(Documentary) An Overture Films release of a Paramount Vantage, Overture Films presentation in association with the Weinstein Co., of a Dog Eat Dog production. (International sales: Paramount Vantage, Los Angeles.) Produced by Michael Moore, Anne Moore. Executive producers, Kathleen Glynn, Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein. Co-producers, Rod Birleson, John Hardesty. Directed, written by Michael Moore.
With: Michael Moore, Frank Moore.
By LESLIE FELPERINBy returning to his roots, professional gadfly Michael Moore turns in one of his best films with "Capitalism: A Love Story." Pic’s target is less capitalism qua capitalism than the banking industry, which Moore skewers ruthlessly, explaining last year’s economic meltdown in terms a sixth-grader could understand. That said, there’s still plenty here to annoy right-wingers, as well as those who, however much they agree with Moore’s politics, just can’t stomach his oversimplification, on-the-nose sentimentality and goofball japery. Whether "Capitalism" matches "Fahrenheit 9/11" or underperforms like Sicko" will depend on how much workers of the world are ready to unite behind the message. Pic reaped mostly ecstatic applause at its first press screening in Venice — no great surprise, given the largely leftist persuasion of film-fest auds, especially in Europe. Still, "Capitalism’s" worldview is resolutely U.S.-centric, apart from the odd approving mention of some foreign nation. Nevertheless, pic is likely to make considerably more offshore, where "socialism" isn’t considered a cuss word, than at home.
Another commercial factor to consider is whether, by the time the Overture release rolls out Oct. 2, most auds might feel too bored with or depressed about the economy to engage with the pic, despite its ultimately upbeat, power-to-the-people message. A release six months ago, when the crisis was still very raw, might have been surfed the zeitgeist more effectively. Ironically, given the current debate over President Obama’s health-care plans, "Sicko" might have suited the times better.
Sticking largely to the template laid down in his earlier films, particularly "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Sicko" ("Roger and Me" and "Bowling for Columbine" had more linear structures, with specific stories to tell), "Capitalism" skips around considerably, laying down a mix of reportage, interviews and polemic. In the opening reels alone, auds are introduced to ordinary folk whose homes are being repossessed; a gleefully unabashed real estate agent who specializes in finding bargains on foreclosed properties; immaculately researched archival footage presenting crew-cut 1950s squares extolling the virtues of capitalism; and homemovies showing Moore as a tow-headed child, visibly overjoyed to be visiting Wall Street on a vacation to New York from his hometown of Flint, Mich.
The helmer is a very visible onscreen presence here throughout, which detractors will decry as self-indulgent. But the decision is justified, given how relevant the damage done to the American automobile industry is to the banking crisis, as well as the the central role GM played in "Roger and Me," excerpts of which are shown here, and the fact that Moore’s father worked in the motor biz. There’s genuine poignancy, even surprising restraint and dignity, in a scene where father and son visit the vacant lot that once housed the factory where the elder Moore worked.
Unfortunately, elsewhere, Moore strives so hard to manipulate viewers’ emotions with shots of crying children and tearjerking musical choices that he’s not so much over-egging the pudding as making an omelet out of it. While it could be argued that Moore needs to milk the human-interest stories for all their worth to get auds to engage with his denunciation of capitalism, more often than not, such tactics just patronize the audience and descend into cheap sentimentality. Moore all but stops short of holding up dead puppies Hank Paulson personally murdered.
Moore is on much more persuasive ground when he holds back and lets a good story tell itself in drier terms, recalling his best, muckraking work in the tube series "TV Nation" and "The Awful Truth." There’s a horrifying yet absurd account, little known outside the U.S., of judges bribed to send as many juvenile offenders as possible to detention centers in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., some for offenses as trivial as ridiculing an assistant principal on MySpace. Also recalling the grassroots activism of his TV work are rousing segments of workers protesting Bank of America’s refusal to pay them money owed when the company goes into receivership, along with calls elsewhere to, if not arms, at least civil disobedience.
