Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Payno I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

achmoye In this movie, Michael Moore talks about several scandals, frauds but also modern-day legal briberies and immoral speculating and bets on life and death, like with life insurance. I will only write one review about Michael Moore's documentaries, because they are all the same, but in a good way. He made several documentaries about diverse problems of USA policies, and I like his vision of documentary. He doesn't try to be "real", he knows that it's cinema and you can't possibly be real. So he confronts you with USA problems, people crying, worst episodes of history, it's really manipulating your feelings, but not as much as propaganda, and we know he is on the right side, so we forgive him. There is no proper way to do documentaries. Michael Moore has its own opinion about it. He developed one method, his method. And you can see his consistency by watching his other movies. You might not like his methods, but he is coherent, his directing makes sense. Michael Moore tries to insert some humor in his work, and it provides an occasion to chill from the disturbing images.He also record himself seeking for the answers, which turns the documentary into an interesting and enjoyable adventure. He is not handsome though, he is kind of fat, but he doesn't care. And that is the whole thing about him : he doesn't care about being confronted with police, administrators, people trying to stop him. His work is useful and relevant because he does it like no one else.

swillsqueal Saw most of CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY tonight via SBS. Moore makes a case against capitalism and then tells his audience that if 'evil' is just removed, democracy and 50s working class standard of living in Flint, Michigan can be restored in America herself....with the help of local Catholic priests and bishops. A sometimes amusing flick, ultimately though another unsatisfying exercise in radical liberalism. The sentimental cosmopolitan republican Gore Vidal once said that Harry Truman was the President most responsible for setting up the 'National Security State'. Michael Moore seems to think it was Reagan. Anyway, the longed for democracy has apparently been achieved amongst WWII's losers: Japan, Germany and Italy....(sigh) more progressive nationalism than you can shake a stick at, Moore's CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY. Capitalists and landlords made up the ruling classes of the USA from the get-go...along with the slave owners. There were no good old days of democracy--that story is 'mythistory'. In fact, democracy and capitalism are incompatible and only accepted as being necessarily connected by the majority because so many believe that the system can be run 'fairly' and with 'Justice', beliefs Michael Moore encourages.

