I have seen Roger and Me and I still disagree with Moore's misguided economic views. Moore seems to believe that the purpose of industry is to create a utopia for people to all make the same amount of money and live in peace and happiness. He completely discounts the evolutionary nature of business and seems to believe that if General Motors acted in a humanitarian style then so would all of its competitors. In short, Moore suffers from innocent minded delusions. What Moore fails to point out are the thousands of jobs that GM provides for the economy that without GM.... WOULD NOT EXIST.
I dunno, laying off 33,000 workers in one city, while your company is making record profits, then go and build new plants in Mexico and Asia is just plain crappy to me.
Well, if anything, I would have hoped that Roger and Me would have shown you the face of people who need some public assistance/welfare etc. Some of you always make it seem like it's the fault of the people who are poor that they are in the situation they are in.
His opinion..... you have your own. Of course everyone is going to believe that their own opinion is the right one. One thing is for sure, most of the arguments in this thread are trash. When trying to prove or disprove a point, please don't let emotion completely control responses...calling someone "fat" and "ugly" for example, proves nothing to the point that you disagree with his views. I want to hear (read) real arguments on why you don't agree with him, not attacks on his physical features. Blanket statements that he doesn't understand economics or "real life" don't work, please explain some more... Just so you know, I don't agree with alot of points from his "documentary's" also.
But what you and Mr. Moore forget is why GM exists. It isn't a jobs program, it is in the business of making profits for its stockholders. That doesn't make shifting thousands of jobs to Mexico or wherever right, but they have to do so to maximize profits. That's the name of the game.
Ummmmmm you might wanna watch it again, the lady in the bank clearly states they have the rifles ON HAND in the safe.
I agree that attacking Moore on looks alone is not at all productive. And I agree that Flint got it in the rear. But the concept that evil corporations are in a conspiracy to ruin Flint Michigan and the working man miss one point - that it was those evil corporations who had created those jobs in the first place. One thing that Mr. Moore and his contemporaries often mistake is that jobs are not rights, they are privledges. People have been losing there jobs for Millenia and it ain't gonna stop now just because Michael Moore has taken it upon himself to arrogantly save the world. I think that is where Moore really takes a wrong turn - he focuses his documentaries too much on himself and detracts from whatever point he is trying to make.
Good points. Where I disagree is "taken it upon himself to arrogantly save the world." I think he actually tried to prove a hypothesis (in Bowling for Columbine) that poverty and fear are main contributing factors for the United State's high gun murder rate. So saving the world no, but promoting an anti-buisness ethic jargon, yes. I think it would have been a great documentry if the facts about Flint and Lockheed where presented fairly, but he "spun" alot of truths for his benefit which I was uneasy with. For someone who dislikes the media "spin" zone he sure supplied a whale of an effort to get across his viewpoint. I don't think it was necessarily wrong though, in the war of information and propaganda in the media, you must fight fire with fire to stay on level ground sometimes.
That's likely only because Moore or someone affiliated with his production called ahead and set it up. I mean, with all the other stuff that's quite obvious set-up in the film (from making up what's written on a plaque at the Academy to saying that rockets that are used to launch telecommunications and other satellites are Weapons of Mass Destruction to editing different speeches given by Charlton Heston at different times into two speeches in order to make it Heston appear much more heartless than the truth would have to the mistakes about the founding of the NRA and so on), it's hard to connect with any of it. When so many of the facts are skewed just to make a point, how can you trust anything that's said or presented within the film? And that's what bugs me most about Michael Moore. He could've made a documentary that was just as powerful and hit the same points without making stuff up, slandering Heston through creative editing and lying, and everything else that falls within the general heading of inaccurate reporting. The issues of gun violence in America are ones that need to be studied because our experiences, as a nation, with gun violence is so different than the rest of the world. If we can find an honest answer as to why that is, perhaps we could better ourselves as a nation. But if we pretend to look into the reasons and, instead, make up stuff to make a better movie, it's worse than just not looking into the issue at all. So, in the end, I'm just disappointed. I'm disappointed that these issues that are so important and that do need light shined upon them in an honest way were, instead, treated as a punchline for a joke of a movie that can't be bothered to tell the truth EVEN WHEN the truth is just as compelling a story. And it's not even that Moore just made some mistakes. The Heston stuff proves that he was willing to outright lie in order to make the point he wanted to make in the film. I think it would probably be impossible to make a completely accurate documentary on this subject, at least in terms of the scope Moore tried to achieve. But I would forgive minor mistakes. It's harder to forgive outright deception.
I don't consider myself to be any smarter than Michael Moore, but, hey...at least I finished high school.
I can understand when somebody on this board says that you should not lie to get your point across. I agree with that i want hard facts not 3 edited speaches into one speach to serve that persons purpose. But it seems some people can never be satisfied. Meaning that if someone points out something that is screwed up in this country, (ex: Iraqi War) then its anti-american. It seems some people on this board just dont care about stuff that goes on in this country, and no matter what think its right.