No Michael Moore film would be complete without scenes of the writer-helmer arguing with security guards in glassy office-building foyers as he attempts to have an impromptu word with the company’s CEO. Predictably ill-fated attempts are made to storm the citadels of various banks and financial institutions that survived the crash. In perhaps the funniest moment, Moore tries to find a banker who can explain what derivatives are; he corners one and says he wants some advice, to which the reply comes, quick as a flash: "Stop making films!"
Moore shows no signs of heeding this injunction, and ends the pic on a combatative note, vowing, "I refuse to live in a country like this, and I’m not leaving." It’s a pugnacious riposte to his right-wing critics, but in the end, Moore also fails to answer his left-wing doubters, who will have plenty of evidence here that Moore’s argument is less with capitalism as Marx and Engels understood it, or even as the North Koreans and Cubans do, than with capitalism’s most egregious excesses in the U.S. His ideal is not the end of private ownership, just more cooperatively owned businesses where everyone shares the wealth and makes collective decisions. Moore merely flirts with counterpointing socialism with capitalism, and ultimately sets up an inoffensive-to-the-point-of-meaningless notion of democracy as capitalism’s opposite.
Original footage looks almost deliberately cruddy, as if shaky camerawork were a badge of authenticity. Sound was also a bit muddy at the screening caught, but editing, credited to seven different names, is aces throughout.
Camera (color, HD), Dan Marracino, Jayme Roy; editors, John Walter, Conor O’Neill; co-editors, Jessica Brunetto, Alex Meillier, Tanya Ager Meillier, Pablo Proenza, T. Woody Richman; music, Jeff Gibbs; sound (Dolby Digital), Francisco LaTorre, Mark Roy, Hillary Stewart. Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (competing), Sept. 5, 2009. (Also in Toronto Film Festival — Special Presentations.) Running time: 117 MIN.
Originally posted by Fighting4Justice: This will be an interesting movie to watch. I either strongly like or dislike Moore docs so we'll see what pile this one falls under.
Which ones don't you like? Perhaps the one that juxtaposed homosexuals getting beheaded in Saudi Arabia with GWB holding the Arabian Prince's hand?
Originally posted by Fighting4Justice: This will be an interesting movie to watch. I either strongly like or dislike Moore docs so we'll see what pile this one falls under.
Which ones don't you like? Perhaps the one that juxtaposed homosexuals getting beheaded in Saudi Arabia with GWB holding the Arabian Prince's hand?
Why must you always go there? If you knew anything about Fighting you would know that is ridiculous.
Posts: 27352 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Originally posted by Fighting4Justice: This will be an interesting movie to watch. I either strongly like or dislike Moore docs so we'll see what pile this one falls under.
Which ones don't you like? Perhaps the one that juxtaposed homosexuals getting beheaded in Saudi Arabia with GWB holding the Arabian Prince's hand?
Why must you always go there? If you knew anything about Fighting you would know that is ridiculous.
Merely being polite and showing an interest in his apparent schizophrenia, 'tis all.
Originally posted by Fighting4Justice: This will be an interesting movie to watch. I either strongly like or dislike Moore docs so we'll see what pile this one falls under.
Which ones don't you like? Perhaps the one that juxtaposed homosexuals getting beheaded in Saudi Arabia with GWB holding the Arabian Prince's hand?
Why must you always go there? If you knew anything about Fighting you would know that is ridiculous.
Merely being polite and showing an interest in his apparent schizophrenia, 'tis all.
I disagree with the first part of your sentence and do not know what you mean in the second part.
Posts: 27352 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Originally posted by Fighting4Justice: This will be an interesting movie to watch. I either strongly like or dislike Moore docs so we'll see what pile this one falls under.
Which ones don't you like? Perhaps the one that juxtaposed homosexuals getting beheaded in Saudi Arabia with GWB holding the Arabian Prince's hand?
Why must you always go there? If you knew anything about Fighting you would know that is ridiculous.
Merely being polite and showing an interest in his apparent schizophrenia, 'tis all.
I disagree with the first part of your sentence and do not know what you mean in the second part.
