Best Movies of 2009 : Capitalism offers more-of-Moore's agit-prop powerful, cinematic-provocations. See it.
Written: Oct 05 '09 (Updated Nov 18 '09)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: A movie that wants you to use your brain.
Cons: Moore is manipulative & smug. Without reason movie is rate R !
The Bottom Line: Entertaining, thought-provoking, film essay with some hopeful and humorous asides amidst the doom and gloom.
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| ChrisJarmick's Full Review: Capitalism: A Love Story |
Michael Moore’s latest cinematic essay Capitalism: A Love Story will NOT win the filmmaker many brand new fans but it should keep the one’s he has pretty happy. More Moore?
If you somehow don't know about Moore from Roger and Me to Bowling for Columbine to Sicko, he makes movies that are more movie essays than documentaries. He provokes, and grandstands and entertains while espousing mostly one-sided opinions and sometimes going into conspiracy theory territory. He's also at times very witty and funny...so you'll also be entertained.
I hope a lot of people go see this movie in theaters. It's not because I agree with everything Moore says or all of the 'facts' he presents, but rather because he offers a very clear point of view and is interested in getting people talking about important issues, and ideas.
The film works off the admittedly naive premise that the post World War 2 boom of the late 50s and early 60s worked very well for a time, allowing the middle-class (or at least the white middle class) to have a pretty wonderful life where women could stay home if they wanted to and raise their kids in nice homes and a Union job was a good one to have—good wages, pension, steady employment. American companies took care of their employees, you could afford to send your kids to college without going into debt and there wasn’t a lot of serious competition for America’s products. American consumers didn’t have huge credit card debts and it didn’t seem like home foreclosures or bankruptcies were very common at all.
Moore’s framing of events in the 50s and early 60s is a purposefully naïve one. He explains how life seemed to be for his family in Flint, Michigan. He shows us old home movies and pictures of how life was for him when he was a kid. What happened to the good times? When did America become so greedy? He talks to his father about the 23 years he spent as a worker making spark plugs. The place his dad worked is a bulldozed ruin, Moore gets sentimental remembering how he used to be I the car to pick up his dad after work.
“What is your best memory about working here?” he asks.
His dad thinks a moment and says: “The people I worked with. A great bunch of people.”
The film opens with a clip from a tongue in cheek preview of Herschel Gordon Lewis’ horror film Blood Feast, where a narrator warns the audience the film they are about to see may be too shocking and disturbing for the faint of heart. Then we watch security camera footage of crooks robbing banks and convenience stores, which cuts to a family who are video-taping themselves as several sheriff cars and armed officers arrive at their house to evict them.
Moore’s lilting voice embraces his smugness which will either annoy you to no end or amuse you. He is interested in provoking audiences and simplifying complicated ideas and political issues. He’s telling stories and then explaining how the capitalistic system we’ve been a part of; that offers every American an equal chance at being very wealthy, is actually a sham. We don’t have equal opportunities, big business has been working at fixing things so that a small number of people get richer and in the process the rest of us have less.
Moore will tell us how our current economic crisis began when Ronald Reagan busted the unions and helped to bail out big business. How the handling of the Savings and Loans crisis was a pre-cursor of things to come. How Greenspan over-sold the stock market and suggested that people could creatively finance their own houses to make more money. Eventually we’ll see vintage footage of President Franklin Roosevelt reading us his idea for a worker’s bill of rights. It was never put into effect and Moore suggests that if it was, we would not be in the sorry shape we are in today.
Although the film is an oversimplification and many ‘cheap shots’ are made, at times Moore’s anecdotes and purposefully naïve posturing is not only engaging and entertaining, but also persuasive.
Probably the most effective story he tells is about the Pennsylvania community that privatized their juvenile detention facility. They destroyed their old facility, built a brand new one and then filled it up with young juvenile delinquents. However, many of the so-called juvenile delinquents should never have been sent to the facility. They were railroaded into the facility and forced to stay beyond their initial sentences by corrupt judges. Eventually the sham was exposed and judges and businessmen went to jail but not before several families were destroyed and lots of tax payer money was wasted.
Moore doesn’t pound his point home about this. I was expecting him to talk about how politicians insist privatization always produce better results than government run programs. I was expecting him to talk about the penal system and how our system of jails is a big business. I was expecting a side-bar about the health plan—but Moore doesn’t go there at all. He moves on. Wise choice, it’s the most effective part of the film. We can figure it out for ourselves.
