Michael Moore

Michael Moore is a American documentarian and patriotic liberal activist hailing from the former auto industry-run town of Flint, Michigan. He has taken upon himself to enlighten the people of the United States about the tyrannical underpinnings of the unlamented Bush/Cheney Administration. Moore’s work uses sardonic humor and various interviews and staged public "stunts" to inform the viewer about the hypocrisies and ironies - as well as the disturbing lack of sanity - which can be found in America's Conservative people and their policies. As a result, conservative pundits really hate him a lot, but like another American liberal humorist, Al Franken, Michael Moore usually regards their hate as the best sort of compliment. In a sense, people like him and Faux rightie- loudmouth Bill O'Reilly and his ilk are cultural symbiotes, with each of them getting public recognition from the negative response of the other; however, this interaction still remains largely unrecognised by the viewing public.

Criticism
Moore has criticized globalization, large corporations, the excesses of unbridled capitalism, gun violence, the Iraq War, U.S. President George W. Bush and the American health care system which lacks Universal health care. Time Magazine says he is one of the 100 most influential people. He is often criticized by conservatives who become agitated when his documentaries end up containing truth they don't like, and/or have decided to ignore and try to get the public to join them in ignorance. (Compare Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth.)

In addition to making movies, he has also written several books which explore the themes brought up in the films in more depth: these include Stupid White Men and Dude, Where's My Country.

Prominent Films
Moore was first recognised for his sad but funny Roger and Me, a look at the interaction between a small town (Flint) and a big corporation (General Motors). His next film Bowling For Columbine, which explored America's obsession with projectile weapons, won him an Oscar.

Later, after the insane march of the Bush II decade had begun, he released his 2006 movie,  Fahrenheit 9/11 , which had won the Cannes Film Festival before arriving at US theaters. In it, he shows the public that whatever it is that actually did happen on September 11, 2001, there are a lot of things that point to it being something other than what the news was telling us - and that there have been a lot of rather interesting and ghastly circumstances suggesting it's not completely illogical to at least consider that Dubya and his people may have known about it in advance, and used it to ferment wars and inspire fervent American nationalism coupled with widespread hate for people of Islamic nations, as well as people who merely looked like they might be Muslims. The movie never outright accused Bush of complicity nor did it get bogged down in a lot of irrelevant and/or unprovable details as some less-popular documentaries about this subject have allowed themselves to become - owing to this, it was the mainstream's first look at the 9/11 issue from a different angle than they'd been getting on the TV news. Owing to this film's controversial nature, many people went to see it after they heard the usual blathering conservative pundits impugning its maker as a "traitor to his nation". The result was that a lot of people of the sort who didn't tend to believe in conspiracies began to wonder about whether perhaps there may have actually been one. In addition, the film decried the disinformation campaign that ramped up to the invasion of Iraq.

He followed this up the following year with Sicko, which delves into the question, "Why does the wealthiest country on the planet have one of its worst and costliest healthcare systems?" -It shows examples of how screwed up this has gotten in America, and also examples of the sort of care available in Canada and Great Britain.

Capitalism: a Love Story
His most recent film Capitalism: a Love Story  was released in 2009, and the subject of this one was the only thing anyone seemed to talk about on the news that year, the Recession That Would Not Die, and its various manifestations, which Moore sees as basically signs that capitalism is an institution that is deeply flawed and needs to either end or change - and that we are at our peril should it not do so soon. (People who hate him claim this means he's a Communist, which reveals the depth of their ignorance, since someone who thinks the American people should take back their government and run things to better serve them would not cotton well to the idea of the State owning everything and making everyone's decisions for them.)

In this bleak look at the econocatastrophic stain that Bush II left behind on his way out of his stolen office, he shows just how a handful of ludicrously rich Wall Street bankers from investment firms - notably Goldman Sachs (aka "Sacks o' Gold, Man") managed to "drive a truck up to the Treasury gate" and just load it up with billions of dollars of  money that the American people thought they'd purchased a government with when they paid their taxes. Instead, Moore showed that in 2008, they purchased things such as the right for a few obscenely rich bankers to each receive "one million dollars each" - this occurring after they whined to Congress and to the media that if they didn't get it, they would make the economy go "boom" - which translates to "bust". Except they blamed that on everything except what was actually causing it - the cooking of their books by their wizard-accountants, which could've put Julia Child to shame. After they got their bailout, they did some more magic and made it all just disappear.

This is just one of the mysteries Moore investigates in this film, showing just how bad things got anyway despite giving the bankers what they'd said they needed, being as no one seems to be able to make this recession go away, or even tell us exactly how one could conceivably make it do so. This is unlikely to get better being that the same Wall Street gangs who got that "bailout" continue to regard the New York Stock Exchange as their own personal Las Vegas, one where the loaded dice at the crap tables make their bets win by playing by different rules than everyone else plays by. This is called "insider trading". They do it because they can, and think "everyone is doing it" justifies it, only that's just the problem, since everyone isn't doing it, since only they get to have the secret information about the numbers the dice are going to roll. And then when they've run out of money themselves, they just go ahead and keep making bets with other people's money. Too bad that in this case what happens in "Vegas" does not stay there.

One noticeable result of all their games has been massive amounts of foreclosures. Foreclosure is what happens when your bank decides it can manage to get more money paid on your mortgage than you've been paying on it your whole life, and get you to sign confusing documents that allow them to legally decide "Your mortgage isn't welcome here any more" - then change it to suit them. They have to find some way to replace the kitty they so rapidly have emptied: they basically steal your house and sell it off, replacing you with someone richer, and making themselves get that way by remarkable coincidence. (A vast oversimplification: it's far more complex than that--but the important point is that homelessness is the end result of it.) Moore shows here just how bad that problem has been getting, since if enough people are emptied from a town, then there's less and less people remaining to run all its stores and factories...which then makes more people lose their jobs, causing yet more homes to be lost...and this just goes on and on, until there's nothing left but "For Sale" signs on every window. This is actually emptying out cities like Stockton, California. Fortunately, apparently there are mavericks within the local governments of a few US towns and cities who are are stepping in to end foreclosures to help save the integrity of their constituencies--despite what they're doing being not exactly legal. Moore interviews one of them in this film.

Slacker Uprising
He also produced Slacker Uprising and released it free on the Internet with the intent of inspiring more Americans to bother enough to actually vote. (After the Shrubbery-stolen 2000 Election, a whole lot of Americans got a bit pessimistic about whether their votes counted, or whether anyone counted their votes - which amounted to the same thing, really. Whether Moore persuaded the Americans to come out and vote or if they voted because they were sick of Bush is sort of academic, since people who don't hate Shrub tend not to follow the advice of Michael Moore. Americans did come out in large numbers and voted for Obama. (Which Moore was thrilled about, naturally, and he was far from being alone in this.) Even folk in the UK and other nations were thrilled.

Filmography

 * Roger & Me


 * The Big One


 * Bowling for Columbine


 * Fahrenheit 9/11


 * Sicko


 * Capitalism: A Love Story

References and External Links

 * Michael Moore
 * Michael Moore
 * Michael Moore
 * Michael Moore releases Slacker Uprising for free on Net