Michael Moore is pretty consistent in terms of form and content. To have reactions of polar opposites to his work may be a sign of schizophrenia. Of course, this is just a layman's opinion; consult a medical professional if symptoms persist or worsen.
Or F4J might just want to tell us what's wrong with Moore's films? Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh can help him with that.
Originally posted by Fighting4Justice: This will be an interesting movie to watch. I either strongly like or dislike Moore docs so we'll see what pile this one falls under.
Which ones don't you like? Perhaps the one that juxtaposed homosexuals getting beheaded in Saudi Arabia with GWB holding the Arabian Prince's hand?
Why must you always go there? If you knew anything about Fighting you would know that is ridiculous.
Merely being polite and showing an interest in his apparent schizophrenia, 'tis all.
I disagree with the first part of your sentence and do not know what you mean in the second part.
Michael Moore is pretty consistent in terms of form and content. To have reactions of polar opposites to his work may be a sign of schizophrenia. Of course, this is just a layman's opinion; consult a medical professional if symptoms persist or worsen.
Or F4J might just want to tell us what's wrong with Moore's films? Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh can help him with that.
I enjoy Michael Moore's films, though I do not think he has made a film as great as his first "Roger and Me", but you do not have to be a conservative to question some of his methods. He is like any idealogue and only presents certain facts while ignoring others and sometimes arranging facts in questionable ways. Say who knows how many Canadian doors he really had to knock on to find open ones in "Bowling for Columbine"... it reminds me of how many people know the name of our first president before Jay Leno finds someone who does not in comedy segments. I also remember in "Sicko" when he shows a report meant to embarrass America about our relatively low ranking in terms of general. Embarrassing for sure especially for such a wealthy country. The film ends with a trip to Cuba for supposedly improved healthcare but in the earlier report, meant to be taken as evidence, you can see Cuba is lower in healthcare quality. So is that report accurate or not? Reminds me of you trying to prove "Klute" was a great film by presenting a negative review.
Anyways, despite the flaws in reasoning and methodology all of Michael Moore's films are highly worth seeing... I have also read all his books. Still, they are the liberal answer, along with Air America, to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and so on and suffer similar faults. The fact that I am usually on Michael Moore's side and find him funny and gutsy makes his work sit better with me than right wing idealogues.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: pacinofan,
Posts: 27352 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
I guess the easy answer for Pucifier's own strange satisfaction is that I am indeed schizophrenic, if that is the only reason I can like some and dislike other Michael Moore docs.
Posts: 8671 | Location: Canada | Registered: October 26, 2005
Originally posted by Fighting4Justice: I guess the easy answer for Pucifier's own strange satisfaction is that I am indeed schizophrenic, if that is the only reason I can like some and dislike other Michael Moore docs.
As a medical professional did you have some issues with "Sicko"?
Posts: 27352 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
This solidly on the left wish-socialism-could-happen guy is not a fan of Michael Moore. On issues, he is mostly right; his filmmaking methods though often are heavy-handed and simplistic. He doesn't get a pass just because we have similar political viewpoints.
By Deborah Young, September 06, 2009 01:08 ET Bottom Line: Building the case for capitalism as an obscene evil was never so easy. Venice Film Festival (Competition)
VENICE -- Twenty years after "Roger & Me" introduced Michael Moore to the world as a politically engaged documaker with a strong knack for showmanship, "Capitalism: A Love Story" sums up his disgust with corporate America and its devastating effect on the lives of ordinary people.
Ending on the notes of the "Internationale" as Moore theatrically encircles New York banks with crime scene tape, the film launches a call for socialism via a popular uprising against the evils of capitalism and free enterprise. Although it's less focused than "Sicko" or "Fahrenheit 9/11" -- whose boxoffice it should resemble -- because its subject is more abstract, this is a typical Moore oeuvre: funny, often over the top and of dubious documentation, but with strongly made points that leave viewers much to ponder and debate after they walk out of the theater.
