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Scott McCulloch A & E Editor Shortly into Michael Moore's 1998 film "The Big One," Moore and his crew pull into the parking lot of a huge corporation that has just laid off several thousand workers. He is there to hand out one of his satirical "Downsizer of the Year" awards, given to corporations that have cut jobs while racking up enormous profits. As the car rolls to a stop and the crew prepares to enter the building, we hear, offscreen, the camera operator ask Moore, "What's the deal here?" Moore succinctly replies, "The deal is, you never turn the camera off." Michael Moore, former journalist turned documentary filmmaker, television-show host and author, has forged an art from this sort of filmed confrontation, captured with his continuously running camera. His formula is simple, yet, in film after film, he has shone a spotlight on the injustice and inanity of American capitalism and culture.
Moore has been a journalist and filmmaker most of his life, but his working-class background, unshaved beard, off-kilter baseball cap, and general unkempt appearance lend him street credibility. He always looks as if he has just walked from an assembly line to in front of the camera. It is this image of an average joe attempting to confront power way beyond his control which is so entertaining and inspiring to watch. With "Bowling for Columbine," Moore focused his David-and-Goliath routine on the NRA and K-mart (the Columbine shooters bought their bullets at K-mart), leading him to the Cannes Film Festival, where he received a special Grand Jury Prize and a 13-minute standing ovation for his effort. At one point, "Bowling" tries to associate national violence with international violence, remarking that the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado occurred on the day of the heaviest bombardment of Yugoslavia by NATO forces. Some may see it as nearly an act of divine providence that Moore just happened to win the Best Documentary Oscar for "Bowling" a few days after America and Great Britain invaded Iraq. Some members of the audience booed as Moore struggled to give his acceptance speech, denouncing President Bush and the war on Iraq. Personally, I thought it was sickening to see all of those milquetoast Hollywood lefties silently squirm in their seats, knowing if the camera caught them clapping, it might cost them cash when they signed their next film deal.
The Academy incident may have emboldened Michael even more - in a recent interview, he said his next documentary will be about how the Bush administration is using the terrorist attacks of 2001 to advance its ultra-conservative agenda. Please, Michael, continue to do us all a service, and keep that camera running. Roger and Me (1989) The stated purpose of Moore's first film is to meet General Motors CEO Roger Smith and ask him why GM is moving a factory from Flint, Mich., to Mexico at a time of record profits. He never really gets a chance to talk to Roger, but his film turns out to be a heart-rending document of the economic collapse of Flint. Moore's camera follows the deputy sheriff of Flint as he evicts tenant after tenant - all of them unemployed, and many, former GM employees. One of the mothers in an unemployed family has turned to selling rabbit meat to make a few extra bucks, and in the film's most shocking scene, she nonchalantly beats a rabbit to death with a metal pipe and skins it. Moore's camera never turns away during this scene, and it is this kind of unwavering depiction of the everyday horrors of poverty, indignity and hopelessness that can come with a lost job, that makes this film so good. For levity, these scenes are balanced with shots of the GM executives attending black-tie cocktail parties and meting out naive advice to the newly unemployed about everybody in Flint, "coming together and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps," and that kind of nonsense. A GM spokesperson who is interviewed tries to explain the logic of the market system, but just comes off sounding utterly insipid. The success of "Roger and Me" propelled Moore into his two short-lived television shows, confirming that TV and truth don't get along very well. The Big One (1998) Finding himself unemployed in the mid-'90s, Moore decided to write a book: "Downsize This: Random Threats from an Unarmed American." His publisher asked him to do a tour to support his new book, so to make things interesting, Moore brought along a film crew. "The Big One" follows Moore from one big, conglomerate bookstore to the next, with many stops along the way to encourage strikers, talk with workers attempting to unionize, and, of course, chastise corporations by handing out "Downsizer of the Year" awards at various corporate headquarters. This film isn't structured as his others and is a lot of fun the way it wanders around, not too worried about where it is going. In a chance meeting at an airport, Michael chats with Garrison Keillor about book promotion. Keillor tells Michael to remember he's "just a chunk of meat" when on a book tour; in another scene, he jams with the guitarist for "Cheap Trick," doing a version of "Blowin' in the Wind," complete with a gravelly, Dylanesque whine. In clips from his appearances at bookstores, Michael ponders why then-presidential candidate Steven Forbes never seems to blink, suggesting he may be a space alien. A hilarious interview with a Forbes campaign worker seems to confirm his suspicion. In a more serious moment, Michael goes on Studs Turkel's radio show in Chicago, where he talks about the recent Oklahoma City bombing. Michael agrees that, "Parking a Ryder truck filled with explosives outside of a building and detonating it is terrorism, but what do you call it when you politely remove the people from the building before blowing it up? I call that 'economic terrorism.'" Bowling for Columbine (2002) Why do Americans kill more than 10,000 other Americans every year with guns? "Bowling for Columbine" is Michael's award-winning contemplation of this question. He scrutinizes America's gun culture, comparing our society with those of other industrialized nations, presenting one country as an especially perplexing contrast to the U.S: Canada. The Canadians have violent TV shows, video games and a proliferation of firearms similar to America, yet they have less than 2 percent of the number of firearm homicides we do. Intrigued, Michael heads north to investigate. In a series of interviews with people on the street, we find Canadians to be a lot less preoccupied with crime than Americans, some of them saying that, although their houses have been burgled before, they still don't bother to lock the front door. In a sequence that had the audience in the movie theatre absolutely howling with laughter, Michael goes door-to-door in a residential neighborhood in Toronto to see if this is true, freely walking into every house he tries. Back in the states, he takes on the National Rifle Association, culminating in an interview at the Los Angeles home of NRA spokesman Charlton Heston, who obviously has no idea who Moore is. Taken aback by Michael's in-your-face tactics, Heston gets up and walks out on the interview when asked to apologize for what Moore sees as the NRA's reckless promotion of guns. Moore's often abrasive character can make the audience, and the people who appear on screen with him, feel uncomfortable, but it is his directness and unwavering indictment of social and economic injustice that make this such a dramatic and entertaining film. "Roger and Me" and "The Big One" are available on videotape and DVD. "Bowling for Columbine" is now showing at the Metro Cinema. © 2003 Shoreline Community College™ |
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