We have written confirmation: Christopher Hitchens is a wanker given over to snottiness and hyperbole. Give the article a read; a few of my hastily written comments on it can be found below.

Hitchens: “This I divine from the fact that this supposedly ‘antiwar’ film is dedicated ruefully to all those killed there, as well as in Iraq.”
It’s not an antiwar film. Moore does not, nor do I think he would ever, refer to it as such. It’s an anti-Iraq-war film, and certainly an anti-Bush film. Moore isn’t so pragmatic to think that war is never necessary. He just seems to think that this Iraq war was not.

Hitchens: “Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not.”
I wasn’t aware that US policy could be driven by only one factor at any given time (e.g., in May it’s the Saudis; in June it’s Bill Clinton’s book…). It’s possible that they influence it in some way, just as it’s possible that Enron or North Korea or NAFTA or the economy of Turkmenistan might.

Hitchens: “In the interval between Moore’s triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in the United States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights.”
By this point in the article Hitchens has called out Moore several times for ignoring news and facts that don’t support his cause (which Moore may well do, however: stones & glass houses), so it’s worth nothing that Hitchens ignores rather suspicious reasoning behind it. The FBI determined – by September 14th, 3 days after the attacks – that all 142 Saudis flown out of Miami (where the mostly Saudi hijackers were based) had “nothing to do with the attacks” (from the Miami Herald). Quick work. Of course, this is no proof of a conspiracy, but it certainly doesn’t hurt Moore’s suspicions, and it does little to discourage anyone’s curiosity about the matter.

Hitchens: “The president is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, on a golf course, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that’s what you get if you catch the president on a golf course.If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm.”
More double-standards. Hitchens knows full well that if Clinton had done it, he would have been crucified by the right-wing media. And while we’re on the topic, Eisenhower earned the right to act however the hell he wanted to when war was at hand. He’d stared it in the face; Bush was a draft dodger. What did Roger Waters call it, “The Bravery Of Being Out Of Range?”

Hitchens: “In fact, I don’t think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic.”
You’re right, Chris. No news organization, certainly no American news network, would ever have cast an inversely skewed look at Iraq. Certainly, the news never centered on the the misdeeds (and there were many) of the Baathist leadership of Iraq, on the infamous torture chambers, on the exquisite pain that Saddam and his henchmen would inflict on the populace. There seemed no point in mentioning the other millions upon millions of regular, ordinary people who went about their lives every day, having nothing to do with this. Obviously the evil few are what the country’s all about. Equally, you have the US, who is prone to ignoring the Geneva convention in Cuban and Iraqi prisons, who revoke personal freedoms of their own citizens in the name of security, and who occupy countries militarily based on wholesale lack of proof. America, the country, is obviously evil and must be invaded. C’mon. Of course Moore’s shots were propogandistic. So is 99.9% of the footage that Americans have been shown for the past 18 months. If you want to call bullshit on someone, call it on everyone.

Hitchens: “Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American.”
If he in facts says this in the film, then of course it’s silly. In fact, it’s silly to think that any country in the world, scrutinized to the degree that Hitchens does here, wouldn’t be as threatening to America as was Iraq. The UK, France, even Canada could be made to look aggressive according to Hitchens’ arguments, never mind countries like Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran or North Korea. Why were we all not targetted?

Hitchens: “Finally, Moore complains that there isn’t enough intrusion and confiscation at airports and says that it is appalling that every air traveler is not forcibly relieved of all matches and lighters.”
I once sat in a London theatre, listening to Michael Moore talking about this very point. He wasn’t arguing for more intrusion and confiscation; he was arguing for more intelligence when doing it. He pointed out that on his flight to London he wouldn’t have been allowed to bring on, say, a nail file, but he *could* bring on a lighter – when only months after 9/11 some wingnut tried to blow up a shoe bomb using a lighter. The only device used in an attempted attack on an airliner, an attack which was highly public and forced airport security everywhere to relieve people of their shoes for months, was carried out with a lighter. But lighters were still ok to bring on board to light anything other than a shoe bomb, so long as you didn’t try to file your nails or remove a staple at the same time.