Simplifications are Moore's stock-in-trade, and his documentaries are not known for their impeccable research and objectivity. But here his talent is evident in creating two hours of engrossing cinema by contrasting a fast-moving montage of '50s archive images extolling free enterprise with the economic disaster of the present. Given the desperate state of the world economy, this provocative film should find attentive audiences along with many angry detractors who will give it free publicity.
As in his previous films, Moore is himself the chief character, offscreen narrator and investigator. Wearing his inseparable baseball cap and T-shirt, he pretends wide-eyed surprise as his interview subjects recount personal dramas related to America's economic meltdown. These are genuinely moving stories: a couple whose farm is in foreclosure, a family that discovers the father's company has taken out a lucrative insurance policy and earned $5 million on his premature death, tearful workers whose factory is suddenly shut down, commercial airline pilots so underpaid they live on food stamps.
Moore has assembled a collection of nearly unbelievable horror stories to illustrate why capitalism and democracy do not go hand in hand, like a privately owned juvenile correctional facility, which paid the local judge to jail teens for misdemeanors. Even the Catholic Church is marshaled in support of his argument, and Moore finds several priests and a bishop who condemn capitalism as an immoral and incompatible with Jesus and the Bible.
The second half of the film is even more chilling in suggesting, through interviews with a number of worried members of Congress, that the country's $700 billion bailout was legalized bank robbery, a "financial coup d'etat" run through Congress just before elections and engineered principally by Goldman Sachs and Henry Paulson.
Though it blames all political parties, including the Democrats, for caving in with the bailout, the film is careful to spare President Barack Obama, who remains a symbol of hope for justice. His support for the workers who stage a sit-in at their factory is paralleled to Franklin D. Roosevelt's call for a new bill of rights -- never implemented -- guaranteeing universal health care.
A Paramount Vantage, Overture Films presentation in association with the Weinstein Co. Production company: Dog Eat Dog Films Sales: Paramount Vantage Director-screenwriter: Michael Moore Producers: Michael Moore, Anne Moore Co-producers: Rod Birleson, John Hardesty Director of photography: Dan Marracino, Jayme Ro Music: Jeff Gibbs Editors: Conor O'Neill, John Walter
No rating, 120 minutes
Posts: 27352 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A *** out of **** from Christy Lemire in the ASSOCIATED PRESS...
How do you make a movie about the country's current economic crisis and actually get people to see it?
Two obstacles most obviously arise: illustrating such a potentially dry subject in a compelling way, and persuading audiences to pay money for information they can get at home — and feel depressed about — for free.
Having Michael Moore as our guide certainly helps. Twenty years after he took on General Motors with his powerful debut "Roger & Me," the proud provocateur is aiming at the same sorts of targets with his latest documentary, "Capitalism: A Love Story."
This is vintage Moore, reflecting both the filmmaker's fondness for manipulation and his strengths as a showman. As he did with "Sicko" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," he typically oversimplifies a complicated topic to make it accessible and amusing for the broadest possible audience. Obviously, when he returns to GM's headquarters two decades later — and the security guard sees him and his crew coming from a mile away — he's doing it as a hilarious spectacle and he doesn't really expect to get into the building for an interview.
It's good for a laugh, as is so much of "Capitalism." But Moore also tells moving stories of specific families who've lost their homes to foreclosure, or airline pilots whose wages are so low, they rely on secondary jobs and food stamps to survive.
With a big assist from his crack team of archivists, he brilliantly juxtaposes 1950s footage of wholesome guys and gals extolling the virtues of capitalism with all-too familiar shots of contemporary hardship. But we also see home movies of a young, towheaded Moore, excitedly visiting Wall Street from his home in Flint, Mich. — and looking impish even as a child — which will become even more relevant when Moore comes back to the economic vortex in the film's final, dramatic moments.
In making the argument that capitalism is evil, Moore is all over the place, and he doesn't even make the vaguest attempt at finding balance journalistically. Then again, he never has. But at least he's equal opportunity, blaming politicians on both sides of the aisle for allowing Wall Street's influence on government to lead us into the troubles we're in today. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) are right up there alongside then-U.S. Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman Sachs executive) Hank Paulson, announcing the $700 billion stimulus package that bailed out banks and mortgage giants last year.
