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Michael Moore at the Full Frame Film Festival April 3rd, 2004

"I'd like to share with you the rest of my Oscar speech" Michael Moore offered to his rapt audience shortly after his introduction by noted documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker. The Full Frame Film Fest crowd responded in applause and laughter. It seems that nobody was unaware of Moore's controversial comments upon winning the Best Documentary Academy Award for "Bowling For Columbine". He elaborated on his now famous statement that "we live in fictitious times, with a fictitious president who was elected with fictitious election results and we're fighting a war for fictitious reasons." Since this happened a year ago Moore has told this story uncountable times. No doubt that many in the audience had already heard his tale of his being publicly criticized and even threatened for what was being labeled a vicious anti-Bush rant but it didn't matter to this crowd. My family who attended with me beforehand all voiced concern about detractors protesting the event and disrupting the evening. I assured them that that was extremely doubtful - Moore would be preaching to the choir. And he definitely was - even mild remarks and slight comical gestures got rousing response.

It also didn't matter that the event was a pretty ramshackle affair. Lights would dim unexpectedly cutting off Moore to start a film clip and despite the presence of microphones placed in the aisles questions were randomly shouted out with no sense of a structured Q & A forum. A moderator might have been a good idea. But again none of this really mattered - the audience ate it all up anyway. Clips from Moore's TV shows and movies were applauded with such enthusiasm you would have thought they were classic rock songs. That was the spectacle though, the real heart of the evening came from the communal feeling among us all that through all the jokes and deflating of political egos and policies there was a genuine belief that we can really change things. Moore made a big point out of encouraging everyone not only to vote but to travel to "swing-states" to help to transport people to the polls.
Moore wanted to make explicit the difference between "us and them". Us was not to be confused with what he called "liberal poseurs" but what he mostly just referred to as "our side" vs. the conservatives. The word liberal has become a dirty word because they are wimps with no real drive he explained. "What I admire about the other side is that they have

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