Michael Moore & the documentary

[ChristineR]

I don't like Michael Moore for the same reason I don't like watching television commercials. He manipulates, he doesn't educate. Like advertisers, one can do that without actually lying. Sicko is an advertisement of socialized medicine. I'm not necessarily opposed to socialized medicine, I just have no interest in watching a commercial for it.

Which is a fair critique, I think, except that no one applies the same standards to the actual ads for the commercialized medical system. Moore's not in it for the money--he genuinely believes socialized medicine is the right answer and he made a commercial for it. You can't say the same about the people making the commercials for private medical insurers.

 

[Ziggurat]

Moore's not in it for the money--he genuinely believes socialized medicine is the right answer and he made a commercial for it.

I'm sure he really believes in it, but I'm not sure you can conclude that he's not also in it for the money. Tickets for the movie aren't being handed out free, and when it makes it to DVD, I doubt he's going to OK piracy.

You can't say the same about the people making the commercials for private medical insurers.

The advertisers? No. But the people who commission them (who are, in a sense, more comparable to Moore in that they're the ones allocating resources to get the ads made) can also be genuine believers in private insurance.

 

[kellyb]

. Tickets for the movie aren't being handed out free, and when it makes it to DVD, I doubt he's going to OK piracy.

Actually, he said it was ok by him.


http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/2138

Well, I don’t agree with the copyright laws and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people. As long they’re not doing it to make a profit off it, as long as they’re not, you know, trying to make a profit off my labor. I would oppose that. But um, you know I do quite well and I um…I don’t know, I make these books and movies and TV shows because I want things to change, so the more people that get to see them the better, and um, so I’m, I’m happy when that happens, OK? Should I not be happy I don’t know? It’s like if a friend of yours has the DVD of my movie, gave it to you to watch one night, is that person doing something wrong? I’m not seeing any money from that. But he’s just handing the DVD to you so that you can watch my movie. A DVD that he bought, but you’re not buying it, yet you’re watching it without paying me any money. See I think that’s OK, and it’s always been OK, we share things with people. And I think information and art, ideas should be shared.

 

[kellyb]

I think it was meant as a critique of violent American values--not so much that people shouldn't have guns or that guns have no legitimate uses, but that we have all these unrealistic attitudes towards guns and what we should do with them, and that these ideas extend to our foreign policy, our treatment of young men who happen not to be good at sports, and of course our banking system.

I guess I can kind of see that. He just did a bad job of making that point, I guess. Or maybe it's not the kind of point that can be made really well in a documentary?

I dunno...I still think getting the Columbine kids to picket KMart was extremely tacky. That poor taste sort of eclipsed any larger sociological statements from my point of view.

 

[ChristineR]

I'm sure he really believes in it, but I'm not sure you can conclude that he's not also in it for the money. Tickets for the movie aren't being handed out free, and when it makes it to DVD, I doubt he's going to OK piracy.



The advertisers? No. But the people who commission them (who are, in a sense, more comparable to Moore in that they're the ones allocating resources to get the ads made) can also be genuine believers in private insurance.

Moore didn't begin life as a filmmaker, but as a muck-raking journalist/storyteller. It's not a lucrative career path. Eventually he began to do the same things he did on paper on celluloid, and he got exponentially more attention. Since then he's been improving his film making skills. I'm sure he doesn't mind the money, but I also think that if all he cared about was money he'd be doing something else by now, like retiring and living on his investments or making commercial movies.

I honestly don't believe that commercial insurers--by which I mean the people actually doing the work--believe in private insurance. Most of them are just cogs in a machine, and they don't like what they see that machine doing anymore than the rest of us do. Indeed, many of them are employers who openly bemoan the system that they fund! The closest thing to a true believer are the economic believers. They think that anything socialized is guaranteed to be worse than anything private, and they are feeding capital into the system and taking profits out. Some of them think it's their God-given right to invest money, and some of them just know how to calculate a bottom line and see no reason why they shouldn't be the ones getting the payoff instead of some other guy.

