MOVIE NIGHT. Saw Fahrenheit 9/11 tonight. Somewhere in this shining land, no doubt, someone is disputing the precise dates and conditions of the bin Laden family's post-9/11 flights, etc. Which reminds me of the prologue to Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot, in which Jeane Kirkpatrick, pressed to review Franken's book, blasts the premise on the grounds that no weight figures are provided to support it.

Since the film was made by an artist and a polemicist, rather than a propagandist, the real theme is not Let's Get Rid of Bush Now (though that is a pleasing corollary) but How Disinformation Works, with the Bush Administration as an appalling object lesson. Someone else could have used the Administrations of Clinton, Bush I, Reagan, Carter, William Henry Harrison et alia, as their lesson. Unfortunately for the other team, the artists mostly swing our way, while the propagandists mostly swing theirs. That's just the way it goes.

The flim was okey-dokey, and the little Brooklyn theatre where I saw it was packed, with a huge line waiting outside for the next show -- the Manhattan theatres had sold out hours earlier. I have no idea what police estimates will show, of course, and any box-office figures supplied by evil Hollywood are naturally suspect, and no doubt Professor Reynolds will mention contervailing demonstrations that prove the American people are still with the President on this one. I can only tell you what I saw.

UPDATE. I think the movie is pretty good, but if films were judged, as some have suggested people should be, by their enemies, then Fahrenheit 9/11 would be Citizen Kane: Both Roger L. Simon ("excrescence") and Andrew Sullivan ("vile, hateful propaganda") have condemned it without (by their own admissions) even seeing it.