''Celsius 41.11" has an agenda that's meant to put Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11" in its place. In doing so, it assumes the comically defensive attitude of Betty Hutton in ''Annie Get Your Gun": Anything Moore can do, this tedious Bush-besotted lecture can do better. ''Celsius 41.11" refers to the temperature at which the brain starts to die, a fact that the documentary, directed by Kevin Knoblock, is polite enough to tell us, while it shows cruddy footage of a jet flying into the World Trade Center.
As you can guess from the two films' competing temperature gauges, Knoblock and Moore speak different languages. ''Fahrenheit 9/11" is conspiratorial, tragic-comedy musing on the implications of the George W. Bush administration's war in Iraq. It's not entirely clear what ''Celsius 41.11" is aside from a piece of stone-faced reactionism.
(snip)
In the name of fair and balanced docu-partisanship, obviously, there's a place for ''Celsius 41.11" and its brethren alongside the glut of equally transparent and incompetently made anti-Bush movies to emerge in the recent afterburn of ''Fahrenheit 9/11." I'm not sure why the anti-Kerry people waited so long to start fighting.
Still, try as it might and despite its tacked-on Swift-Boat bit at the end, ''Celsius 41.11" doesn't have anything on anyone as pointedly damning or funny as some of what Moore shows of the current Bush administration. And as far as the movie's putting Moore in a submission hold, it's already been bested by the depiction of the director as the hotdog-gobbling, self-detonating maniac in ''Team America: World Police," a movie whose brain is operating at decidedly less dangerous temperature.
more…
http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2004/10/25/celsius_rant_is_tepid_and_insipid/
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