And he's just as inclusive in his suggestion that, while we're all in this thing together, we're also capable of making a change together. (Along those thematic lines, the only person who doesn't receive any kind of skewering is President Barack Obama.)
"Capitalism" may make you feel hopeless, with its tales of corporations taking out huge insurance policies on dying workers and judges accused of accepting bribes to send teenagers away to a for-profit Pennsylvania juvenile detention center for ridiculous reasons. But it also gains the most momentum with real-life examples of the people standing up for themselves, such as the laid-off Chicago window company workers who staged a good, old-fashioned sit-in to fight for outstanding wages, or the California bakery that functions as a co-op where the employees are also the owners.
As dense and daunting as "Capitalism" can often seem, it may also be Moore's most hopeful film yet, and it couldn't be more relevant or resonant. See it — and argue about it — with someone you love.
"Capitalism: A Love Story," an Overture Films release, is rated R for some language. Running time: 126 minutes. Three stars out of four.
Posts: 27352 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” is anything but — something you, I and everyone who has ever watched him shamble into action, megaphone to mouth, know from the start. He might have had a crush on capitalism early on, yet anyone who thinks that the two have been on friendly terms for a while hasn’t been paying attention. After years of needling big business in movies like “Roger & Me” (about the auto industry) and “Sicko” (health insurance), and giving voice to the disempowered, he has finally decided to go after the system that, in his words, is dedicated to “taking and giving, mostly taking.”
His timing couldn’t be better, as the headlines and innumerable journalists, politicians, bloggers, tea partiers, talk-show bloviators and millions of unemployed, underemployed, fed-up and freaked-out citizens are making clear. It’s the morning after in America (where one of the big movie hits of the year is titled “The Hangover”), and Captain Mike is here to explain it all or at least crack jokes, milk tears, recycle the news and fan the flames of liberal indignation. Along the way, because his heart is in the right place even if his images aren’t always, he also makes room for other voices, including those of striking workers and members of one family in foreclosure who videotaped the police breaking down the door to evict them.
Nothing if not direct, Mr. Moore cuts right to the point or rather the queasy joke, opening the movie with surveillance shots of citizens partaking of a favorite pastime: robbing banks. He then introduces some wittily culled clips from a movie titled “Life in Ancient Rome,” which looks and sounds like one of those educational flicks you tried to sleep through in school and which he juxtaposes with more recent totems of American power, including the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center draped in the Stars and Stripes. (The New York premiere of the movie on Monday was at Alice Tully Hall, the main site for the New York Film Festival. Mr. Moore isn’t in this year’s lineup, but still grabbed some of its spotlight.)
America, in other words, is headed straight down the historical toilet, along with Nero and his fiddle (or rather Dick Cheney, who’s anointed with a throwaway reference to the “emperor”), a thesis that Mr. Moore continues to advance if not refine with another hour and a half or so of alternatingly entertaining and distracting found footage; some stirring archival images of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; snippets from charming home movies; and assorted weeping, gloating, pontificating and sensible talking heads. Some of those heads are baffling (the actor and author Wallace Shawn, enlisted to explain free enterprise); some of them are sharp, welcome, bracing, provoking, mostly when they’re able to talk without too much interference from the comically mugging, slack-jawed Mr. Moore.
Despite the waggish invocation of ancient Rome, the story in “Capitalism” more truly begins where and when its director did, in Flint, Mich., after the end of World War II. In broad strokes Mr. Moore, who was born in 1954, positions himself as an Everyman whose family reaped all the usual rewards of postwar middle-class prosperity. This collective dream begins to disintegrate rather fuzzily (cue the Vietnam War), coming to a bummer climax in the 1970s (cue an unsmiling Jimmy Carter in a cardigan) and culminating in the ascension of the Smiler in Chief, Ronald Reagan, whom Mr. Moore introduces as a “spokesmodel for president.” Tax cuts, union busting and household debt ensue, as does some protest, notably in the form of “Roger & Me,” Mr. Moore’s first movie.
