The spirit of Michael Moore is alive and -- well, it's alive anyway

I clearly remember Michael Moore releasing Fahrenheit 9/11 in the summer of 2004, and me thinking "Wow, right in time for the election! That'll knock their socks off alright!"

It didn't. George W. Bush still beat John Kerry. Relatively easily, in fact, despite some optimistic exit polling early in the day, which still feels like a tease all these years later.

I'm sure that wasn't the first time a polemic had been released in an election year with the hope of influencing the outcome, but it is something I tend to associate with Moore. He's tried it twice during the Trump era, once to prevent the era from starting (Michael Moore in Trumpland, from 2016) and once to effect change on the midterm elections (Fahrenheit 11/9 in 2018). I guess the latter could have helped, as there were a lot of Democratic wins in 2018. He appears to have been willing to let Barack Obama fend for himself, which turns out to have been a perfectly good decision. 

Maybe he's run out of gas, as there is no Michael Moore movie trying to take down King Donald in 2020. 

However, that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of other filmmakers who have taken his place. 

In fact, this past weekend alone I watched four movies released during this "most important election of our lives" election season, each of which could reasonably be construed as trying to prevent the second term of the Donald Trump presidency. I hadn't started our three-day weekend with the intention of watching all of them -- in fact, I watched October horror movies the first two nights, Thursday and Friday. But once I got started, I kept going, and I thought I'd recap them for you now. 

1. Feels Good Man (dir. Arthur Jones)
Watched: Saturday late afternoon
Released: August 28th

The first, and ultimately the best, is the heartfelt documentary that tries to restore the innocent roots of the internet's most awful right-wing meme, Pepe the Frog. No, Pepe was not originally envisioned as a sadistic, politically incorrect dog whistle to any person out there inclined toward racism, violence or one in the name of the other. His creator, Matt Furie, drew him as a happy-go-lucky stoner living with three other animals, playing video games and peeing with their pants dropped all the way to the floor. The latter action contained the fateful origins of the character's meme-ability, as he explained his pants-dropping freedom by quipping "Feels good, man." That line made its way into the first not-very-sinister, then the extremely sinister parts of the internet, where incels initially adopted Pepe as a sad frog that they thought resembled them, and then as a mad frog that wanted to burn the world.

The progression -- regression, really -- from innocent comic book character to embodiment of the alt-right is told with a highly engrossing narrative competence by Jones et al. It's moving and angering and by the end, you just feel bad for this character with the gentle soul who was transmogrified into the personification of evil, not to mention the gentle soul of its creator. The movie also really details the life cycle of a meme on a place like 4-chan, where these anonymous users were first adopting him as a kindred spirit, then ultimately shoving him in the face of the various "libtards" they wanted to own as they worked to elevate Donald Trump to the White House. One nice thing about it is that it does not overtly campaign for the end of the political fortunes of Trump, but that message is a clear subtext in the story of a benign cartoonist and his attempt to wrest back control of his intellectual property.

2. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (dir. Jason Woliner)
Watched: Saturday evening
Released: October 23rd

If you had to intuit that the director and stars of Feels Good Man want to see Trump go down in flames, no such intuition is necessary here. Oh, Sacha Baron Cohen doesn't say that either -- he doesn't need to. His relentless, merciless attempts to ensnare members of Trump's inner circle -- and his success at catching one big fish, Rudy Giuliani -- really speak for themselves. 

I did end up reviewing Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, as I told you on Sunday I would. If you want to check that out, you can find it here. So I won't go on at length about it because my review captures most of what I'd like to say, even though I probably could have written a review twice the length. (In short, I really liked it.)

However, I do think it's worth noting that Borat, in a way, shares a spirit with Moore the most. Like Moore, he relies on confrontational, cringey humor. Although Moore might not like to hear his work reduced to this, both also rely on pranks to either embarrass their subject or to try to make them understand the error of their ways. This time around, Borat has to disguise himself to better pull off his schemes -- Moore never bothered with any of that. And both have produced, at their best, riveting results in unveiling the malevolent prejudices of right-wing jerks. 

3. #Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump (dir. Dan Partland)
Watched: Sunday morning
Released: August 28th

What was it about August 28th that made it such a good day to release anti-Trump films? Feels Good Man also came out that day. Oh, I know -- it was the day after the end of the Republican National Convention. Or, maybe it was just a Friday in late August, when they figured there would not be a huge amount of competition from high-profile theatrical releases. (Ha, joke's on you -- there was zero competition.)

