If you have not seen Fahrenheit 9/11 yet, you may want to skip this blog entry if you don't want any spoilers.

I had four problems with the movie:

1. When Michael Moore gets in to the ice cream truck to read the Patriot Act, you never here him read any of the juicy bits. He gets in the ice cream truck, he introduces himself and announces what he's going to do, then you get two snippets of "Section such and such," but nothing else. He missed a golden opportunity to ingrain the nastier parts of the Patriot Act into the minds of the audience by juxtaposing it with the ice cream truck. We got the setup, but no punchline.

2. Michael Moore solicits congressmen to enlist their children. After one conversation and some rapid-fire edits of other congressmen running to avoid him, he says that none of them offered up to enlist their children. It's moments like this where my assertion that Michael Moore can be the left-wing's Ann Coulter is confirmed. Of course they didn't enlist -- you're on the street, you're accosting them, and, oh yeah, you're Michael Fucking Moore. Duh. In a situation like this, send someone else, get more honest responses, get those congressmen to actually stop, if only for a second.

3. When listing members of the Coalition of the Willing, he oddly enough skips England, and it seems that he only does because it would have ruined his joke.

4. That much video footage is hard to watch for two hours on a large movie screen.

Other than that, Fahrenheit 9/11 is by far the most brilliant piece of filmmaking Michael Moore has done yet. He mostly makes his assertions without cramming them down your throat. Instead of preaching, he just shows you a Christian woman reading the last letter she got from her son who was killed in Iraq. Instead of promulgating the evils of Halliburton, he simply shows a U.S. soldier saying that a Halliburton bus driver in Iraq makes ten times more than he does. On the most part, Michael Moore lets the evidence do the talking.

To a certain extent, Moore's cult of personality does make questioning his objectivity an easy feat. However, Moore stays out of this one as much as possible, only popping in to make a point here and there. The two I mentioned above, while funny, fail when thought about. One that works well, and always works for him, is returning to Flint, Michigan. His uncanny ability to cast his hometown as a microcosm for the world is laudable, and it's also the sign of a good documentarian.

As I walked home from the cinema, I kept asking myself if the movie could sway my father and my stepfather, assuming that they could actually sit through the damn thing. Fahrenheit 9/11 has a far better chance of swaying conservatives than Bowling for Columbine would for all of the reasons I've stated. Even my father, who argued that the way to keep American afloat is to afford help to the corporations, could perhaps find truth in the efforts to cut benefits and salaries for soldiers. My stepfather, on the other hand, may never believe that it is possible to be a patriotic Christian and think George Bush is wrong for this country, but if he were to watch this movie, he could see one.

I actually do have one more fault with the movie. Instead of spending all of that money to promote and distribute the film, instead, buy two hours of airtime on every major television station and show it. Sure, it might violate election laws, but at least it would get it into my father's and my stepfather's respective houses.