Another effective anecdote is the story of the workers at Republic Window company. Bank of America took over the company, locked the doors and told the workers, they would not be getting the money that was owed to them because the company is out of business. Well the workers decided not to accept that and they broke back into their building and had a sit down strike demanding media and political attention. It wasn’t their fault the owners of the company made terrible financial decisions and the Bank stepped in to take it over. They worked hard and were owed money and they wanted to be paid. The community supported the workers and eventually, a settlement was reached and every worker was paid an average of $6,000 dollars. Not a huge amount, but they were not going to get anything! Nothing. They peacefully protested what was happening.
We also see how communities are doing peaceful protests. A family was evicted from their home and forced to live in the back of a truck. They broke back into the house they were evicted from with their help of their neighbors who in an act of civil disobedience would not let the authorities kick the family out of the house again. Eventually the authorities let the family squat in the home. Another small victory.
These stories about people affected by the economic crisis are effective. Moore knows to get himself out of the way of these stories and let his subjects do most of the telling. He doesn’t need to insert a smart-a-s-s comment. That is when the movie is most effective.
We also hear about ‘peasant insurance’ or the practice some companies have of taking out insurance on their employees. If the employee dies, the company and only the company is paid off and benefits. You can make an argument that a few companies (electric companies) have a valid reason for doing this. We learn however that Walmart until recently (when they were exposed) used to do this. We hear a sad story about a man who lost his wife and found out later, that Walmart who paid none of his medical bills or funeral expenses, profited from his wife’s death to the tune of nearly $100,000.
This is peanuts compared to the several million dollars a bank made on the peasant policy they took out on one of their employees. Clearly there’s something wrong when a company can make more money on an employee’s death, then if he or she was alive working with them. And clearly for the company to keep the money and not have it benefit the employee’s survivors is also very wrong.
Moore naturally has some humorous stunts up his sleeve too. He jumps into an armored car and goes to the offices of AIG, and then Citi-Bank and Morgan Stanley with empty money bags. He demands to be let inside so that he can get the people’s money back and is met with doormen and security people who are slightly amused with his antics, but have no intention of letting him in. At another point he wants to make a citizen arrest. He can’t resist showing up at the now bankrupt G.M. headquarters and demanding to see the CEO. I laughed out loud when he started unrolling police scene crime tape in front of some banks and the New York stock exchange.
I also laughed when he showed clips from the movie Jesus of Nazareth and re-dubbed some of the dialogue so that Jesus says to a man begging for his touch to be healed: “I’m sorry I can not heal your pre-existing condition.”
Moore however doesn’t find anybody that can talk intelligently about the situation we are in. No one argues with any of the points he makes or effectively represents an opposing viewpoint. When Moore insists he is confused about what a derivative is, and how stockbrokers and their clients have made lots of money and lost lots of money on derivatives, he shows us people who stutter and get tongue-tied as they try to explain it. It’s amusing and many in the audience will connect perhaps, but we don’t learn anything new or valuable.
Well he does offer a couple of alternatives I suppose. He tells us the story about Jonas Salk who discovered the polio vaccine. Salk didn’t make money on the vaccine and he refused to patent his discoveries and become rich off of it. He made a good living as a doctor and didn’t believe it was right to profit off the curing of a disease. Wow, we sure need more people like Salk!!!
We absorb a concentrated dose of shallow information that reinforces what we already know. Our financial structure is severely flawed and the middle class and Unions are in trouble. No credible solutions are actually offered.
We are reminded the richest 1 percent in our country who are worth more than 95 percent of us…combined. Yet for all their money, the richest people in our country still only get one vote each. (Yes, money buys influence….but).
In an internal Citi-bank memo from several years ago concern about one thing is raised-- everyone in this country has 1 vote and the poor, middle-class and unemployed have the power to change things very quickly. Of course what the rich and powerful count on, says Moore, is that we the people believe we can become very rich like the 1 percent, so we don’t revolt in huge numbers and try to run the places we work at in a democratic system, but accept the workplace is a dictatorship.
Good point. People should remember we can change things by voting. Naïve? Overly simplistic? Perhaps, but I’m not ready to say that this voting thing is over-rated just yet. We did elect a president that just a couple of years ago no one would have believed was possible.
I doubt Moore’s film will instigate or provoke many people to action, but it will remind many not to give up hope, change is possible and the ideals we want America to stand for are still within our reach. Heck, for all the Capitalism bashing Moore does in the film, he ends it by telling the audience he is not leaving no matter how frustrated he gets, this is his country and he believes in its people. After all, where else but in America could he have a lucrative career making the kinds of movies he does?
Then again, the movie is rated R... no nudity, violence and only a few spots is the language the last bit salty... R? Hmmm maybe that's a real conspiracy....limit access to the movie by rating it R..........
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Serious Movie
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ChrisJarmick
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Member: Chris Jarmick
Location: Seattle
Reviews written: 594
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About Me:
With or-w/o hat,writing quality reviews,encouraging-others-to-do likewise-since-the-'50's.
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