Hitchens: “Moore has announced that he won’t even appear on TV shows where he might face hostile questioning.”
Moore has said that he’d like to go on the O’Reilly Factor (where he’d surely face some tough questioning), but Bill O’Reilly wouldn’t even sit through a screening of the film, so I can’t imagine why Moore would do him any favours. Other than that, he’s appearing on at least talk show every day this week for what I can tell by the TV schedule.

Hitchens: “But then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia. Such courage.”
Heston fucking well deserves every bit of humilation, animosity and aggression that he gets, from Moore or anyone else. Anyone who, for years, continually showed up for NRA rallies in towns that had just suffered gun fatalities, in the name of preserving the right to bear arms, should be expect any bad karma that comes his way.

Hitchens: “If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq.”
First of all, Afghanistan is all but under Taliban rule again anyway. Second, when did we start talking about the Balkans or the first Gulf War? And what the hell does Hitchens know about how Michael Moore would have preferred to handle Milosevic? Is everything so black and white to Hitchens that violent reprisal is the sole, solitary way by which to control international crises? Let me give you a hypothetical situation: I look out into my yard and see a small child kicking my dog. I tell him to stop; he refuses. I take out a gun and shoot the child, wounding my dog in the process. Was this the only solution available to me? Of course not; but anyone opposing the method by which I stopped the child is immediately cast as hating dogs.

Christopher’s just so screamingly tedious.

from The Globe and Mail: two feature films change their release dates to avoid being “trampled” by Fahrenheit 9/11. Not that I have any doubt of how it’ll end up. White Chicks will still win the weekend. But at least it’s a tiny shred of sensibility in the movie world.

The new blockbuster docs
Once relegated to public television, documentaries are muscling in on feature films at the box office
By SIMON HOUPT
From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail

New York — It is the epitome of high-stakes Hollywood gamesmanship. Every year, movie studios plant flags on days they consider to be prime real estate to launch their planned summer blockbusters, warning potential competitors to steer clear or face destruction. Backing away from an intended release date is a sign of weakness. But early this month, two movie studios quietly made an inauspicious sort of history by doing something no studio had ever done in the history of Hollywood: They each moved the release date of a feature film to avoid getting trampled at the box office by a documentary.

Not just any documentary, mind you. Sony Pictures moved up the Wayans brothers comedy White Chicks by two days and MGM delayed its launch of the Cole Porter biopic De-Lovely by a week to avoid competing for audiences and movie screens with Michael Moore’s anti-George W. Bush screed Fahrenheit 9/11, which opens in Canada on Friday. The studios’ defensive move illustrated more than just the power of Moore to draw a crowd. It acknowledged the growing might of documentaries at the North American box office.

This season may just be remembered as the summer of blockbuster documentaries. True, no non-fiction feature is going to compete for the box-office crown with Shrek 2, but audiences are demonstrating an unprecedented desire to pay for the type of film people used to think belonged in the sleepy backwater of public television.

For three weeks this spring, Super Size Me, a film tracking one man’s quest to ruin his health by gorging on McDonald’s fast food, landed in the top-10 listings of the weekend box office, marking the first time in history a non-concert documentary had achieved that feat. Not even Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine managed to crack the weekend top 10 during its long run in the fall and winter of 2002, despite winning an Oscar for best feature documentary.

In July, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, will open on more than 500 screens across North America. The heavy-metal band’s rabid fan base is expected to push the film into the upper reaches of the box office for its weekend launch, and possibly, long after.

Meanwhile the Canadian film The Corporation, having already taken in a record $1.1-million at the domestic box office, is now sucking up cash and audiences as it rolls across the United States. Out of all films playing in the U.S., it ranked second only to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in per-screen average during its opening week, a key indicator of desire among audiences, taking in more than $25,000 (U.S.) per screen.

It has all been a bit of a shock to the industry. Geoffrey Gilmore, the director of the Sundance Film Festival, said that shortly before the release of Super Size Me last month, the CEO of one of the top four cinema chains in the United States, a man who oversees more than 2,200 screens, told him the film wouldn’t make any money. “These guys haven’t changed their stripes,” says Gilmore. “They’re still very cynical about what will make money.”

Film-industry analysts say success breeds success. After a film like Bowling for Columbine hits the jackpot, distributors are more willing to put up money for advertising and marketing, which then helps propel the success of other films.

