You should go see Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, if you haven't already, but that's not the point. If you're reading Eat the State!, you're really not the audience Moore was aiming for. It's much more important for your conservative relatives, coworkers, neighbors, and the sales clerk at your local hardware store to go see this movie.

If the first couple days of box-office-busting interest is any indication, some of them already have. And not just in the "blue" states. Thanks to F9/11, we may see a very different 11/2. That, of course, is the real point.

It's hard to imagine any but fundamentalist right-wingers (a loud but small minority) watching this movie and still thinking that voting for Bush in November is a good idea. Offer to give conservative-but-otherwise-decent family members double their money back if going to see F9/11 doesn't change their opinion of Bush and his war. You won't lose much money.

Moore avoids preaching to the choir by mostly leaving the choir out of the picture. Sure, we get a few cameos: inauguration protesters (to remind us that not everyone fell for that crooked coronation), members of Congressional Black Caucus (ibid.), local liberal Congress-guy Jim McDermott (to remind us--what?--that not every Democrat in Congress supported Bush's terror war)... And, compared to his other films, very little Michael Moore.

Mostly we see Bush, his cabinet, his corporate cronies, and both the regular Iraqis and regular Americans who are victims of Bush's agenda. By focusing the camera on these subjects, and framing the juxtaposed images in one coherent picture, F9/11 burns with more emotional intensity than I expected. I cried a lot and sometimes thought my head would explode.

And maybe that's the point, too. Some of us remain in shock over this four-year-long "bad dream," daily suppressing real human emotion at the horror of it all. Maybe, while it's turning Aunt Millie away from voting Bush on 11/2, F9/11 can also remind the rest of us that merely sending this corporate cowboy back to Texas is thinking too small. After what they've done, Bush's posse deserves to be rounded up and sent to the penitentiary. --Lansing Scott

Don't stop with Michael Moore when considering your summer movie going. Two other documentaries playing limited runs in Seattle are worth running, not walking, to see.

The first is The Corporation, playing at the Egyptian and brought to you by some of the same Canadians that made the Chomsky pic "Manufacturing Consent" a few years back. The Corporation starts off slow, and some of it is pedantic--seeming, at times, like a list of every evil ever committed by corporate America. But this will be a movie activist groups will be renting and showing for years for a couple of reasons: first, the central premise, that if we are to treat corporations as legal human beings, what sort of humans, psychologically speaking, are they? (Answer: psychopaths.) Secondly, the editing job, which is nothing short of phenomenal: pulling up archival footage, case studies--some of which are guaranteed to be unfamiliar--and an onslaught of talking heads that generates its own momentum as the movie zips along.

Even better is the second documentary to come out of SIFF: Control Room, in which an American filmmaker embedded herself in Al-Jazeera during the runup to and invasion of Iraq. This is, quite simply, what a movie can do best: taking you to a world you'd never see otherwise, and humanizing its inhabitants. In this case, the stars are the editors and reporters of Al-Jazeera, who turn out to have many of the same ideals ascribed to Western journalists, along with the inevitable emotional entanglement of watching a foreign power invade an Arab country. What elevates Control Room further is its humanization of everyone it films: the US military spokesman and US network journalists included. It's gripping, unforgettable stuff. Playing, for a limited time, at the Varsity in the U-District. --Geov Parrish