This is the first (though not the last) of the movies I watched to rely heavily on the talking head format. The talking heads in this case are mostly psychologists breaking down their diagnoses of Trump, which mostly come down to that he's a malignant narcissist. This I knew, but what I didn't know was that there was a rule of thumb growing out of Barry Goldwater's run for the presidency in 1964 not to diagnose a patient from afar. Goldwater was apparently done a disservice when all sort of psychologists were quick to declare him unfit, a judgment that many of them later consider to have been rash. Nowadays, though, the theory has shifted with someone like Trump due to the sheer quantity of information about him they have access to. Some even declare that this gives them a better chance to diagnose him than if he were sitting on their couch, feeding them what he thought they wanted to hear.

The lion's share of interviews with people we know are with George Conway and Anthony Scaramucci, one-time Trump voters or actual Trump employees who came to Jesus about this man and the threat he poses the country. I thought this was very well put together and fairly enlightening, even though I did probably know most of it. The pillars of malignant narcissism really rang true with me, especially as one of them involved sadism.

4. Totally Under Control (dir. Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan & Suzanne Hillinger)
Watched: Sunday night
Released: October 13th

The final film was the one I thought had the potential to make the most impact, as it involves an inevitably rushed attempt to analyze the mistakes made during the pandemic under Trump's watch. I say "inevitably rushed" because the final chapter in the story has, of course, not been written. The reason to make the movie now, rather than waiting until a vaccine was out there and the whole breadth of the disruption and loss of life could be measured, is to influence the outcome of the election. And while I support that as a mission, I think in this case it made the film a bit less effective.

For more than two hours -- Gibney has never been accused of brevity -- I watched as the film took us back through the critical junctures and big news headlines of the pandemic, following an on-screen timeline across the bottom of the screen, and interviewing key figures along the way, mostly virologists. Although I obviously did not delve into every single one of those moments at the time they happened, I did live them, so some of this felt like regurgitating things to me that I already knew. Gibney is always a thorough filmmaker, but I felt this movie got a bit bogged down, and was at times quite dull. A 90-minute film would have worked better, especially since the "ending" hasn't been written yet.

Still, it was useful to have all this stuff in one place, and I thought the movie was worth making. I have to acknowledge that burnout was also a factor for me in this viewing, as I was coming to the end of a weekend in which I'd watched seven movies total going back to Thursday night. 

So if I liked all of these films, some of them very much, and some not as much for a reason that could help explain that reaction, why do I only say that Michael Moore's spirit is "alive," not "alive and well"?

Because ultimately, I'm not sure if any of these films is going to mean anything. 

I don't mean that I think Trump is going to win. I think he's going to lose. But I don't feel like any of these films will have played a meaningful role in bringing about that loss. 

We like to imagine this set of undecided voters out there, selecting from the available movies and television programs and articles and books to help eject them from that camp one way or another. But I'm just not sure this is really true. Especially in the case of the later releasing films, I'm just not sure there are people sitting out there, marking their calendars for October 13th, waiting for a single film to eviscerate Trump on his failed handling of the virus. They've got so many other outlets more immediately providing them that information. 

What's more, I think these films are mostly preaching to the choir. Liberals like me gobble them up and dream ourselves away into a fantasy that these are big, influential conversation pieces. When in fact, particularly in 2020, they are just small drops in a very big bucket of election-related noise. In fact, by having four such movies (and certainly more that I didn't watch this past weekend), the filmmakers are essentially cannibalizing each other as viewers make choices among an ever-growing pool of entertainment options. And who could blame them if they'd prefer escapism in 2020, rather than yet more election discussion?

The good news is, I'm pretty sure the end result will have made it seem like these movies had an influence, even if they probably did not. 

Before leaving I'd like to mention that I considered watching a fifth movie this weekend, just to be balanced. If there's a true corollary to Moore in our cinematic landscape, it's not on the left side of the aisle, but the right. Even more doggedly than Moore perhaps, conservative filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza times new films to the elections, trying to do for conservative candidates what Moore tries to do for liberal ones.

Just for the sake of being fair and balanced, and to see what it was all about, I did watch, back at the time, his 2012 movie 2016: Obama's America, whose title alone probably suggested he did not expect it to help Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama. I thought it was bad, but not awful -- I disagreed with his politics, but the worse part about it was just that he's not a very good filmmaker. 

Since then he's made a conservative screed every two years, only two of those having been timed to presidential elections: Hillary's America in 2016 and Trump Card this year. I thought it would be "fair" of me to give D'Souza another viewing, even though I disagree with his politics as well as his filmmaking. 

