Michael Moore's Last Words: Capitalism Stinks

TORONTO---At the end of the Depression-era Clifford Odets play "Waiting for Lefty" a character exhorts the audience to join in a rallying cry of "Strike! Strike! Strike!" In a more doleful key, the new Michael Moore documentary "Capitalism: A Love Story" ends with a similar provocation. It's basically: We need another -ism! We need another -ism!
This -ism hasn't worked out, asserts Moore in every frame of his latest project, which opens commercially (that is to say, capitalistically) Oct. 2.
Already, "Capitalism: A Love Story" has attracted attention on the international festival circuit. Premiering earlier this month in Venice, it received an eight-minute standing ovation. The film went on to a North American bow earlier this week at the Toronto International Film Festival, North America's preeminent film gathering. (The festival concludes this weekend.) We spoke after the initial press and industry screening in a sleek, aggressively air-conditioned hotel room in the Yorkville neighborhood. There, he told me that the Venice rapture was "more gratifying than what I'd gotten for any of my other films, because I didn't know how this one would be received."
"To make a movie about an economic theory? How are you going to make that something people would actually want to see on a Friday night?" he says.
"Capitalism: A Love Story" finds Moore at his most bluntly polemical, while attacking his largest, most daunting canvas with his preferred primary colors. In part it's a response to the market meltdown and last year's federal bailouts: At one point the man from Flint, Mich., wraps crime-scene tape across the entrance to the New York Stock Exchange building.
The most compelling evidence presented by Moore in "Capitalism" takes corporate-speak and socioeconomic heartlessness to task. There are the so-called "dead peasants" insurance policies taken out on employees, allowing employers to cash in big-time if their workers die ahead of actuarial schedule. We meet a gleeful Florida real estate maven who goes by the handle "The Condo Vulture," taking swift advantage of foreclosures and a lousy housing market.
Most alarmingly, an internal Citibank report, which Moore's people found floating around the Internet and which Moore initially (and wrongly) assumed was a fake, frames contemporary America as a "plutonomy"---the top one percent controlling 95 percent of the wealth, essentially wiping out the middle class in a flurry of bullet points.
Much in the film will be familiar, tactically speaking, from the sound of Moore's sing-song, ironically tinged voiceover commentary to the tear-stained close-ups of the have-nots, the recently downsized, the strapped and wrathful, including a Peoria, Ill., victim of foreclosure. What's new this time, the director believes, are statements he felt emboldened to make because he had no follow-up project in the wings.
"At the end," Moore says, "to come out and say that I believe capitalism is evil, and that you can't regulate evil ... that's putting it out there. People know my politics, and it's important to let the audience think some of this out for themselves, come to some of their own conclusions. But I just thought: If I had to say one thing only---if all my films from this point on are going to be fiction films, or whatever---what would I say? And that's what I wanted to say.
"I'll get criticized for saying it, I'm sure, because people are OK with me criticizing the system, but to say the system has to be eliminated----that makes people scared."
So what's next for Moore? He doesn't know. "I made this one as if I wasn't going to make another documentary after this. So I didn't hold back." Not that his earlier screeds were the work of someone accustomed to holding back.
"Actually," he says, the interview wrapping up, "I got one idea talking to you in Traverse City." Uh-oh, I think. I knew that July trip to Moore's film festival in upper Michigan would come to no good.
Moore asks me if I remember how he started our interview. I do, I say. You started by asserting the death of the American newspaper. Indeed, Moore floats this (to me, premature) notion the day after our interview in Toronto, at the "Capitalism" press conference. He suggests that the imperiled state of the modern U.S. newspaper might make a good documentary. He planned initially to include a section on the subject in "Capitalism" but he couldn't make it fit. So maybe Moore has his next subject after all. And maybe his return to fictional narrative filmmaking---Moore wrote and directed the 1995 comedy "Canadian Bacon," about the U.S. waging war on its neighbors to the north---will have to wait.

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RickWhite said:

I have never wished death on anyone but I would seriously enjoy seeing Michael Moore beheaded on the internet.

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RickWhite said:

I have never wished death on anyone but I would seriously enjoy seeing Michael Moore beheaded on the internet.

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jrh72582 said:

How is he different from any other sensationalist? Beck, Hannity, O' Reilly, Moore, Limbaugh, Coulter.....they're all the same! Let them do their thing. If their audience weren't stupid enough to fall for their bullshit, then they'd be rendered impotent. So let's encourage intelligent skepticism in every american and be on with it. If we're smarter than those trying to deceive us, then we're in charge, not them.

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doobnVA said:

He's different because his bullshit is at least compassionate bullshit, for the bullshit good of the people. The rest of the lot you mentioned are demons sent from hell to eat our liberal babies

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ilkhan said:

Well it sucks that Capitalism is getting such a bad name.
Sence there is scarcely any true capitalism to be found.
It also sucks that so many people think government is even able to run something so complex. (Healthcare)
It sucks for socialists that capitalism is the greatest wealth builder ever devised.
Even the poor in this county are far and away better off then in any other country. (IMO)
It sucks that the left doesn't look at the mobility of our sociaty.
Bill Gates born to middle class teachers = richest man in the world (officially), Why? Capitalism.
We used to be a nation of opportunity now we are a nation of freebees.
To bad nothing is ever free.

Oh well one way or another this capitalism Vs. Socialism arguement will settle itself.
Either way about 40% of the people are gonna hate the outcome.
Maybe we can have the civil war part two.
Only this time it will be between the people who:
Want to be slaves
and the people who want to be free.

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RickWhite said:

I have never wished death on anyone but I would seriously enjoy seeing Michael Moore beheaded on the internet.

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Phenom420 said:

Or maybe boiling transfatty oil since that lard ass loved it so much.

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jrh72582 said:

Oh how the intelligence flows from this site...

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Anjinsan said:

So michael moore will be giving the movie away for free then?

Bah I'll pass.

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ilkhan said:

I'm saying law and economics are to totally diffrent animals and yes it is more complex then Law IMO.
Government can make a law but it can not accuratly set prices.
Only a free market can do that.
Hence why prices have gotten so out of control.

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