After all, they've got to pay their health insurance bills also.

 

[jimtron]

With Bowling for Columbine...I thought that documentary was horrible because it never proved any points at all. In fact, if the idea was to prove that American having guns was responsible for all our violent crime, the conclusion of the film debunked itself. So the whole thing just left me confused....

One thing that I admire about that film is that Moore didn't jump to any bogus conclusions. IIRC, it turns out that Canada has tons of guns too, yet a much lower rate of gun crime (again, IIRC). He brought up very important issues that we should discuss and think about. I find that admirable in a filmmaker. If it was Bill O'Reilly perhaps he would have come to some specious conclusion.

I couldn't ever figure out exactly what the point was supposed to be. It was like he set out to make a documentary, had no idea where it was going to go, and then just ended with a big questionmark.

Very bizarre, and a bit of a waste of time to watch, I thought.

I found it entertaining and as I said, it raised unresolved issues that are worthy of discussing and pondering.

I'm sure he really believes in it, but I'm not sure you can conclude that he's not also in it for the money. Tickets for the movie aren't being handed out free, and when it makes it to DVD, I doubt he's going to OK piracy.

Money is almost always potentially an ulterior motive, but so what? Unless there is evidence that there is a conflict of interest or something like that. When Moore made Roger and Me, I'm sure he wasn't expecting to get rich.

 

[Oliver]

I like Moore because he represents the other side of the story. It wouldn't make sense to show up the same critiques than the Health-Care sponsored media does because that's nothing new and wouldn't have the same impact in the rare time frame of a movie.

The source-picking about the per capita amount wasn't very wise from him, but if it was the more accurate/latest one, Jesus - why not? He didn't make up that number and quite frankly: I would love the same fair&balanced outcry from Moore-Critics concerning People like the Fox-Crowd who're really making stuff up.

Well, I guess Moore is less patriotic in his coverage - which makes him a real Patriot -aka- someone who's able to criticize his own country if something is wrong - and the current Health Care system surely is.

 

[kellyb]

One thing that I admire about that film is that Moore didn't jump to any bogus conclusions. IIRC, it turns out that Canada has tons of guns too, yet a much lower rate of gun crime (again, IIRC). He brought up very important issues that we should discuss and think about. I find that admirable in a filmmaker. If it was Bill O'Reilly perhaps he would have come to some specious conclusion.

That's true.
He seems to have set out to make it "antigun", and he didn't just edit out the parts that conflict with that simplistic picture.

I found it entertaining and as I said, it raised unresolved issues that are worthy of discussing and pondering.

I didn't find it particularly entertaining, but yeah...good questions were raised.

 

[Skeptic Guy]

It must be disheartening to make a movie very few people see.





15 million. Not so good. I think they call that bombing. Harry Potter made that much in 2 minutes.

If those are the gate receipts for "Sicko" keep in mind it is a documentary, not a huge Hollywood blockbuster movie. I don't have the numbers, but I would suspect that $15m is not too bad for a documentary. I think "Fahrenheit 911" was exception in that it almost approach Hollywood movie numbers.

 

[Skeptic Guy]

That's true.
He seems to have set out to make it "antigun", and he didn't just edit out the parts that conflict with that simplistic picture.



I didn't find it particularly entertaining, but yeah...good questions were raised.

The one criticism that I have heard about "Bowling for Columbine" is that he didn't adjust for population sizes when he quoted death by gun statistics. The argument is that the US has such high numbers because it has the biggest population, but I have to confess that I have not done my own research to verify that.

 

[The Painter]

No, they’re not very good number for a documentary. March of the Penguins will kick Sicko’s butt. More people will have seen Penguins freezing their ass off than Sicko.

 

[Oliver]

No, they’re not very good number for a documentary. March of the Penguins will kick Sicko’s butt. More people will have seen Penguins freezing their ass off than Sicko.

Where can I find the US charts verifying your assertion?

