What's your opinion on Michael Moore?

[thecincykiddo]

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Let's go to "Bowling For Columbine" for an example, and the scene I described earlier, where he goes and tries all the front doors in a Canadian town to see if people leave them unlocked because they feel safer. Obviously, you can't show all the doors you try, that would be boring. But shouldn't you show a representative sample? How is it "compelling" to show only the unlocked doors, when nearly as many were locked? He respresenting this town as something it's not, otherwise known as lying.

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b/c he knows that his audience isn't so stupid to assume every door in Canada is unlocked. there's no point to show the locked doors, b/c we know they exist and that's just a waste of time. the fact that some of them are unlocked is more than enough to get the point across.

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If Moore's job is to make a compelling film about a non-fiction topic, that's fine. But he's not doing that. He's making a fictional film about a non-fiction topic and pretending it's not fictional. That's not a point of view, that's fraud.

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um...not really. i wouldn't call his films fiction any more than i'd call Borat a documentary.

fraud's a pretty dangerous word to be throwing around so lightly.

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So, if I make a documentary about black people, and show them doing nothing but committing crime...thats not misleading?... because by your logic, everyone knows that not all blacks commit crime...right?

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That's an argument? What's the topic of the film? What is the question you are trying to raise? The discussion you are trying to generate or continue?

Depending upon what subject the filmmaker is exploring, there aren't many rules for "infotainment" or "edutainment" which is, essentially, the arena that Moore's films fall under; nor even, for that matter, for documentaries which take artistic license to give conext that isn't necessarily already "there" in the veritable shots by themselves.

If you're making a film that's meant to raise questions about violence in the black community, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to show images of whites committing crime, now would it?

One thing that most people, spoonfed and apt to believe whatever they are told by "authoritative sources," constantly overlook is that there aren't always two sides to an issue. That's completely misleading and contrary to the whole point of democracy.

Take global warming for instance. Sure, you can be "for" or "against" the existence of global warming as much as you can be for or against doing anything about it, but that doesn't mean that those are actual positions. Global warming either exists or it doesn't and no amount of voting is going to change that.

Likewise, with complicated issues like the kind that Moore tackles, the better approach is to raise awareness of a problem so that people engage with and take part in the discussion. Do research on their own to map out the problem.

How on earth can that be a bad thing?