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Michael Moore has made a documentary on Trump called Fahrenheit 11/9. Thank God because if it wasn't for Fahrenheit 9/11, we would have suffered through a second term of George W. Bush.

Didn't he make a Trump doc last year as well? Why can't he just accept he's totally irrelevant now?

His Trump doc correctly predicted the electoral win, I'd say he's still quite relevant

Correctly predicting something isn't the same as being relevant.

What would indicate his relevancy? People still care what he says and watch his films

People watching his films and talking about them for sure. The last movie of his to really be watercooler talk was released a decade ago (though I suppose Capitalism was at least cinephile watercooler talk).

Watercooler talk? Fuck me if that's the barometer of relevancy.

For the kind of impact Moore is going for, maybe.

The way things are going he'd better hurry.

knives wrote:Didn't he make a Trump doc last year as well? Why can't he just accept he's totally irrelevant now?

Frederick Wiseman is still making documentaries too. Maybe he should just shoot himself instead & save y'all the time of having to complain about these old has-beens who are still churning out movies.

Moore's previous, Where To Invade Next, is his best & I'm glad he's still at it.

As Swo kind of alluded to Wiseman is a bad comparison because of the different goals.

We need this movie as there is nowhere else to go to access negative Trump coverage.

Moore is as relevant as ever, not that I'm a big fan but he's been saying things the DNC needs to hear for the past year or more.

That said, allow me to be a contrarian and/or some guy who takes things too seriously by observing that it's at least a little bit insensitive to equate, no matter how "jokingly," 3,000 people being brutally eviscerated on September 11th, with unfavorable results of an election, no matter how shitty that election-winner is. Just a small thought.

While I liked a lot Roger & Me and Bowling for Columbine, I admit I never did quite understand the extreme appeal that Fahrenheit 9/11 had (a Palme d'Or ? Really ? That's how poor the selection was.) though it was still enjoyable in some ways.

However, I stopped following Moore's documentaries after the hackjob that Sicko was, with all its approximations over the French social health covers. It made me wonder how many approximations were in the other documentaries he made, but it also made me realised how US-centric his work and view were - and how it was best for him to stay this way instead of trying to use elements he can't study entirely.
I'm not surprised many French critics were much less positive than what you could find in the US - and the ones who were rarely praised the movie for being fair and factual.

Tarantino seemingly had free reign as president of the jury (he even got to select one of his fellow jurors!) that handed Fahrenheit that Palme (both he and Moore were with Weinstein at the time and he would later award his friend and maybe former paramour the top prize at Venice) but yeah, that 2004 selection looks pretty dismal, outside Wong, Weerasethakul, and Martel. I'd rather (out-of-Competition) Guzmán's Salvador Allende won, if a documentary was to win, but what are you going to do.

Fahrenheit is definitely of its time, but it's difficult to convey to others just how much Moore was riding the anti-Bush zeitgeist immediately after the invasion (still the most controllable disastrous thing to occur in my lifetime, despite Bush's efforts to rehabilitate his image and the liberal outlets that gave him a platform), with his Oscar speech, his television appearances, Bowling for Columbine on DVD, and those omnipresent books. Ultimately I'd lump his early efforts last decade in with the same smug liberalism that is still somehow someway coursing through the increasingly irrelevant Democratic Party, but pre-Web 2.0 his voice was sorely needed, alongside (I know) Keith Olbermann. The turn against the Bush Administration didn't really occur until post-Katrina, but until then Moore was there to harness the anti-Bush demographic.

I'm not a fan (although I probably to need to revisit Capitalism and see Where to Invade Next) and of course him branding this documentary "Fahrenheit ___" is just him being his entertainer self, but I partially agree with oh yeah above in that he is at his most relevant since 2005. This guy firmly thought a Trump victory would occur probably in large part because he actually speaks to those in Trump country. Watching Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson, he does seem to have a legitimate empathy for those who are receiving nothing from the DNC, but everything from figures like Trump. I look forward to seeing what he comes up with.