Mr. Moore doesn’t just refer to “Roger & Me,” which involved his attempts to speak with Roger Smith, the chief executive of the floundering General Motors; he also includes some nominal highlights from that 1989 movie. A lot of performers like to replay their early hits, so it isn’t surprising that Mr. Moore, a practiced showman, recycles images of his younger, slimmer self engaging in one of his trademark moves: trying to enter a building to speak truth to power, only to be turned away by security guards. It was faintly amusing theater then, especially if you didn’t think too hard about the fact that he was hassling working people just trying to do their jobs. It’s less amusing when he repeats the same routine in “Capitalism.”
He’s on far firmer ethical ground when he doesn’t use other human beings as props. Some of the more effective scenes in “Capitalism” involve his straightforward, journalistic interviews with people who have been abused by the greed of their employers. In one segment he visits with a widower whose wife was unknowingly insured by her company — a sleazy practice colloquially known as dead peasant insurance — which earned it a chunk of change when the woman died. (Even after death, your boss can exploit you.) Like many of the stories Mr. Moore pulls together in this movie, dead peasant insurance might not be a revelation to those who follow the news, but it makes for infuriating viewing.
In the end, what is to be done? After watching “Capitalism,” it beats me. Mr. Moore doesn’t have any real answers, either, which tends to be true of most socially minded directors in the commercial mainstream and speaks more to the limits of such filmmaking than to anything else. Like most of his movies, “Capitalism” is a tragedy disguised as a comedy; it’s also an entertainment. This isn’t the story of capitalism as conceived by Karl Marx or Naomi Klein, and it certainly isn’t the story of contemporary American capitalism, which extends across the globe and far beyond Mr. Moore’s sightlines.
Neither is it an effective call to action: Mr. Moore would like us to vote, which suggests a startling faith in the possibilities of social change in the current political system. That faith appears to be due in some part to the election of President Obama.
As it happens, the most galvanizing words in the movie come not from the current president but from Roosevelt, who in 1944 called for a “second bill of rights,” asserting that “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” The image of this visibly frail president, who died the next year, appealing to our collective conscience — and mapping out an American future that remains elusive — is moving beyond words. And chilling: “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” It’s a brilliant moment of cinema both for the man delivering the speech and for Mr. Moore, who smartly realized that he’d found one other voice that needed to be as loud as his own.
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Posts: 27352 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story is a blistering, mad-as-hell indictment of everything in America that, according to Moore, has led to our current state of economic peril. The back-scratching greed and corruption, the cult of Wall Street as a casino for elites, the subprime mortgage vendors who operated like loan sharks: Moore pulls the big picture together, and much of the movie (about three-fifths of it) is urgent, unsettling, and mischievously funny. Yet I wish — oh, how I wish — that Moore had restrained himself from painting America's sins with too broad a brush. Pointing his finger at ''capitalism'' Moore sounds a little too much like Rush Limbaugh getting hot under the collar about ''socialism.'' In both cases, they’re not making an argument — they’re demonizing a word.
Early on, Moore, who narrates the movie in his trademark tone of bedtime-fairy-tale sarcasm, creates a memorable montage of the '50s and '60s, taking us back to a more secure and, in some ways, egalitarian America. For Moore, the transformative moment was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Capitalism: A Love Story is most potent when it shows us what the financial desperation and ruthless corporate squeezing that descended from that era now look like. There's an astonishing section about companies that take out life-insurance policies on their employees, profiting from their deaths, and Moore squeezes a great deal of symbolic mileage out of the fact that airline pilots have been reduced to beleaguered wage slaves who routinely make less than $20,000 a year. Then there's the federal government's $700 billion bank bailout, which for Moore is a conspiracy, an officially sanctioned robbery.