I had the movie up on iTunes to rent and everything, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I saw his smug face on the poster and thought "If I contribute even one $4.99 rental to this guy, it will boost his worldview and his sense of his own importance just that little bit more." Just as every vote counts in a presidential election, every rental counts in determining the success of a film. And I don't want either Trump or Trump Card to be considered a success.

Hey, who ever said I had to be fair? Donald Trump has run roughshod over the very notion of fairness, in every day of his life, in everything he does. I can't wait until we send him packing. 

Michael Moore is as old as his shtick

We watched Where to Invade Next on Thursday night, which was probably not really necessary in terms of Michael Moore completism. I'm not a Michael Moore completist, having missed Capitalism: A Love Story (although I did recently watch Canadian Bacon, the move of a Michael Moore completist if ever there was one). Even back then, in 2009, I knew I was tired of the way Moore was conveying his message (though not the message itself, with which I agree), and I just never prioritized seeing Capitalism.

For some reason, Where to Invade Next inspired me with more hope. Not because the trailers made it look particularly different or more interesting than his other movies -- in fact, it looked pretty much exactly like his other movies -- but because when Moore stopped making films, I noticed his absence. It kind of felt like a vital liberal voice had been snuffed from the political entertainment landscape, and I didn't want that to be viewed as a victory by his opponents.

Besides, it was the 99 cent rental on iTunes a few weeks ago, and I'll see anything for 99 cents.

Unfortunately, Where to Invade Next is easily Moore's least interesting film. Even while being very much the same as the others.

I guess it could be that he's lost the bite from his commentary in an age when Obama is president and he doesn't really have anything bad to say about him. Or rather, he probably has plenty bad he'd like to say, but he's not the type of liberal who will cut off his nose to spite his face. He sees the big picture, which is that the country is heading in the right direction in terms of who's in charge of it.

But really, I just felt like I'd seen all this before. In fact, I'd seen Michael Moore himself telling me all this before.

The premise of this movie is not military, actually. There's a bit of commentary at the start about how the U.S. has been in a non-stop series of conflicts dating back, oh, pretty much to World War II. But that's just the jumping off point. The "invading" Moore talks about here is not a scathing look inside how the U.S. decides the next fight it plans to pick. It's actually an invasion of friendly nations to take their best social ideas.

The primary symbol of this "invasion" is Moore carrying around an American flag, planting it in various places like the living room of Italians who enjoy their eight weeks of paid vacation, or a Slovenian university where tuition is free.

Yawn.

Same old Michael Moore. Same old shtick.

Emphasis on the word "old."

I noticed for the first time in this movie how old Michael Moore is really looking. He's 62, so it should not be such a surprise. But it's not just his chicken neck and general sense of sagginess. It's that the stuff he's doing seems so old -- so old-fashioned, and so tired.

One technique Moore has always used is to ask dumb questions. He's big on pretending he doesn't know the answer to a question and asking it in a way that sets up the interview subject to make his point for him. Like asking university students about their debt, knowing that they do not actually have debt. Like asking a Norwegian prisoner in an open prison plan how many times he's been raped in the shower. Like asking police officers where their guns are.

I get what Moore is doing, but my God has he done this so many times before. One of my favorite Moore films is actually Sicko, which is only two films ago for him. This movie is essentially like Sicko all over again, except focusing on things other than just healthcare.

And don't get me wrong, there are some interesting things in it. But we know by now that places in Europe have radically different approaches to work, to healthcare, to life, to school, to taxes than we do in the U.S. Michael Moore himself has told us this over and over again. Some of those approaches are probably applicable to the U.S. Some are not. And Moore conveniently overlooks the things that are not working particularly well in those countries. My wife characterized it best when she referred to it as "cherry-picking."

For the first time in his career, Moore seems to be merely engaged in shaming, rather than suggesting real solutions and alternatives. Does he really think a movie like this is going to allow the U.S. to institute three-hour school days and no homework (an approach that supposedly works wonders in Finland) and eight weeks a year of paid leave? At this point it just seems like a gratuitous nose-rubbing of all the ways America is broken.

And because he recognizes how to structure a narrative (though not how to cut 30 minutes out of a two-hour movie), Moore finishes up with a "happy ending." He acknowledges that many of the practices successfully put in place in far-flung areas of the world originated with American concepts that have fallen by the wayside. But honestly, this ending seems disingenuous.

I welcome Michael Moore back to the arena, I suppose. But just because you're old doesn't mean you can't learn new tricks. If Moore makes another movie and it's evident he hasn't learned any, I won't be watching it.

