirational and moving political documentary.
more than a million innocent men, women and children. The official reason for this was "to ensure the safety of South Vietnam from aggression."
PG-13, 89 minutes, AMC Studio 30-Olathe
0.7-04
30 - Olathe
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
When John Kerry spoke these words before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, he was a handsome 27-year-old veteran of America's War in Vietnam. For more than half a decade his countrymen had roamed the fields and jungles of Southeast Asia, eventually killing more than a million innocent men.
political documentary. Adapted from Douglas Brinkley's biography Tour of Duty, Going Upriver opens with Kerry's childhood and Yale schooldays before jumping headlong into the war. Butler's vision of Vietnam is a vision of hell, where an endless green countryside of exotic beauty meets the cold
technological "progress" of the new age. He assembles an extended and detailed sequence to explain Kerry's killing of a Viet Cong fighter—a convincing rebuttal of the Swift Boat Veterans advertisements. It's a heroic
Kerry's true test came after the war, when he headed the influential protest group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. What's most striking about this section of the film is Kerry's voice; this isn't the gravelly accent we've come to know in the last two years but a youthful Massachusetts cadence reminiscent of John
ing rebuttal of the SWB Bennett for Truth advertisements. It's a heroic portrait, culminating with Kerry pulling Jim Rassmann out of the river under fire.
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and Robert Kennedy. Butler reveals that Kerry sent the Nixon Administration into fits of paranoia. A memo written by Charles Colson, special counsel to the president, advised Nixon to "destroy the young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader." The director wastes no time in drawing allusions to this year's presidential race, positioning Kerry as the fiery upstart to a war-mongering Republican administration that has forgotten (or openly rebelled against) the lessons of Vietnam.
rebelled against) the lessons of Vietnam. If Kerry loses the election next month, it'll be because he failed to capture the imagination of the progressive movement that has emerged from the war in Iraq. Butler's film shows the deep ironies of that, and hints that the Kerry of the Vietnam War protest days will return.
— Stephen Shupe
Jayplay 10.7.04