If there is one thing that's stuck out from his work, particularly recently, that's always bugged me, it's been a partially baked thesis statement backed up by almost rushed work. Capitalism: A Love Story was arguing for socialism but seemed too frightened of coming right out and saying so (I remember him saying you need to replace capitalism with "democracy" - okay), and Where to Invade Next never really thought through its concept of the U.S. "claiming" some of these countries' ideas (as evidenced by the confused faces every time he took out that flag). I'm not expecting much from this because Moore has been in the business of overpromising and underdelivering for a while now. Don't say "that all ends with this movie" re: your Trump doc unless it actually has explosive information to reveal, which I can almost guarantee it won't.

I did like Sicko quite a bit though, if only because it's my pet issue and it was refreshing, particularly in its pre-Obamacare time, to see the idea of socialized medicine introduced to a large American audience. Now it's preferred by a majority of this country's voters.

I believe that Moore's movies are some kind of personification of placing elements on top of a thesis / theory already fully formed, rather than analysing facts and figures and then concludes (or not) over an existing pattern.

It's fine to have great values but you can't make a fair cause for them this way.

He's neither a good filmmaker nor a good journalist, he's a funny entertainer whose material is wholly based on current events. The fact that he could be so entertaining is nothing to sneeze at, but his films remain very problematic even when I'm already sympathetic towards the overall sentiment - I would never use his films to back up one of my arguments because the most they do is preach to the choir.

Moore is a muckraker, and he's good at it.

The Where to Invade conceit was half-baked and intentionally a little silly, but the idea that there are alternative ways of doing things in Europe and many of them increase satisfaction and even performance was timely (especially with the know-nothing patriotic troglodyte GOP approach in fashion in the US).

Is he? Sure, he's bringing these issues more attention, but is he ever exposing new factual information to bolster those aims? I'm not sure if repackaging existing data in a fashion that's more palatable to a larger audience is necessarily muckraking.

He very rarely unearths new information. That's actually one of the knocks on the boom of theatrical news documentaries in recent years, they often repackage information that was widely published either in news articles or in book form - then the film comes out and someone like IndieWire writes about it as if it was new information.

He's really more of a political activist that feels movies efficiently and effectively reach today's audiences. He'd probably use any media available. He was on Charlie Rose talking about how he is ramping up a Broadway production, really mostly because he feels there is currently a window of opportunity to reach people there.

He is definitely aware that he wants to go where there are audiences and stand in front of them waving his ideas, regardless of the medium and the product.

Some may think that he actually wants himself to be seen, rather than his ideas.....which is subjective.

Repacking existing data isn't an issue. It's when the repacked data are selected to prove a point that is at best simplistic or obvious, or at worse simply the result of your own prejudices or biases towards a given subject and not the result of a factual analysis.

That's the difference between one of his film and something like, say, The Corporation : Moore always already has made up his mind about a situation, and the whole movie is just his public confirmation bias, never a deeper better and especially fairer analysis. That's why Sicko stood up so badly in France : because all his biases, poor superficial analysis and biases were suddenly showing explicitly on screen.

Seems like an opportune time/place to pimp this podcast, Michael and Us, which works through/critiques the Moore canon pretty thoroughly. Also features discussion of the legion anti-Moore docs and some other notable, mostly shitty political cinema.

Omensetter wrote:Tarantino seemingly had free reign as president of the jury (he even got to select one of his fellow jurors!) that handed Fahrenheit that Palme (both he and Moore were with Weinstein at the time and he would later award his friend and maybe former paramour the top prize at Venice) but yeah, that 2004 selection looks pretty dismal, outside Wong, Weerasethakul, and Martel. I'd rather (out-of-Competition) Guzmán's Salvador Allende won, if a documentary was to win, but what are you going to do.

Martel would have been a great and bold choice. Also Hong and Gatlif (perhaps a minor film by his standards, but still a hell of a lot better than Moore's didacticism).