Posts Tagged ‘Michael Moore’
November 19, 2009 - 2:26 am
By Steven Zeitchik
 One of the perks, or punishments, of this film blogging racket is the opportunity to see an obscene amount of documentaries. This was more of an issue when there were an obscene amount of documentaries being made, but if you’ve been to a film fest recently, you know that number is still high — if not Larry Flynt obscene, then maybe at least Robert Mapplethorpe obscene.
Given all that, we’d have to say that the flap over the omissions by the doc shortlist committee Wednesday is, like all flaps, with some merit and with some bloviation.
One of the reasons for the shortlist has always struck us as political. The doc category is rife with submissions, in part because it’s so damn cheap to make one. That means a higher level of chaff but also a higher level of wheat, and part of the idea of revealing three times as many films as will actually be nominated is to show just how inclusive the Academy can be.
But that inclusiveness also creates a sense of entitlement. Everyone wonders why they can’t make the cut. if you actually look at the number of docs made every year relative to the fifteen slots (made, not qualified), it’s probably a higher ratio than the number of features relative to their slots. In other words, it’s harder to actually make the doc shortlist than it is to get nominated in other categories.
So we should probably treat the doc shortlist as slightly more elite than we do, and not be so in umbrage when films don’t make it.
We also shouldn’t be surprised for another reason: several of the supposedly glaring absences contain their share of flaws. The omission of Toback’s “Tyson” is understandable. The film is essentially a single interview, and while revealing at points — Toback is never lacking for things provocative — you could make a case it’s a little too thin, given all the ambition out there, to make the list.
October 8, 2009 - 3:25 am
By Steven Zeitchik
 Anyone waiting or hoping for politics — that is, for the outside world — to come to awards season these past few years has probably been disappointed.
Two years ago there were a slew of political movies released, but outside a few of the docs, nothing really clicked. Last year saw some Prop 8 heat with "Milk," but it was mostly contained there. You probably have to go back to 2003 and the now-famous Michael Moore speech about fictitious presidents to find something genuinely polarizing.
This year would seem to be shaping up a little differently, first with Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" and, lately, with Samuel Maoz's intensely personal "Lebanon," the latter of which looks to go further than Ari Folman did with his "Waltz with Bashir" campaign last year. Both Folman's and Maoz's movies deal with the same war (the Israeli conflict in Lebanon in 1982) and draw from the same autobiographical well, but Maoz's pic is the less whimsical, more gritty and thus, in the end, more stirring (though significantly, "Lebanon" won't compete in the foreign-language category at the Oscars; the Israeli-Palestinian ensemble character drama "Ajami" edged it out as Israel's official selection. Maoz's pic will hopefully get foreign-language consideration from other awards and critics groups, as well as tech consideration by the Academy; it excels in below-the-line areas like sound editing and art direction).
But even more than Folman, Maoz seems to be treading very lightly on political ground. At a New York Film Festival screening a few days back, he was asked in several different ways about the politics of the pic and carefully avoided the topic each time, instead talking in his characteristic low-key way about the far more personal experiencing of being in a tank during a war, and about conveying that feeling to the audience, which he does perfectly and chillingly. (To replicate the claustraphobic sensation for the actors, he locked them in what he describes as "a small and dark container for a few hours." When the actor was sufficiently disoriented, he came to the door and knocked on it with a loud iron pipe. "It was similar to being attacked," he said.)
September 16, 2009 - 1:19 am
By Steven Zeitchik
 Michael Moore kind of spares Barack Obama in his otherwise unsparing account of the way capitalism has let down Americans.
Both Democrat and Republican legislators who voted to bail out the nation's banks just before last November's elections get skewered in "Capitalism: A Love Story," Moore's pointed if at times slack documentary about several decades of misguided economic policy.
Said polticians, he noted, are weak-kneed and corrupt (and serve as this movie's villain, the 'they' in his pic's usual 'could they really be trying to do this to us' narrative, along with big conglomerates, of course, who are the 'they' in capital letters). Obama, though? He's a symbol of hope, a symbol, he says, of how capitalism might not win out.
But anyone who thinks that latitude will continue will be in for a surprise, the director said.
After the movie screened Sunday night in Toronto (yeah, yeah, we're a little behind), with groups of pro- and anti-Moore protesters making the expected noise outside the theater, Moore had some critical words for the president, more critical than we've seen him have before.
