Truth be told, in between the beginning and the ending Moore, who functions as an American Idol for instant-justice for the corporately abused, is a man with plenty of stories to tell and most of his segments in this outing do work fairly well. Some of the pieces he covers are terribly moving. In particular the grieving family of a dead cake decorator Wal-Mart made a mint off of the death insurance for and the evicted Peoria, IL who have to burn their own possessions as part of their eviction are hyperbolically heart-wrenching.
Moore orders his arguments well as well, bringing in the religious case against the kind of capitalism being practiced by the plutocrats, the enormous social costs we are enduring, the historical evidence of its rise, the way propaganda campaigns have been used to sell the concept to us; and the basic anti-democratic nature of the whole enterprise. But he only taps the surface of the possible condemnations available by a scan of the numbers of the afflicted in the headlines. A topic like this: "how have the rich screwed us over today? could have provided Moore not merely with more movie, but surely with an entire TV series, even a daily syndicated series.
Instead Moore brings us a film with a modest two hour running time that attempts to bring us up to speed on a crisis that has taken decades to perpetrate. There are so many things he had to leave out, but for his finale Moore still breaks out his patented fat guy slapstick and begins mock harassing Wall Street: call in the keystone cops, Moore's going to make a citizen's arrest. At what appears to be about midway through a supposedly sidesplitting routine involving crime scene tape, however Moore pulls the film to a screeching halt and over a blackened screen says, "I don't think I can keep doing this--
Which is exactly how it feels sometimes when I sit staring at monitors trying to make jokes about something that is no laughing matter. Moore gives himself a way out by adding, after a pregnant pause, "--without your help. Then he tells up to hurry up and the credits roll. No further hope, no further discussion. He just throws up his hands and seems to walk away. Which is why the fact that the movie had movie flaws in it upset me so much I could not speak, or at least type on the subject. If Michael Moore is so overwhelmed he's giving up what chance do I have?
I attempted to do a piece on rightwingers' outrageously shameful schadenfreude over Obama losing the Olympics, then it seemed he got the Nobel as a consolation prize and that felt ridiculous to try to defend, so nothing there. Though you've got to admit, in comparison it wouldn't take much to look like a peace prize winner next to Bush. Heck even Mike Tyson seems in the "Sister Teresa range next to Bush. By the time I tried to blend that all together it was called "Degree of Difficulty and it lived up to its name.
But something inside me makes me want to keep trying to change the world through my writing. Moore's choice to film his disillusion and apparently leave us hanging, while quite effective theatrically, was in the end more of an artistic choice than a life choice. If he had truly been defeated there would have been no point in finishing the film, much less doing all the press over which is where, months ago, I entered this fiasco of a writers block.
And I know I will not be free from this cursed topic till I completed this article. So dear Kingman readers, now I have done just that. To overcome the paralysis I had to write more about Moore, really I really wanted. I in fact have written the first and last word on "Moore this round. I think I've tried to do justice by this topic and doubt I should or possibly could say any more.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
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