When documentaries aren't enough

When thinking of a fiction filmmaker, we tend to think of either someone who has a specific artistic vision, or someone who's trying to make a buck.

It's a bit different with documentarians. Documentarians have a purpose.

Sure, there are plenty of purpose-driven directors of fiction films. But we can never fully know what their motivations are. Wanting to be rich and famous might be one of them.

Now, we know that's not why people get into documentary filmmaking, or if it is the reason, then they're deluding themselves -- a quality that tends to fly in the face of being a good documentarian. The reason people become documentarians is that they have a story to tell, or corruption to uncover. They want to stand up for the oppressed and take down the giants. They want to save the world.

Seth Gordon may not have been saving the world with 2007's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. But it's for damn sure he wasn't saving the world with Four Christmases, his first studio feature the next year. And no matter how good Horrible Bosses may be -- it's got a promising cast, that's for sure -- he won't be saving the world here either.

Come on, Seth. I thought you were supposed to be "enlightened." I thought you were supposed to not need the glitz and glamor of Hollywood. In fact, I thought you were supposed to shun it.

I don't know why I feel disappointed that Seth Gordon wanted to be "more" than a documentarian. If I were trying to be a filmmaker myself, I'd want to make fiction films. Why should I fault him for getting his foot in the door with one of my favorite documentaries of the past decade, then bolting for the greener pastures and paychecks of Hollywood as soon as the opportunity presented itself? Even if his debut feature was such inferior schlock? Maybe he always wanted to be a fiction filmmaker, and the documentary was the exception.

But I do. I do feel disappointed.

I guess it's the same way you feel disappointed when a public defender starts chasing ambulances. When a crusading journalist takes a cushy PR job. We expect documentarians to be serving a higher purpose than just creating entertainment. It may not be a purpose we ourselves want, but it's an honorable purpose that the world needs.

Of course, there are all kinds of documentarians. Some really are not serving a higher purpose. Seth Gordon made a movie about two grown men competing for the high score in Donkey Kong. It wasn't about human rights violations or a corporate scandal. It was about men seeking a certain type of personal transcendence by moving a joystick better than anyone else. I'd probably be much more disappointed if someone like Alex Gibney directed Four Christmases and then Horrible Bosses. For Gordon, it's not such a big transition.

But I'm still disappointed.

I think part of that has to do with the fact that I just pieced it together that Gordon directed both King of Kong and Four Christmases, so I'm still stinging from that realization. He also played a role in the multi-director effort Freakonomics, which I saw last month and wrote about here, and in looking at his credits at that time, I made the discovery: The same Seth Gordon who directed King of Kong directed Four Christmases. I loved the first and loathed the second, so this was like a kick in the stomach. It felt beneath him. It felt like he traded in quirky insight into human behavior for a rancid Christmas comedy in which the supposed funny parts involved Jon Favreau giving Vince Vaughn noogies and wedgies.

And I think that's really what gets at the oddness of the transition from documentarian to studio hack: It's not even the same skill set. Even if someone makes the greatest documentary you've ever seen, does that then mean they're capable of getting big Hollywood stars to emote? In the case of Four Christmases, the answer was "no."

Take Michael Moore, perhaps the most famous/notorious documentarian working today. As pure as we seem to think his documentary instincts are -- even if he bends the rules in well-documented ways -- Moore too was lured by the temptations of fiction filmmaking. Like Gordon, he had one wildly successful documentary (Roger & Me) and followed that up with his fiction film debut, the satirical Canadian Bacon, in which the U.S. and Canada come to the brink of war. The film was a massive failure and sent Moore scampering back into the documentary world, where he made a name for himself as the polarizing figure he is today. (And, has made a buck or two along the way as well.)

I haven't seen Canadian Bacon, but I'm guessing that the reason it didn't work is that Moore is not good at making fiction films. He makes documentaries, and satisfies his fix for fiction by inserting staged or fictitious elements into them. (Well, maybe that's taking it a bit far -- but he certainly doesn't take the stand-back-and-watch approach taken by most documentarians.) In any case, he's found his niche and it's working for him.

So especially if Horrible Bosses is a flop, it's time for Seth Gordon to scamper back to documentaries. He may have made only one, but it was a darn good one, and a person who can make one good documentary can make two, or three, or four.

There are plenty of other people who can make bad studio comedies.

Not interested any Moore?

So what's happened to Michael Moore in the last two years that makes me not very interested in seeing his latest movie?