September 7, 2009 - 12:10 am
By Steven Zeitchik
 There's much about the new Michael Moore pic, "Capitalism: A Love Story," that spins one head.
The documentary started out as something entirely different (a foreign-policy investigation) from what it became (an economic screed). But that's only the beginning of the whiplash. We won't see the pic (and thus can't evaluate fully) until Toronto this week. But the early word out of the film's premiere at Venice — which has it as a powerful piece of filmmaking, if not an unimpeachable work of journalism — doesn't completely address the questions we've had for a while now about both the scope and consistency of Moore's criticisms and the audience it will speak to.
There's never been a better time for Moore to practice his brand of emotional populism. And judging by the reviews, he is, from a filmmaking standpoint, in fine form, with rhetorically weighty shots like banks wrapped in crime tape (evocative of the equally showy but powerful scene of politicians in "Farenheit 9/11" asked if they would send their kids to Iraq) and colorful, depressing examples of recession-era profiteering, the kind of absurdities that Moore so effectively uses to get blood boiling and tickets selling.
But there's something different here. Unlike some of the provocateur's previous movies, Moore is taking aim not only at the kind of fat cats who are normally his cinematic villains but also the politicians that supported bailing out said fat cats. And when you talk about the politicians who supported the bailout, you're talking about a lot of Democrats.
July 9, 2009 - 7:48 am
By Steven Zeitchik
 Michael Moore is in love.
The provocateur director has named his new film — in which he explores the roots and culprits of the economic collapse — "Capitalism: A Love Story."
Moore quipped in a statement that romance was the appropriate theme for a film about our current state of financial woe.
"It will be the perfect date movie. It's got it all — lust, passion, romance, and 14,000 jobs being eliminated every day," he said, adding "It's a forbidden love, one that dare not speak its name. Heck, let’s just say it: It’s capitalism.”
November 13, 2008 - 3:01 am
By Steven Zeitchik
Director reinvention has always struck us as a lot easier than the actor sort. As an actor you’re playing against public perceptions as well as your craft; as someone behind the camera, it’s mainly just about being able to pull it off creatively.
But sometimes directorial changes can be just as difficult, even monumental. Two very different directors are making just those sorts of shifts with upcoming projects.
The first, for the indie darling David O. Russell, has him moving between the deceptively disparate precincts of quirky comedy and broad comedy.
Russell’s movies have always had a sort of universal appeal; though the characters are determinedly weird, they don’t generally beg for our empathy so much as allow us to laugh from a distance (those antic moments at the end of “Flirting with Disaster” come to mind).
Still, it’s a surprise to learn today that he’s taking on that Black List spec sensation “The Grackle,” a New Line project that Matthew McConaughey fell in love with and decided to produce and star in when it got all he studios excited a couple years ago,
People who’ve seen the spec say it’s smart and funny — that is, not like filmic gems such as “Failure to Launch” — but still a fairly broad commercial comedy involving a high-concept idea (a pugilistic barfly decides to help legal clients settle scores, er, extralegally). That means Russell will have to go from soldiers searching for treasure, and all the metaphoric humor that comes with it, to the simple funny spectacle of a man whaling on his legal adversary. We’ll see how that more literal kind of spanking goes over.
On a more political note, Michael Moore is also making a switch. In his case, he’s adjusting his upcoming Vantage/Overture doc that was supposed to be about the post 9/11 world — well, it’s a sequel to “Fahrenheit 9/11″, so let’s say the post-post-9/11 world — from a foreign-policy-centric film to a movie focusing more on domestic policy, especially the economy and the financial crisis. There are all sorts of questions about where Moore will find the culprits, whether audiences will find those discoveries new or redundant, etc.
But there’s a bigger artistic and tonal question — namely, in an age when a Democrat who’s simpatico with Moore’s world-view is in power, can the filmmaker go form rabblerousing upstart to a man with all the answers? There’s some evidence to the contrary. “Sicko,” for all its effective indictments of the health-care system, was notable for its lack of prescription; you came out wondering, ‘huge problem, lots of greed, but what the heck should we do about it?’ (And no, moving to France doesn’t qualify as a policy suggestion.)
The realization that you need to change tone or direction to keep up is admirable. But it remains to be seen whether merely having the desire to change is enough.
