 Bowling For Bush Or, Dining On Jellybeans By Michael Willard |
Given a decent camera crew, a comfortable editing suite and the penchant for selective irony, most of us could portray even Jesus Christ in a documentary as an unemployed vagabond who hung out with whores.
This is especially true of someone who does it for a living, like Michael Moore, the quivering belly of certitude, whose film Fahrenheit 9/11, won the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or award. It was an honor, I suppose, new to me, but to no one else on the planet.
I confess I have not seen the film, the title of which is based on Ray Bradbury's sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451(Italics), which was about censorship. I have seen clips and commentary. Early on, I was duly impressed by a Moore film, Roger and Me, during my impressionable youth, just prior to my impressionable old age.
Then came Moore's Bowling For Columbine, an Oscar-winning documentary which, everybody says, rated at least four popcorn boxes in review icons. I personally, again the only one on the planet, came away from it feeling sorry for gun owners, who it reviled.
For the record - and I realize that is an literary affectation generally followed by a questionable fact - I am a liberal, non-gun-owning, union favoring (Roger and Me was about shutting down an auto factory in Flint, Michigan), Democrat who is becoming more and more uncomfortable with the Bushes.
Which brings me to the latest Moore blockbuster, Fahrenheit, which is about George Bush and his family being close to the Saudi elite, including the very hate-able Osama bin Laden, and causing every problem from the 9/11 tragedy to rush-hour traffic and sewer smells.
Moore is often described as a journalist, which is sort of like saying I am a nuclear scientist because I once visited Chernobyl. He is not. He is a political advocate with a camera who comes down on my side of the issues more often than I feel comfortable.
Other than never owning a gun, and feeling they are way too available, I am a former member of a grocery union, a postal union and a wire service union. My liberal credentials are up there with Sen. John Kerry, though I never fought in a war nor cast a legislative vote.
However, the documentary filmmaker Moore stretched his points to the ridiculous in pro-Union Roger and Me (which was mildly entertaining) and in Bowling for Columbine
(an exploitation of a tragic situation. Two middle class high school kids went bonkers and gunned down their classmates. They had an ammunition dump of munitions on them).
As a PR guy, I would advise a client who didn't totally agree with Moore's point of view to stay away from the prying eye of his camera. Otherwise, you will get your heart jerked out and stomped on. And millions will see it happen - while chomping on Jujubes and sipping Double Gulps.
An aside here, there are also written versions of exaggerated and under-cooked film tableaus, including one book recently released in Ukraine about the gruesome death of Ukrainian reporter Georgy Gongadze. By Jaroslav Koshiw, it is called: "Beheaded: The Murder of a Journalist."
At first blush, one applauds the fact that someone has come forth after careful study to detail this hideous crime, and one is even hopeful that an author has painstakingly connected the dots and reached concrete conclusions.
Instead, we find that the Ukrainian-language version of the book is subsidized by a political party, and that it is primarily a rehash of previous conjecture. The main source of the tome is the hours of tapes Mykola Melnychenko is believed to have secretly made in President Leonid Kuchma's office. Melnychenko was a member of the president's security force turned renegade.
While various U.S. authorities have vouched for the authenticity of the tapes, which supposedly incriminate Kuchma, those same authorities also foretold the discovery of Kochulga radars the administration allegedly sold to Saddam Hussein. The radar system has been as illusive as WMD.
This is not to say that journalism is out of control, any more so than say, accountancy is out of control (Enron), or the legal profession is out of control (again Enron). It merely says that we aging semi-socialists have more capitalist in us than we would like to admit.
Moore's latest documentary will probably earn much more than the $150 million raked in by Bowling for Columbine, and not because he won an award at Cannes. The fact is that Moore is more P.T. Barnum master showman than journalist.
He has parlayed a dispute over the film's distribution with Disney, the Mickey Mouse folks, into such a controversy that he can yell to the heavens that the only people who will not get to see his film are freedom-loving Americans. Thus, he has insured it will get great distribution in the U.S., packing theaters.
If Moore were the only example, I could shut this column down for lack of evidence. He is not, and he has spawned more than one Moore clone.
Late last year, the Sundance Film Festival named a documentary by a fellow West Virginian, Morgan Spurlock, as best in its class. It was called Super Size Me its target was the unsuspecting fast-food giant, McDonalds.
Over a 30-day period, Spurlock dined only on McDonald's hamburgers and fries -breakfast, lunch and dinner - and as a result gained 24 1/2 pounds, saw his cholesterol skyrocket and did a little damage to his liver. The event was filmed and packaged.
McDonalds was embarrassed. Spurlock became rich.
Is there anyone else who thinks there is something wrong with this picture?
Quick, grab a camera, I'm going to spend the next 30 days munching only jellybeans, If nothing else, I will have a Super Size bellyache to show for it. Anyone want the distribution rights?
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More in the section:
The Man With 4,392 Pet Peeves
The Big Mac Observer?
Read also previous issue' articles:
Expats: Why Are We Here?
The Luckiest Man Alive
Being Vladimir Putin
The Age of Unreason?
Yes, I Give a Damn
News:
The Rush to Judgment
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