Here, as in the health-care doc Sicko (2007), Moore's real subject is the collapse of the social contract. That's a powerful theme, but why did he have to make the film's villain nothing less than…capitalism itself? Moore depicts the very concept of American free enterprise as inherently unjust. But even if you believe that deregulation in the '80s went too far, that unchecked capitalism is a voracious beast that can eat a culture alive, you may have a hard time swallowing the film's finale, in which Moore trashes our system as ''evil'' and pushes for a citizens' ''revolt.'' At its best, Capitalism: A Love Story is a searing outcry against the excesses of a cutthroat time. At its worst, it's dorm-room Marxism. B
Posts: 27352 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Say what you like about Michael Moore, he certainly knows how to pick his subjects. "Fahrenheit 9/11" was so au courant about the invasion of Iraq it won the 2004 Palme d'Or at Cannes, and 2007's "Sicko" got the jump on the current healthcare imbroglio. Now, barely a year after the Wall Street meltdown, "Capitalism: A Love Story" examines, in typical love-it-or-leave-it Moore fashion, the causes of the collapse of the century.
"Capitalism" is not just Moore's latest documentary, it is, as the filmmaker himself has said, "the movie I've been making for the past 20 years." He lays the ills of American society that he's chronicled over all that time at the feet of an out-of-control free-market system he so detests that he puts priests on camera to talk about capitalism as morally evil.
Clearly, Moore has not lost his provocateur's gift for stirring the pot, and it is heartening to have a filmmaker take on a subject this all-encompassing and almost taboo. But not even Moore's skill can quell the suspicion that "Capitalism" misses the narrower focus that gave his earlier films some of their punch.
In a sense, "Capitalism" comes by its wide-ranging, scattershot approach naturally. After all, this is a heck of a big subject: Just ask Karl Marx, who spent 18 years researching and writing his multi-volume "Das Kapital." So it's perhaps inevitable because of the ton of territory "Capitalism" covers that this film ends up as the sum of its parts, nothing more.
That said, Moore's scattershot is a lot more interesting than some filmmakers' focus, and many of those individual parts are classic. For one thing, Moore retains the instincts of a shrewd stand-up comedian -- the astonished, baffled looks he often wears are a case in point, as is his decision to include under the rubric of "When did Jesus become a capitalist?" the dubbing of a section of a biblical epic with free-market platitudes.
And Moore has not lost his zest for confrontational antics. He asks New York financial workers to explain derivatives, drives an armored car up to AIG corporate headquarters and demands the company return federal bailout funds, even surrounds all of Wall Street with yellow "crime scene" tape to emphasize his low opinion of the area's activities.
One of the things that is new about "Capitalism" is an emphasis on the filmmaker's personal life. He talks about how, inspired by Daniel Berrigan, he wanted to be an activist priest, and he goes with his dad to the site of the former AC spark plug plant in Flint, Mich., -- now a vacant lot -- where his father spent satisfying decades as a union-protected assembly-line worker.
The main point Moore wants to make, the thing that drives him craziest, is his notion that capitalism, far from being a system that rewards excellence, is a scheme set up to make a profit on absolutely anything. He fears it has in recent decades turned American society into a culture that says money is the only value, and he has a number of cases he wants to use to make his point. These include:
* The scandal surrounding a for-profit juvenile detention center in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in which two judges got millions of dollars in kickbacks from the owners for sending more than a thousand juveniles to the establishment.
* The little-noticed portion of the congressional testimony of Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, the US Airways pilot who miraculously landed his plane on New York's Hudson River, who told legislators that his pay has been cut 40% in recent years and his pension terminated.
* The strategy of major firms to take out life insurance policies on their employees -- known in the trade as "dead peasant insurance" -- that pays off to the companies, not to the employees' survivors.
Though he started on "Capitalism" before last year's Wall Street meltdown, Moore delves into that collapse as well. While another documentary, Leslie ****burn's "American Casino," does a better job with the questions surrounding massive housing foreclosures, Moore's film, aided by strong statements from Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), raises questions about the nature of the multibillion-dollar government bailout.
