"Michael & Me: A Love Story" by Eileen Jones

[JVS]

Capitalism: A Love Story is a fantastic slap-upside-the-head film, just what we need right now. It’s been playing a week in New York and Los Angeles, and just opened wide. The reviews are “mixed.” Critics say it’s just Michael Moore preaching to the choir again: people who love Michael Moore will go see the film, people who hate him won’t, therefore he has no persuasive effect whatsoever.

*snip*

It beats me how people have managed to get themselves so completely balled up about Michael Moore, the excellent filmmaker who gave us such great stuff as Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and now Capitalism: A Love Story. Conservatives hate him and try to dismiss him for obvious reasons—he’s a real threat, a working-class lefty with nerve, brains, humor, ass-kicking rhetorical strategies, and a lifetime membership in the NRA. But liberal types don’t seem to like him much either. Even when they praise his films they do it apologetically, grudgingly, condescendingly, hastening to make clear that, of course, Moore’s a fat naïve self-aggrandizing buffoon with a tired shtick that he’s been boring us with for twenty years, but still, he does get a lot of attention and pulls off an amusing prank now and then.

*snip*
Film History Lesson:
Direct Cinema is that fly-on-the-wall documentary style that most people vaguely assume is the gold standard of documentaries because the filmmaker is not seen or heard and you can kid yourself the film is free of the filmmaker’s subjective take on the material. It represented a break with documentary tradition, because prior to the 1950s-‘60s documentaries were largely staged affairs, featuring authoritative “Voice-of-God” narration telling you what to think about the images. Technological innovations during and after WW II, such as lighter cameras, faster film stocks, and portable sound recording equipment, allowed documentary filmmakers to get out in the streets and shoot on the run, and the Cinema Verite and Direct Cinema movement developed.

*snip*

These days we watch Synthesis Documentaries, which feature a mushy, familiar set of conventions we tend to embrace as “objective,” neutral, representing no particular point of view, weighing all controversies fairly and impersonally. All the techniques tossed out by Direct Cinema filmmakers in the interests of “neutral” observation are back—talking-head interviews, voice-over narration, musical scores, intertitles, archival materials, etc. Just think PBS.

We buy the Synthesis Documentaries as “impeccably researched” and “objective” because we are stupid and we learn nothing and we remember nothing.

http://exiledonline.com/michael-me-a-love-story/

[JVS]

1. kick

Nobody wants to talk about Michael Moore. I find this hard to believe

[AllentownJake]

2. Try tommorrow

There is a war going on over the Nobel Peace Prize