One of the most likely numerous sites devoted to Michael's (to put it PC) exaggerations can be found here .
That was the impetus behind my original posting in this thread. But, like I said, it works both ways. There are those, too, who will make great hay about GWB misleading the country to go to war in Iraq while at the same time, excuse Moore's distortions. Humans are often internally inconsistent with their logic (and, as a human, I include myself in that).
The hard facts he wanted to present were presented pretty clearly there. I didn't pay attention so much to the content of Heston's speeches as to the pure fact that he was in those places so soon after a shooting death. I haven't cared what Heston has had to say for years, and I fully support the right to bear arms. I must have seen a completely different movie because the only real bashing Moore seemed to do was against the media. He certainly resorted to hyperbole when trying to connect America's military to the rate of gun violence, but he made his point: Americans, when threatened and afraid, attack someone. The vast majority of the time (WWII, WWI, Afghanistan, etc) we are absolutely in the right, but it does not change the fact that we DO attack someone when we feel threatened. That feeling seems to have permeated into every level of our society and could certainly have an influence on the way we treat each other when we feel threatened. The media was the "big Satan" that I got out of this film, and in many of his points, Moore is dead on. Everything we see is death here, fires there, and rapes down the alley. Even when we celebrate, many of us seem to feel the need to exhibit some particularly nasty behavior (except in Houston, I didn't see any riots on Richmond in '94 and '95). I think that we might be approaching chicken and egg time here, though, as it is difficult to tell how much the media is an influence and how much it is a mirror. Overall, I thought it was a thought provoking film that, as most great documentaries do, brought up at least as many questions as it answered. It is easy to twist some of the events in the film to demonize Moore, but if you haven't seen this film, it would be worth picking up from Netflix.
andy, What Moore somehow forgets to mention is that the Heston could not have avoided the meeting in Denver. It was the annual meeting of the NRA which had already been decided upon far in advance. The following is taken from this site. "Fact: The Denver event was not a demonstration relating to Columbine, but an annual meeting (see links below), whose place and date had been fixed years in advance. Fact: At Denver, the NRA canceled all events (normally several days of committee meetings, sporting events, dinners, and rallies) save the annual members' meeting; that could not be cancelled because corporate law required that it be held. [No way to change location, since you have to give advance notice of that to the members, and there were upwards of 4,000,000 members." There is far more information about the numerous innacuracies that border on outright slander towards Charlton Heston. I very much agree with mrpaige and his feelings of anger at Mr. Moore for his stretching of the truth when attempting to ask such important questions. If only Moore didn't have such an inflated sense of ego and self worth it could have been a fantastic film. As it is it is riddled with innacuracies that leave a bitter taste in my mouth.
I totally understand the meeting in Denver, as it is a very large place and it was planned far, far in advance. To my recollection, that part of the movie was only about some demonstrators. Moore didn't hammer on that one, it was the one in Flint, a small community that had just lost a child in a shooting incident. That one was NOT a yearly meeting or anything that could not have been pushed back out of respect. I do not see what you are referring to as slander toward Heston. Apparently you have been reading too many copies of the National Review's torching of the film because, although irreverant, Moore was never derogatory about or towards Heston, or at least I never got that impression. Moore asked for an apology to the people of Flint over the meeting Heston COULD have avoided if he had a shred of compassion for the victim or her family. I know that guns are important, but dead children are far more important. I watched it twice and I am going to have to get it back from Netflix now because I cannot have seen the same movie you did.
andy, just out of curiosity did you read much of the link I posted above? The editing that Moore did appeared to show Heston in a much more callous and mean-spirited light that I felt he deserved. I assure you I am not a right-wing nut (in fact I am a fellow Libertarian and voted for Browne last election) and do not get all of my information from the National Review. If you didn't get the same impression as I did, that's fine. However, I did feel that Moore tried to deceive people about Heston's feelings and character.
To me, Heston came across as the leader of the NRA, unapologetic in his zeal for guns. I would expect that out of him, but in any case, I did not get the impression that Moore was attacking Heston. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I felt that the group Moore was heavily slanted against was the media. I expect for people to come out with their particular bent. I see Ann Coulter's rantings for what they are, and Moore is the side of that coin that has a heart. I saw the movie, read the criticism, and came to the conclusion that Moore has many good points to make in this film. The funny part is that the segments with Heston do not even go to the heart of what I think Moore is trying to say. Moore never argued against gun ownership, in fact he made a point of saying that Canada has as many guns as the US per capita. Moore's strongest argument has nothing to do with the NRA, but instead has to do with the way Americans are conditioned to act. When we are afraid or threatened in any way, we tend to attack instinctively where people in other countries and cultures (more mature cultures) tend to be more diplomatic.
