h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am looking them up in my "records" (doesn't that sound poncy?) even as we speak! Seriously, I have a list of my favourite books that goes back to 1996! Aha! One is "Ghost of the Revelator" way back in 1999 list. Brilliant!
(I can give you heaps of other good books on another convo if you want - but that's just according to my taste... John Barnes f'r'instance...)

kea,

I thought jwf's joke about using 'anything' twice (repeating himself as all liars do) was to say he actually wasn't saying MM is a liar. But perhaps I misread that.

<>

Oh, me too. And I think MM does this with aplomb.

Roger and Me was made on a shoestring budget and didn't get a wide audience in terms of cinema backing. But it remains a very fine film, imo.

<>

I think this was an intended exaggeration. They may not shoot them but would certainly not allow MM to 'shoot' them.

I'm still amazed at how he gets into these places with his little hand-held camera. For example, the opening bank scene in Columbine. I can only think that people are way more keen about being seen in a film than thinking about what the actual outcome might be. Same for the guy standing in front of a huge war missile and talking about 'company policy'.

And the same for Charlton Heston. I think it was simple vanity that let MM in for that interview. It was only when CH saw the interview was not going the way he wanted that he got upset.

And the nutzoid brother of the American terrorist - I did hear that he had tried to sue afterwards but I don't know what happened afterwards.

Personally, I think the world is a better place for having MM in it, doing what he does. I am not cynical about the fact he has now become a multi-millionaire by rooting for the underdog. In fact, he has a bit on his web-site talking about, how he is a millionaire now, he got all these new special tax breaks from the Bush government. And that he wants to use every penny of his tax break spent to get this guy out of office.

He may well be full of himself by now and subject to the claims people have made against him being self-serving and all of that. But he continues to make films that are not only challenging but also get people to THINK. Even if they think - 'oh, this can't be possible!' - he sows the seed of doubt and, I hope, gets people to question what they had previously taken for Truth.

az

the pen is mightier then the sword

*sic
-looks down at the bar.

t

az. Very nicely put.



If you are right about jwf, he was being far too subtle for me . I must admit I was surprised by what he said (or what I read), but will await further clarification.

>> If you are right about jwf, he was being far too subtle for me <<

Clarification?

Well, sometimes I'm just too subtle for me too.
Sometimes the right side of my brain is having a conversation with the left even as I'm writing, and the whole thing can take a U-turn in mid-thought. That's the trouble with having an open mind, it's quite drafty and the winds of change are liable to blow any which way, doors banging open and shut.

But in truth, I like to believe I was trying to do something similar to what azahar suggest MM does:

"He may well be full of himself ... self-serving and all of that. But he ... sows the seed of doubt and, I hope, gets people to question what they had previously taken for Truth."

I just love playing devil's advocate as much as MM does. The difference perhaps is that I have no fixed opinion on anything, no agenda, just an ongoing series of questions about Liff, the Universe et al. And I never take any of them seriously.
Seriously.

~jwf~

Oh, ok, so when you called MM a complete liar, without offering any evidence or rationale, you weren't being serious?


I think playing the 'devil's advocate' can be a fine vocation, although I'm not sure what the point is if your point doesn't get understood. Other than just stirring for the fun of it I guess.


>>he ... sows the seed of doubt and, I hope, gets people to question what they had previously taken for Truth." <<

All you've done as far as I can see jwf is throw out some brief personal opinion. Hardly a challenge to the prevailing wisdoms.


I'm still hoping that someone can come up with a genuine critique of MM's work (as opposed to an expression of their personal dislike or a repeating of rumour). Seriously too. Because I like the man's work, but I doubt that he is perfect and I want to know what his weaknesses are. All that's been offered so far are some vague criticisms though

I have never seen anything that seriously made me question MM's credibility - sites I had been referred to usually turning out to be either Republican or NRA-backed. A couple of critical reviews of Fahrenheit 911 I saw on the weekend, were full of assertions, but not proof or fact...

It is interesting how quickly in the British media how quickly he went from flavour of the month to someone to be ridiculed and attacked. Attacking gun culture was ok but attacking the war on Iraq and reaching a mass audience, couldn't have that.

I gather that the British media (or sections of it) are significantly more "pro" the war than the general public are..

Television news is fairly neutral here but newspapers with the exception of the Guardian and the Mirror are pretty gung ho.

>>It is interesting how quickly in the British media how quickly he went from flavour of the month to someone to be ridiculed and attacked. Attacking gun culture was ok but attacking the war on Iraq and reaching a mass audience, couldn't have that.<<

It'll be interesting to see what happens when Moore makes his film about the UK then.

That's pretty much what I had gathered. Our local newspaper seems to be trying its honest best to present both sides, and reprints all sorts, everything from Newsweek, to the Grauniad, to the Telegraph Group, to the Independent. I still rely on the BBC WS, especially for fast breaking stuff. Our paper seems to think there's no hurry about anything that's not local!

Very, do you have any info on the focus of the film?

Oh, for TV news we also have Sky, perhaps a little more pro-war than the Beeb, but nothing like the print media or Fox. Of course Rupert Murdoch controls Sky, The Sun, and The Times so they all tend towards the same view, although The Sun puts it a bit more bluntly than The Times.

People are always talking about how liberal the media is here in America, so that was one of the things that surprised me in Farenheit -- Moore shows one news correspondant after another who is obviously biased in favor of the war. Some of these journalists were positively drooling over the high tech weapons in the military, as if they were the latest toy.

Someone mentioned a Moore UK film earlier in the thread but I don't remember the details sorry.

Has Fahrenheit been released internationally yet? I know it was shown at Cannes, but I mean general release? I was just wondering how many people on this thread have actually gotten to see it. And when does Moore plan to put it out on DVD? I wouldn't be surprised if he released it right before the election.

>>People are always talking about how liberal the media is here in America,<<

Is that the perception in the US JEllen? Here the perception is that it's...I was going to say right wing but maybe it's more a patriotic thing - that the media there gets caught up in not critiqueing systems of authority? Certainly the impression is that the US news is quite narrow in it's reporting.

Of course there are stories we know about like the Washington Post journalists involved in exposing Watergate, but I guess that was a long time ago.

I saw a comment from someone the other day about Moore being a Hollywood radical. Quite apart from Moore not being part of the Hollywood system I can't see Hollywood as radical. Maybe it and the U.S. media in general are liberal on some domestic issues but otherwise they don't seem so to me.

I also found Hitchins criticism of Moore funny given that he made his name as a polemicist making extremely personal and unbalanced attacks on people he disapproved of, pretty much what he now accuses Moore of.