 

[The Painter]

Try Yahoo or Google. I found it on Yahoo

 

[Oliver]

Try Yahoo or Google. I found it on Yahoo

Nope - I tried and found nothing. There must be an official Movie Chart in the US, but I have no Idea what their Name or Site is...

 

[jimtron]

No, they’re not very good number for a documentary. March of the Penguins will kick Sicko’s butt. More people will have seen Penguins freezing their ass off than Sicko.

a) Assuming that what you say is true; that these are not high numbers for a doc, what's your point?

b) What's the average box office for docs in the first few weeks of release? (I assume you have knowledge of box office receipts for docs, otherwise you wouldn't have made the above claim).

eta: I guess I was wrong to assume:

1 Fahrenheit 9/11 Lions $119,194,771 2,011 $23,920,637 868 6/23/04
2 March of the Penguins WIP $77,437,223 2,506 $137,492 4 6/24/05
3 An Inconvenient Truth ParC $24,146,161 587 $281,330 4 5/24/06
4 Bowling for Columbine UA $21,576,018 248 $209,148 8 10/11/02
5 Sicko LGF $15,830,046 756 $68,969 1 6/22/07

Fifth-highest grossing documentary since at least 1982 is "not a very good number"? "Bombing"? "Not very many people will see"?

 

[The Painter]

Compared to Fahrenheit 911, it is a bomb. A big stinking bomb. Oh don’t count too much on video making up the difference with Sicko. As big as Fahrenheit 911 was, it didn’t even make 2 million on video. March of the Penguins made 30 million on video.

 

[Oliver]

Compared to Fahrenheit 911, it is a bomb. A big stinking bomb. Oh don’t count too much on video making up the difference with Sicko. As big as Fahrenheit 911 was, it didn’t even make 2 million on video. March of the Penguins made 30 million on video.

You should watch the movie - it's funny, cynic, sad and informative. And I can't wait to see the German version in the theaters.

 

[jimtron]

Compared to Fahrenheit 911, it is a bomb. A big stinking bomb. Oh don’t count too much on video making up the difference with Sicko. As big as Fahrenheit 911 was, it didn’t even make 2 million on video. March of the Penguins made 30 million on video.

I'm guessing that you're yanking my chain, but anyway--what's your point? Let's say that Sicko is not a box-office success (even though it demonstrably is)--what's your point? Do you judge films by their receipts?

 

[Unabogie]

Mixing sources for statistics isn't exactly factually inaccurate (those statistic do exist, so in a sense they're facts), but it is deceptive and dishonest. People assume that when you cite statistics like Moore apparently does (such as Cuban per-person medical expenditures versus American per-person medical expenditures), that they're comparable. But they aren't really: they're from different sources, which used different methodologies to get those statistics. When you mix and match like that, you can exagerate or minimize differences which might be the same (relatively speaking) within either data set, hence creating a false impression despite the fact that no single number is exactly false.

Except I don't see where Moore did this. He used United Nations Human Development Report statistics. It was CNN who used different sources, and still CNN was forced to apologize for getting their facts wrong.

Here's a link from a diary at the DailyKos which I think does a fair job of discussing the criticisms.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/7/15/202247/558

 

[Beanbag]

I've seen Sicko, the first Michael Moore film I've seen. With all the flap about F911, I didn't want to see that particular film.

The first thing I'll say is that Michael Moore approaches his subject with a cool, clinical precision. He doesn't rant. He presents a series of facts to back up his assertions. There are no loud plays to emotion. He makes a statement, and backs it with facts and first-person interviews. Only occasionally does he make an unsupported opinion, such as speculating that the government doesn't want us to like the French so we won't want their level of health care.

He DOES show people in a state of crisis. You feel for them. He gives the impression of being out with the regular people. That's something that Bush has never been able to pull off, because he never was.

You can say that Moore cherry-picks the facts he gives. You can say the same about the "other" side as well.

My suggestion is that you go see this movie, not to support the film, but to evaluate it critically.

Beanbag