When Sicko came out in 2007, I saw it in the theater, and was incredibly moved by it, even if Moore was certainly manipulating my emotions with that whole "taking patients to Cuba to get treatment" scene. I liked the film a lot better than Fahrenheit 9/11, which I thought gave too much ammunition to Moore's critics, and I ended up ranking it in my top 10 for the year.

If anything, Moore's profile should have only improved since then, as Sicko can probably be viewed as some kind of catalyst for the health care debate that's currently dividing the country. Certainly, the election of a progressive Democrat to the White House plays a larger role, but let it not be said that Moore's movie played no role in getting this discussion going.

But maybe I've put my finger on it in that last paragraph. Maybe the election of a progressive Democrat to the White House has reduced Moore's relevance. Maybe his primary function was as a fly in Bush's ointment, as a rallying cry on the liberal side. After all, Moore's last three films -- the period when he gained international celebrity/notoriety -- all came during the Bush administration. Now that the liberals have rallied, and elected Barack Obama, maybe there's just not as much room for Michael Moore (no size jokes please) as there once was.

Then again, today's release of Capitalism: A Love Story is also well timed, in a way. After Obama got an initial honeymoon of about three to four months, the Republican backlash has hit him hard. All those people who called him Barack Hussein Obama last fall have come back out of the woodwork, their thinly veiled racism as thinly veiled as ever. They've poured into town hall meetings to throw the world "socialism" around, and basically created the appearance that the vast majority of Americans do not want the health care reform that would benefit most of those making the protests.

So is this a deceptively appropriate moment for Moore to rise again?

Well, it's hard to say, especially when Moore himself doesn't think so. In fact, the man has gone on record recently saying he may be finished with documentaries, at least for now. Before Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly go doing a victory dance on their anchor desks, they should know that Moore will probably touch on his familiar liberal concerns in the fiction films he's discussed making after his documentary career ends.

And maybe that's part of why Capitalism doesn't interest me that much, either: Even the man considers himself done, and wants to leave the scene before he becomes a parody of himself, if he hasn't already. I think when I saw the first trailers for Capitalism, I thought, "Oh here we go again -- Michael Moore and his microphone doing something outrageous." And this reaction is from one of his ideological soul mates, mind you. However effective your gimmick -- and I don't really mean to insult Moore by calling it a gimmick -- is, it always gets tired eventually. Like if we see Sacha Baron Cohen haul out yet another character he wants to send out to shock and offend people, we'll probably react to it even more negatively than we reacted to Bruno (which I still haven't seen).

But then there's the part of me that worries about that Beck/O'Reilly victory dance. Any tendency to recede from the public eye on Moore's part could easily be viewed as Moore "giving up," as a victory for conservatives. The last thing I want to do is let the conservatives think they fatally wounded their target last year when the execrable An American Carol was released. You may remember me discussing it here, but if not, I'll synopsize: A thinly-veiled -- okay, not veiled -- Michael Moore clone named Michael Malone wants to boycott the 4th of July because of his rampant anti-Americanism. (See, Moore is always accused by his critics of being unAmerican). What results is a sort of Naked Gun-style, heavily conservative spoof of A Christmas Carol, in which Malone receives his comeuppance (and numerous physical pratfalls) in the course of being visited by three ghosts, all played by famous conservatives (Kelsey Grammer, Jon Voight, Trace Adkins, etc.). The movie was downright terrible -- I'd like to think I would have ranked it last for the year on execution alone, even if I hadn't disagreed with its politics. But with Moore announcing that he's getting out of the game less than a year after its release, both the filmmakers and the film's ideological supporters will probably think An American Carol had something to do with it. Conveniently ignoring, of course, the massive victory Moore scored over them when Obama was elected president.

So I'd like nothing more than to contribute to a large box office haul for Capitalism: A Love Story this weekend, the same way I wanted to stick it to the religious people who boycotted The Golden Compass by boosting that film's box office.

But I just don't think I will, and I don't think I'll be the only one of Moore's former flock to make that decision. I've got too many other movies I'd like to see first -- Zombieland, Paranormal Activity, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Big Fan, Whip It, The Informant! ... the list staggers me without even including Capitalism. If other liberal movie fans are in my camp, and feel barraged by a surprising number of September releases they need to see, the movie may struggle to make $5 million.

Well, I guess we'll just have to be satisfied with our Democratic president and our Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. If we're still measuring our successes by the zingers Moore scores, and are so easily agitated by the conservative windbags who try to get under our skin, then we're just dropping down to their level.

And I for one am interested to see Moore's next attempt at a fiction film. I haven't actually seen the much-maligned John Candy vehicle Canadian Bacon, but it can't be the best he has to offer, can it?