At the end of the day, perhaps the most startling thing about "Capitalism" is that Moore stands revealed not as some pointy-headed socialist but as an unreconstructed New Deal Democrat who admires Franklin D. Roosevelt, believes in increased democracy and opportunity, and feels that the decades-long weakening of unions has fatally weakened America. The fact that this will be a controversial stance says as much about today's political culture as it does about Moore's place in it.
Posts: 27352 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Michael Moore is now a Marxist for Capitalism: A Love Story But he's still selling the same old shtick
By Ella Taylor
The ushers at a packed screening of Michael Moore's latest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, came proudly decked out in T-shirts bearing slogans like "Make Love, Not Capitalism" and "Capitalism, We Have a Problem." The shirts and the movie are brought to you by those filthy Reds: Overture Films—which is owned by John Malone, the Limbaugh-loving media magnate who was fined a hefty $1.4 million this summer by the Justice Department for illegal stock purchases.
Such are the contradictions of late capitalism, and I wish that more of them had made it into this scattershot, lazy slice of agitprop, which recycles Moore's usual slice-and-dice job on corporations, while bobbing a curtsey to the current crisis.
Less a movie than a traveling circus, Capitalism is cobbled together from the director's usual toolbox of film clips, pseudo-triumphalist choral scores, potted labor history, and staged stunts with the director's left-leaning pals—in this case, a downright baffling shopping trip with a bemused Wallace Shawn to illustrate the oxymoronic doublespeak of free market.
Moore is a skilled court jester, and there's some bitter fun in the sight of a Harvard economist tying himself in knots trying to define a derivative, or Moore wrapping the perimeter of AIG headquarters in crime-scene yellow tape like some unhinged Christo. But if you've seen his other films—the footage of former Treasury Secretary Donald Regan whispering to a speechifying President Reagan to "speed it up," or Reagan the actor slapping a woman on screen intercut with footage of marching feminists—a dubbed-over Jesus spewing corporate doublespeak feels like old hat. Mostly, Capitalism is a point-by-point retread of Moore's 1989 film Roger & Me, with Moore trying and failing once more to gain entry to the offices of General Motors. He notes, but doesn't much pursue, the fact that the company is now bankrupt. Instead, he goes on pummeling the corporations, and the legislators who sit in their laps, in the usual way. If Capitalism feels stale, it's partly because Moore isn't trying very hard, but more crucially because, one way or another, now everyone knows about or has felt the sting of the current crisis firsthand.
If economic collapse has done anything to change Moore's position, it has been to push him further—or, at least, more explicitly—to the left. Contrary to its strategically ambiguous title, whose irony is designed to make hip liberals nod their knowing heads without scaring off the hard right (as if they'd show up for anything with Michael Moore in the credits), Capitalism is the most purely Marxist film Moore has ever made. Its purpose is not just to go after corporations and their sidekicks in Congress, but also to fully come out of the closet and acknowledge free enterprise as evil. Quite an admission from a man who, on this side of the Atlantic, never identifies himself as a socialist—unless he's talking to Canadians.
Predictably, Capitalism played well with Moore's most loyal constituency, the college-educated young blades at my screening, who clapped when Dennis Kucinich's face filled the screen and gave the movie a standing ovation. Will the lifelong Republicans and conservative Democrats whose lives have been shredded by the worst slump since the Great Depression show up, assuming they can still afford a trip to the multiplex? Unlikely, but if they did, they'd see their daily plight writ large in the movie's genuinely touching moments, unadorned by Moore's cloying habit of milking pathos for every last drop.
We see Moore walking his elderly but still sharp father around the razed lot that was once the spark-plug factory where he had worked all his life, visiting companies that are making a go out of profit-sharing, and chatting with the sheriff who put an end to foreclosures in his town. Though there's little here that we don't see already on TV news, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the victims of foreclosure and shady bank deals who allow the director into their shattered lives. The last word goes to a gun owner whom we watch packing up his home and then, heartbreakingly, being paid a measly $1,000 to clean up the site by the very bank that foreclosed on him. "There's the people that's got it all, and the people who don't have nothing," he says bitterly. Charlie Marx must be shouting "Toldja!" from his grave.
Posts: 27352 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
