Reviews

another great piece of work by Moore. while this film doesn't have as much polish and presentation as "Bowling for Columbine" (which i still feel is his best work) it presents a lot of facts and footage which have not been exposed to mainstream US audiences by the corporate media. stress should be placed on the term "footage" since just the large volume of video clips shown in this film and nowhere else makes it required viewing for anyone who feels the media is unbiased or uncontrolled in this country.

also fantastic were the large amount of interviews with recruits, soldiers, and their families. Moore shows the true human impact of war, particularly worthless and pointless war. Of particular significance is the change we witness in one soldier's mother. Spending much of her life uninformed and wrapped in the safe blanket of blind patriotism, her first interviews show her pride in the children she's sent to war in the past. Later, when her son's helicopter is shot down in Iraq, reality hits her like a ton of bricks and she realizes the lies she's been force fed by the government. Her pain and anguish is palpable and should open the eyes of many pro-war families.

See this film, with a group of friends if possible. Naturally, there are plenty of right-wing ignoramuses who will immediately dismiss all of Moore's work... but there are a lot of good, hard-working, independent-thinking Americans out there who don't know how badly they're being screwed by this administration. Take some of THOSE people with you to see the film and it could have a HUGE impact in November.

"It always amazes and impresses me in this country, that the people who have it the worst -- the people who are taken advantage of by big businesses and by the government -- are always the first to step up and say 'what can i do' or 'how can i sacrifice' when their country needs them." - Michael Moore (i'm paraphrasing from memory, but the film's final lines are truly patriotic and powerful)

This was a movie that deserved to tank. Kevin Mitnick, a genius with computers who was a little too inquisitive for the authorities liking, has been the victim of so many abuses that it can make one's stomach turn. "Takedown" was adapted from a book written by John Markoff and Tsutomu Shimomura who exploited Kevin, a man about whom neither of the authors had any direct knowledge, and pretended to be Mitnick experts when in fact they couldn't have been more clueless.

Markoff, a hack journalist who did everything that he could to portray Kevin a danger to society in order to keep writing articles about him, has claimed wild rumors about Mitnick to be fact (rumors such as Kevin hacking into NORAD computers, harassing Christie McNickle, and converting home phones into pay phones) with no regard for the fact that he was demonizing Kevin in the eyes of society and in the eyes of a justice system - a system that would eventually lock Kevin in solitary confinement for 8 months because they were afraid he would use prison phones to launch nuclear missiles if placed in general population. Tsutomu Shimomura is nothing but a smart-ass hacker wanna-be whose main contribution to the book "Takedown" was a list of his skateboarding and eating habits.

If anyone out there really wants to learn the true Kevin Mitnick story, please view "Freedom Downtime" by Emmanuel Goldstein. [http://us.imdb.com/Title?0309614]