Documentaries that made a difference

I'll throw in a vote for Hoop Dreams, Troublesome Creek (about family farms struggling), and where the hell is SuperSize Me?

 

Definate point. Pre-Farenheit, we weren't that far removed from the days of Dixie Chick ostracization, and public figures were still walking on eggshells worrying about their patriotism being questioned when it came to criticizing the Bush Administration's war. Post-Farenheit, the floodgates opened and it became acceptable to openly blast away.

 

I take it you weren't around here in 2003. I don't remember any of our beloved lefty SportsJournalists.commers "walking on eggshells" or otherwise being restrained from "blasting away."

 

Wow, I can't believe we've never had a discussion of this topic around here. Weird.

 

C'mon, certainly you're smart enough to see the obvious flaw in that reasoning. Here's a hint: blasting away under an anonymous user name on a message board is entirely different than blasting away to the general public under your own name.

 

If I wasn't lazy and otherwise preoccupied, I'm sure I could do a Nexis-Lexis search and find -- minimum -- 10,000 articles from 2003 in which a prominent public person criticized the Bush administration and the war.

 

Yes, and movies and newspaper columns are similar media with similiar impacts.

 

And how countlessly many more from 2004? How many documentaries critical of the Iraq war preceded Farenheit compared to the explosion of copycat documentaries and similarly-themed books that followed? Farenheit had a major impact in terms of making it more publicly acceptable (indeed even trendy in many circles) to be openly critical of the war and U.S. foreign policy, whether you want to admit it or not.

 

Not that this has anything to do with the price of mint tea in Marrakesh, but where I live, anyone who criticizes the war is still automatically labeled unpatriotic. Just sayin'.

 

F_B,

I was responding to this post, which wasn't really about movies at all.

See how much fun it can be when you keep up?

 

Stay with me here.

This little digression began as an argument about how "influential" Fahrenheit 9/11 was -- I think, though my head has now begun to hurt.

Fahrenheit 9/11 was a movie, made in 2004, that -- among many other things -- made the case the Iraq war was wrong.

Three years later, the Iraq war is very unpopular. This is due in large part to 3,568 U.S. soldiers (I think that's the latest number) being killed in combat in Iraq.

HOWEVER, the number of troops in Iraq has not decreased. In fact, it has increased, as you may have heard.

In the election immediately following the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 -- an election the creator and many of the fans of the film hoped it would influence -- supporters of the war won an unequivocal victory. In the most recent election, two years after the release of the film and 3 1/2 years after the invasion, opponents of the war won an unequivocal victory, though very few of them ran on the "withdraw now!" platform favored by the creator of the film.

Now, seven months after that election, the opposition-controlled Congress has failed even to pass a non-binding resolution demanding immediate withdrawal from Iraq. None of the mainstream candidates for either party are running on a "withdraw now!" platform, and several prominent members of the opposition party are refusing to demand withdrawal at all.

So far as I can tell, Fahrenheit 9/11's two biggest claims to influence are increasing Michael Moore's bloated paycheck and contributing to several threads on SportsJournalists.com, including one that became perhaps the ugliest in memory.