Spiked! spike-online.com Michael Moore has a pretty good knack for making documentaries that capture the spirit of their times. Bowling for Columbine (2002), for instance, tapped into the feverish gun control debate in America; Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) was released in the aftermath of the disastrous Iraq War of 2003; Sicko (2007) prefigured the recent US debate on state- run healthcare. In the midst of a serious economic crisis, Capitalism: A Love Story appears to be a timely investigation into bank bailouts, bankruptcies and the return of mass unemployment. So why do all of Moore's stunts, dashed-off analysis and gloomy conclusions in this film feel so tired and out of date?To begin with, Moore makes an apposite, albeit superficial, comparison between the dying days of Rome and contemporary America. He introduces some clips from what appears to be an old educational reel titled Life in Ancient Rome, which he then juxtaposes with more recent totems of American power, including the Metropolitan Opera House at New York's Lincoln Center draped in the Stars and Stripes. He makes the point that America's long-standing support for the free market has gone the same way as countless failed businesses: from unqualified confidence to directionless decadence. He proceeds to flesh out the scale of corruption in modern American society, using human-interest stories to elicit viewers' anger.Indeed, his well-worn directorial devices in this latest film reveal his limitations. As in his previous films, Moore inhabits the role of the burly, conscientious documentary-maker on a mission, who nevertheless lets people's stories speak for themselves. He intercuts these testimonials with a morass of kitschy stock footage and B-movie warnings that what we're about to see is 'truly one of the most unusual movies ever made' (except it isn't). The scenes where Moore battles it out with stern-faced corporate security guards and tries to access the high-seats of capitalism through silly stunts have a groaning over-familiarity to them.As in his previous films, Moore reveals an absolute aversion to the notion of personal responsibility. For example, he blames Ronald Reagan's policy of expanding the availability of credit for a lot of the current economic mess. The film offers the rather lame notion that no individual could possibly have been expected to understand the terms and conditions of the loans they signed their names to and that they were coerced into doing it. But in taking this approach Moore in fact reduces autonomous individuals to hapless victims. As a result, the burden of private debt is all the fault of rapacious financial institutions, riding roughshod over ignorant, ordinary Americans. He then borrows some divine authority from the Catholic Church by simply labelling capitalism as fundamentally 'evil'. Now that's telling 'em.This is where Capitalism: A Love Story really falls flat. Far from analysing the subprime meltdown, the credit crunch or the slump in productivity in the West, Moore avoids any coherent argument about how and why the crisis happened or why the consequences were so grave. Instead, he blurs and improvises one ill-conceived idea after another, becoming the Miles Davis of moralistic anti-capitalism.Moore is on firmer ground when he isn't strong-arming security guards or jabbering incoherent theories. The more effective scenes are the straightforward interviews with people who have lost out to unscrupulous employers. In one scene, he visits a widower whose wife was unknowingly insured by her company — a dubious practice called 'dead peasant insurance' — which earned the company quite a substantial amount of money when the woman died. Like many of the stories Moore explores, dead peasant insurance might not be massively revelatory, but it is effective in generating outrage and empathy amongst viewers.In many ways, it is precisely this kind of posturing that makes Moore's films such hits with liberals on both sides of the pond. In Moore's universe you can appear outraged, concerned and engaged with the world without having to fight for or justify a better alternative. Moore's conclusion, for all the leftist rhetoric in the film's title, suggests that the politics of TINA - There Is No Alternative - is very much alive and well in the US.Capitalism features strikingly retrograde ideas dressed up as faux radicalism. It's all very well to bemoan 'selfishness' and 'greed' in modern society, but when Moore conflates rational self-interest with anti-social behaviour and disregard for others, he is justifying clampdowns on basic freedoms and rights. By equating individual freedom only with degradation and amorality, he is going some way to legitimising the culture of unfreedom prevalent in both the US and the UK.Even more disgracefully, he borrows a quote from Roosevelt to suggest that people who are unemployed 'are the stuff of which dictatorships are made'. Raising the spectre of the masses voting for demagogues has long been the conceit of political elites. Moore is foolhardy for repeating it here, especially when the idea of limiting mass democracy looks set to define the new decade.After two decades of filmmaking, Moore's methods and arguments are essentially the same, but the impact of his films has grown ever weaker. Indeed, Capitalism repeats many of the same tricks and devices used in Moore's 1989 film Roger & Me, about the effect of General Motors downsizing in Flint, Michigan. But whereas that film appeared fresh and amusing 20 years ago, the same shtick – harassing security guards, staging publicity stunts outside corporate offices - is now wearisome, irritating and rather contrived.The main weakness of Capitalism, though, is that Moore doesn't quite know what to say. In his better films, like Bowling For Columbine and Sicko, his persona as affable, single-minded ordinary bloke was effective, but here the subject matter - capitalism - seems too big and complex for him.When one Wall Street employee asks Moore 'Why don't you stop making films?', it was one of the few sentiments in the film I could sympathise with.

Raoul Duke Before I begin this review I would like to say that "Roger and me" (also directed by Michael Moore) is one of my favorite movies, and T.V nation I think is a great example of early very liberal television (nowadays we have the daily show and colbert report). That being said, I also have to disclose I have two business degrees including the coveted MBA. So is this a good movie, well unfortunately no. This is not the capitalist pig that dwells within me speaking, but a lover of good movie making speaking out. The second half of this movie was timely and in general pretty good, the first half was uneven and at times a little stupid. The worst scene in the entire movie came just before the movie started to pick up steam. It involved a family, who both the husband and wife worked at walmart. Walmart had taken out a small life insurance policy, on the guys wife (I am assuming to offset rehiring costs in case she died) but Michael Moore slanted it to almost look like walmart killed this poor woman. Or at the very least hoped she would die so they would get a big payout. They had the whole white trash family gathered around the dinner table, crying for their mom, all the while implying walmart was evil and to blame. If you are going to attack walmart do it on unfair wages or supporting Chinese goods made in poor work conditions with no environmental standards, not complete bull pucky. Well that was a rant. Which is what Michael Moore at least inspires in people on both sides. That is what I like about him, but not this movie, I say skip it.