Finally! Something to write/rant about other than the crappy ads on Bid-up TV.

I went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 last night. I hadn't been sure whether to go or not; I read Fast Food Nation a while back after hearing so much about it, and I was rather underwhelmed. Given my cynicism about corporate behaviour in general, descriptions of just how bad every part of the fast-food chain were fell a little flat when they only confirmed what I had already imagined to be the case. Carry the same cynicism over to the Iraq war and add in having watched Bowling for Columbine and I wasn't expecting to be particularly surprised by much.

The film was mostly as I expected. The media coverage (at least in commie rags like the Guardian that form the majority of my news sources) of the Bush administration's preoccupation with Iraq and the post-9/11 cronyism stuff with Halliburton and the like meant that I had already been exposed to most of Moore's points of view.

What I wasn't expecting was the sheer, unapologetic profiteering hidden by a veneer of patriotism that was displayed by some of the executive types interviewed. The sight of a suited, gelled, 30-ish twat explaining how proud he was to be helping with the war effort turned my stomach. The contrast between the little fucker standing in an identikit hotel foyer with canapés and free champagne, and the charred body of a GI being pulled behind an Iraqi militia pickup truck was utterly appalling. The disconnect between the idealistic argument - however flawed in the first place - for waging such a war ("free the people", "war on terror" etc.) and the reality of dead soldiers, civilians and children is jarring enough, but when you remove any idealism and substitute rampant oil money-grabbing for it, things get even more revolting.

The film was a little weak on narrative, which was a shame. It started off implying some kind of Saudi/Bush conspiracy or nepotism but abandoned this partway through to concentrate on the cretinous decision to invade a country with fuck all ability to attack anyone apart from its own people. And once it did that, it became a damn sight more effective.

One almost surreal sequence had me oscillating between hilarity and incredulity, with a tank crew talking about how they piped nu metal through their Abrams's comm system while they blew stuff up, like an unconscious manifestation of Buffalo Soldiers' smackhead tank jaunt.

3/5 on the RF's drum-beating documentary scale, but worth seeing just to remind onself just how pear-shaped everything went after Bush won Florida in 2000.

/leftie film review + rant

Oh, and we had a flat game of poker on Wednesday. I didn't win, but by some combination of luck and idle curiosity to see exactly which cards were on the table, I came second. And didn't even buy back in. The future's bright. The future's...green. Er, like the baize on a card table.