February 8, 2008 - 12:40 am
By Gregg Kilday
Michael Moore did the Hollywood thing over the past few days: Picking up the documentary prize from the Producers Guild of America for “Sicko” Saturday night; dropping by the Academy’s nominees luncheon on Monday; showing up at the AARP’s Movies for Grownups Awards at the Bel-Air Hotel Monday night, where “Sicko” shared the best documentary prize with the Apollo moon mission documentary “In the Shadow of the Moon.”
And somehow, through it all, he also found time to visit with Larry King. On King’s CNN show, he announced he couldn’t support Hilary Clinton — at least in the primary — explaining, “I am morally prohibited from voting for Hilary in the primaries because of her war votes.”
He also offered a tantalizing glimpse of his next project, saying that he was taking a look at what corporate America has been up to over the past eight years. It’s organizing theme: While America Slept.
Of course, he added, it would be a comedy.
May 15, 2007 - 3:40 pm
 The U.S. Treasury Department may have struck the first blow when it announced it was investigating Michael Moore for possibly violating America’s trade embargo with Cuba by taking ailing Sept. 11 rescue workers to the island for medical treatment and documenting it in his new film “Sicko,” which debuts here in Cannes on Saturday.
But Moore, never one to shy away from a righteous fight, isn’t playing defense. I talked with him by phone Sunday night — I was in Cannes and he was in New York, putting the final touches on his film — and he displayed his usual mix of passion, outrage, humor and bravado. “Why would they do it now? I have no idea,” he said of the government maneuver. “Were they just sitting around there and somebody said, “Hey, this is opening in Cannes next week. We have to do something.” Are they that divorced from reality or the popular culture to know that isn’t the right thing to do? I think maybe they thought, ‘We’re going to chance it here to try to paint him with some Castro brush or whatever.’ I think when people see the film, there is going to have to be a lot of rewriting done on the initial stories that went out last week in terms of what really happens in the film and what we really did.”
He reserved special scorn for former senator and possible presidential candidate Fred Thompson, who’d written an opinion piece accusing Moore of being soft on Castro. “I didn’t know he’d been appointed the official spokesperson against the film,” Moore laughed.
All the while, what is shaping up as a formidable Moore team was gearing up for a counterattack. The Weinstein Co., which produced the film, has enlisted the services of David Boies, the chief attorney in Al Gore’s recount battle against George Bush in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, as well as political consultant Chris Lehane. And today, it unleashed a letter Moore has sent to Thompson that is full of what can only be called opposition research. Posted on Moore’s own Web site, michaelmoore.com, the letter first makes sport of Thompson’s fondness for Montecristo cigars from Havana and suggests that the cigar-chomping senator may have violated the trade embargo himself. More seriously, it accuses Thompson of wanting to cut funding for AIDS research, cozying up to former Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist, whose family has had a financial interest in the HCA hospital chain, and raising “hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the health care and insurance industries.” Hey, how about debating me about health care, Moore challenges.
How will all this play in Cannes? Europeans will probably shake their heads over the American healthcare system, and most of them admit that the whole Cuban trade embargo is a mystifying issue to them. But my colleagues Scott Roxborough and Gregg Goldstein report that foreign distributors who will be handling the film, such as TFM Distribution in France and Gaga Communications in Japan, are “waiting to see the reaction of the Cannes audience before forming a promotion strategy for the film.” In the meantime, they’re promised a good show — both off screen and on. (Gregg Kilday)
February 27, 2007 - 6:24 pm
 John Anderson has written a NYT story about the documentary Manufacturing Dissent, coming up at South By Southwest, which dissects Michael Moore’s brand of POV filmmaking.
November 25, 2006 - 6:28 pm
 In response to the latest bloodshed in Iraq, Michael Moore sent out this letter to his email list:
Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do
Sunday, November 26th, 2006
Friends,
Tomorrow marks the day that we will have been in Iraq longer than we were in all of World War II.
That’s right. We were able to defeat all of Nazi Germany, Mussolini, and the entire Japanese empire in LESS time than it’s taken the world’s only superpower to secure the road from the airport to downtown Baghdad.
And we haven’t even done THAT. After 1,347 days, in the same time it took us to took us to sweep across North Africa, storm the beaches of Italy, conquer the South Pacific, and liberate all of Western Europe, we cannot, after over 3 and 1/2 years, even take over a single highway and protect ourselves from a homemade device of two tin cans placed in a pothole. No wonder the cab fare from the airport into Baghdad is now running around $35,000 for the 25-minute ride. And that doesn’t even include a friggin’ helmet.
