Jerkoffs finish first

Before I go any further I want to say a few things. First:

If you think Michael Moore is an inflammatory liberal pundit and you roll your eyes when you hear his name (as so many do), I trust you already have Bill O'Reilly, Anne Coulter and Glenn Beck in deathmatches with genetically engineered polar bears on the moon.

Michael Moore is far, far, FAR more tactful than any of those morons, and that's astonishing because Moore can display a sad lack of tact a lot of the time. It does the conservative party a great disservice when they can't find anyone competent to wave around their propaganda. It's not like finding someone like that would be impossible, or even hard. The closest thing liberals have to someone like Anne Coulter (whose job it is to scream at everyone, talk about how liberals should be hung and be a drawing of a person) is Michael Moore, who's basically a big teddy bear. And I can't help but feel like Glenn Beck is the Republican party's sad, sad answer to Stephen Colbert.

Early on I made a decision to avoid politics on this blog. People have a hard time looking at politics objectively. They cling to the things their parents told them to believe and scream and cry when someone disagrees with them. It's something I see too much of, being a centrist living in Indiana (which makes me a raging liberal, I guess).

Enough about that. Here's the film:

Financial collapse! When Wall Street came down, who got rich? And who got fucked? Michael Moore is on the case. With a series of interviews with reg'lar folk, hoity-toity business man types, insiders willing to spill their guts and a healthy supply of stock footage, Moore attempts to trace back the financial collapse and figure out who's responsible.

His answer, although not %100 clear, seems to be "every president since FDR". I'll contend with you on that one, Mr. Moore.

Why did the economy collapse? The consumer. We're the ones who said fuck the small business, we only trust multinational brand names. We only want products produced quickly and cheaply, who gives a fuck about quality. QUICKLY AND CHEAPLY. Everything else be damned we want it QUICK and we want it CHEAP. So we threw our money at the same dozen corporations because they were able to provide the quick and the cheap. Eventually they got big enough that they could either buy out or corner every market and they swelled big enough to command the vast majority of the money and power in the country. As Moore says, America became a plutocracy.

But then the balancing act kicked in. Financial ruin! The guys that had all the control were coming down and things were preparing to level out. There would be collapse, but new powers would rise from the ashes. Consumers would have to rethink their buying habits. Then Congress did exactly what the US government is never supposed to do: they bailed them out. They gave them hundreds of billions of taxpayers dollars that we don't have to do fuck knows what with.

Moore blames the government, I blame the people. We allow all these things. It's up to us who gets the money and who gets the power, and the only reason that these dickwads have the money and have the power is our complacency.

So as is his signature style, Moore interviews some very sad lower and middle-class people to bring the audience to tears and make them say things like "Those dastardly corporations! My whole life I thought they had the employer's best interests at heart!". That's all okay, emotional manipulation and political documentaries are like me and really long metaphors. You just have to remember to ask yourself what the family crying about their dead mother has to do with capitalism (not that much).

In other words, it's scattershot, like most of Moore's films. I agree with the points, but not the thesis, like most of Moore's films. He and I have different philosophies, which is fine, because he at least tries to make a coherent argument (unlike some people I could mention).

But his arguments tend to get convoluted amongst all the stunts and interviews. His goal isn't even terribly clear. I think that's the worst thing I can say about him. He puts on a good show but there isn't usually that much substance to them.

His stunts are fun, but they're fluff and he knows it. They're there so that he can put them in the trailer and get asses in the seats. He's a likable guy and I'm always game for one of his films.

For a more informative documentary on a similar subject, check out Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.

7/10