Unlike many documentaries of the past, the new films are fiercely unobjective and usually have a political or social agenda articulated by the filmmaker who plays a central role in the film. “The big docs tend to have a persona in front of them with which the audience identifies,” says Gilmore.

They also borrow one element that helps make Hollywood films so successful. “Large-audience films are often about bad guys and good guys,” observes the noted Canadian cinéma-vérité documentarian Allan King. “To be in a large crowd is to become anxious, to become anxious is to regress, and you can argue that listening to stories of Good and Evil is characteristic of childhood.

“Often, more complicated ways of looking at things are less popular and more demanding to pursue.”

Some of the traditional documentary-makers who value objectivity over agendas are dismayed by the evolution. Fred Wiseman, the dean of American documentary filmmakers, pointedly refused comment last year when asked about Moore’s approach and his self-promotional style.

The new docs have other similarities with popular Hollywood films. Most of the documentaries in the past decade to win an Oscar were concerned with historical issues, either heartbreaking tales from the Holocaust or vexing accounts of the U.S. civil-rights movement. Indeed, this year’s winning film, Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, revisited old ghosts from the Vietnam War. But the new popular docs all address issues that are burning up the evening newscasts and they have all been turned around speedily in the editing suite to capitalize on the current interest in their subjects.

Because of their timeliness, the films benefit from the cross-pollination of controversy. Super Size Me prompted sputtering outrage from nutritionists in the pocket of the food industry, inspiring op-ed articles and even copycat films in progress that aim to show eating at McDonald’s can be, as the fast-food company claims, part of a healthy diet. The Wall Street Journal took on The Corporation in its news pages, offering the last word to the noted free-marketeer Milton Friedman, a critic of the film’s message.

“When documentaries get feature-film attention — either from newspapers or electronic media — that drives people to the theatres,” said Sundance’s Gilmore, who notes that none of the films refers to itself in advertising as a “documentary,” perhaps because that term still carries a whiff of preciousness.

The most pressing contemporary issues today in the U.S. concern the actions of the Bush administration toward terrorism and Iraq, issues forcefully tackled by Fahrenheit 9/11. The trade newspaper Variety reported last week that research by the firm Nielsen NRG, which tracks developing interest among audiences for upcoming movies, found Fahrenheit 9/11 was the first choice this weekend of 4 per cent of moviegoers, more people than listed either the Hollywood romance The Notebook or Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adventure Two Brothers.

In fact, the distributor Lions Gate Films said demand for Fahrenheit 9/11 is so high it chose to open the film in two cinemas in New York before its national release. The movie will take up three screens in one theatre alone on the liberally inclined Upper West Side of Manhattan, Michael Moore’s own neighbourhood. A campaign by the liberal grassroots organization MoveOn to raise awareness of the film is seeking to have 100,000 pledge to attend a showing on Friday. As of midday yesterday, only five days after the campaign kicked off, more than 108,000 MoveOn members had made the pledge.

The new wave of popular docs even threatens to swamp some of the smaller fish in the non-fiction sea. Sarah Goodman, an independent filmmaker whose Army of One won the Best Canadian Feature prize at this year’s Hot Docs festival, sent out an e-mail yesterday to her friends asking them to support this weekend’s brief theatrical release of her film in Toronto. “Our challenge now is to get people out to see it in the face of the bigger blockbuster films,” it read. “We can’t compete with the star power and dough of Michael Moore.”

“The court jesters of old were said to tell a truth, a truth to power that no one else dared tell. The court jesters of today have no message, at least no message of truth. It is merely a message of consumption. Which is similarly horrible to behold if we were willing to watch.”

from GloNo.

The slow but inevitable self-destruction of Stephen Harper has begun. Last week, he accused Paul Martin of supporting child porn, then Ralph Klein took his knees out by saying something stupid (as if Klein could do otherwise) about health care, and now Harper wants to make Air Canada monolingual outside of Quebec airspace, a policy announcement that came out yet wasn’t part of his official platform (which makes you wonder what else he has up his sleeve).

Vacation day + sunny + 25 degrees = happy ltdan.