Is this utter failure the fault of our troops? Hardly. That’s because no amount of troops or choppers or democracy shot out of the barrel of a gun is ever going to “win” the war in Iraq. It is a lost war, lost because it never had a right to be won, lost because it was started by men who have never been to war, men who hide behind others sent to fight and die.
Let’s listen to what the Iraqi people are saying, according to a recent poll conducted by the University of Maryland:
** 71% of all Iraqis now want the U.S. out of Iraq.
** 61% of all Iraqis SUPPORT insurgent attacks on U.S. troops.
Yes, the vast majority of Iraqi citizens believe that our soldiers should be killed and maimed! So what the hell are we still doing there? Talk about not getting the hint.
There are many ways to liberate a country. Usually the residents of that country rise up and liberate themselves. That’s how we did it. You can also do it through nonviolent, mass civil disobedience. That’s how India did it. You can get the world to boycott a regime until they are so ostracized they capitulate. That’s how South Africa did it. Or you can just wait them out and, sooner or later, the king’s legions simply leave (sometimes just because they’re too cold). That’s how Canada did it.
The one way that DOESN’T work is to invade a country and tell the people, “We are here to liberate you!” — when they have done NOTHING to liberate themselves. Where were all the suicide bombers when Saddam was oppressing them? Where were the insurgents planting bombs along the roadside as the evildoer Saddam’s convoy passed them by? I guess ol’ Saddam was a cruel despot — but not cruel enough for thousands to risk their necks. “Oh no, Mike, they couldn’t do that! Saddam would have had them killed!” Really? You don’t think King George had any of the colonial insurgents killed? You don’t think Patrick Henry or Tom Paine were afraid? That didn’t stop them. When tens of thousands aren’t willing to shed their own blood to remove a dictator, that should be the first clue that they aren’t going to be willing participants when you decide you’re going to do the liberating for them.
A country can HELP another people overthrow a tyrant (that’s what the French did for us in our revolution), but after you help them, you leave. Immediately. The French didn’t stay and tell us how to set up our government. They didn’t say, “we’re not leaving because we want your natural resources.” They left us to our own devices and it took us six years before we had an election. And then we had a bloody civil war. That’s what happens, and history is full of these examples. The French didn’t say, “Oh, we better stay in America, otherwise they’re going to kill each other over that slavery issue!”
The only way a war of liberation has a chance of succeeding is if the oppressed people being liberated have their own citizens behind them — and a group of Washingtons, Jeffersons, Franklins, Ghandis and Mandellas leading them. Where are these beacons of liberty in Iraq? This is a joke and it’s been a joke since the beginning. Yes, the joke’s been on us, but with 655,000 Iraqis now dead as a result of our invasion (source: Johns Hopkins University), I guess the cruel joke is on them. At least they’ve been liberated, permanently.
So I don’t want to hear another word about sending more troops (wake up, America, John McCain is bonkers), or “redeploying” them, or waiting four months to begin the “phase-out.” There is only one solution and it is this: Leave. Now. Start tonight. Get out of there as fast as we can. As much as people of good heart and conscience don’t want to believe this, as much as it kills us to accept defeat, there is nothing we can do to undo the damage we have done. What’s happened has happened. If you were to drive drunk down the road and you killed a child, there would be nothing you could do to bring that child back to life. If you invade and destroy a country, plunging it into a civil war, there isn’t much you can do ’til the smoke settles and blood is mopped up. Then maybe you can atone for the atrocity you have committed and help the living come back to a better life.
The Soviet Union got out of Afghanistan in 36 weeks. They did so and suffered hardly any losses as they left. They realized the mistake they had made and removed their troops. A civil war ensued. The bad guys won. Later, we overthrew the bad guys and everybody lived happily ever after. See! It all works out in the end!
The responsibility to end this war now falls upon the Democrats. Congress controls the purse strings and the Constitution says only Congress can declare war. Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi now hold the power to put an end to this madness. Failure to do so will bring the wrath of the voters. We aren’t kidding around, Democrats, and if you don’t believe us, just go ahead and continue this war another month. We will fight you harder than we did the Republicans. The opening page of my website has a photo of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, each made up by a collage of photos of the American soldiers who have died in Bush’s War. But it is now about to become the Bush/Democratic Party War unless swift action is taken.
This is what we demand:
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