I got to the Mod Club last night after slogging through seemingly endless crowds of Little Italy streetfest revellers, on an unusually chilly June evening, so I wasn’t in the loveliest of moods when I arrived. But I was heartened when I walked into the club itself — great sightlines, awesome sound, good lighting, and Raising The Fawn launching into one of their best songs (“Gwendolyn”) — and contented further when my admittedly odd urge for bourbon was satisfied by a large shot of Maker’s Mark. I caught Raising The Fawn’s last few songs, and was impressed; I saw them open for …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead about two years ago (RTF was followed that night by Explosions In The Sky…pound for pound, it was one of the best shows I’ve seen). I might have to give The North Sea another listen.

I should comment on The Mod Club. Granted, I’ve only been there once, I saw a great band, and Duarte comped my drinks all night, so I could be biased. But it definitely has a lot going for it: I’m picky about both sightlines and sound in live venues, but here both are terrific. Being 6’2″ I’m at an advantage anyway, but I think I could’ve stood anywhere in the club and seen the stage perfectly. The sound, even when we were off to the corner of the stage, sounded balanced and clear. Even the lights impressed me, and I couldn’t usually give a shit about lighting. After the headline set the DJs took over, and any club whose DJ (it was Ben at that point) plays “Youth Against Fascism” by Sonic Youth and “Yeah” by LCD Soundsystem is ok in my book. Of course as the night went on and the crowd became less concert-goer and more club-kid, the music went away from my tastes a bit, but it could’ve been worse. I could’ve been at Tonic. Frankly, the I think the Mod Club could now be the best place in the city to see a live show. It’s bigger than Lee’s or the ‘Shoe but still more intimate than the Phoenix or the Kool Haus, has better sound than any other live venue in the city (that I’ve been to, anyway) and the decor & staff tend toward warm & friendly rather than going for that surly biker feel.

Definitely the weirdest thing that happened all night was when I met the owner of the Mod Club, Mark Holmes, ex of Platinum Blonde. I kind of wanted to scream, “One of the first things I learned to play as a drummer was the solo to ‘It Doesn’t Really Matter!'”, but I figured that would be a) lame and b) stupid, ’cause he was the singer.

Anyway, the reason I was there: The Fiery Furnaces. They came on around 9:45, and finished around 10:40. Normally, I’d feel ripped off by a band that played less than an hour, but not last night. They played their songs at a manic pace and without stopping. Song ran into song. Endings came abruptly as a new beginning was counted in. Songs were changed so drastically that they were barely recognizable. Some songs became recurring themes (they sang a few lyrics from “Leaky Tunnel” 2 or 3 times before quickly moving onto something else. When they finally let us up for air, it was 9:25. They played another song or two (my memory is fuzzy…the songs were such a blur that it became difficult to keep track) before walking off. Matthew and Eleanor came back out for three songs — leaving behind the bassist/keyboardist and drummer who tour with them — one of which is a favourite: “Rub-Alcohol Blues”. I was hoping it would lead into “We Got Back The Plague”, but Eleanor waved Matthew off before he could start. She forgot most of the lyrics to the last song, so they gave up and that’s how they left us.

A few words about Eleanor: She was captivating. She has, as Eye suggests, “an unnervingly Patti Smith-esque glare”, and some kind of a slight trembling ferocity that’s irresistable. Anybody who says they weren’t turned on by the sight of her pounding her guitar, or rocking back and forth when she sang, “Don’t you wish your little boy was cute like mine?” are lying. She’s approaching PJ Harvey-ish territory, where force & anger of voice belie physical size. Like Rock and Roll could give a shit about size.

Like The Fiery Furnaces could give a shit about rock and roll.

I’ve revived the ltdan blog (link | feed) to be a general, all-purpose holding area, a fattening pen for my thoughts.

Just ordered three new goodies:

• Das Not Compute
• Stealing Beauty (Widescreen)
• Uh Huh Her

I’m trying 4 restaurants for Summerlicious this year: Crush, Verveine, Corner House and Bymark

Ah, an empty apartment. My wife’s gone camping for the weekend with friends, so I have the place to myself until Sunday evening. Not that I dislike having her here, but it’s nice to occasionally be alone. I can listen to music at full blast, watch Euro2004 in my underwear and eat pizza for breakfast. Not that I can’t do those things when she’s here, but it somehow feels decadent to do it while she’s gone.