posted
Ron and I started watching this movie last night, after the kiddies were in bed. We intended to watch a little and then go to sleep.
Didn't work out that way.
Whatever you may think about this man just now, his first movie is blessed genius. I say 'blessed' because he didn't know squat about making a movie or anything when he started the project. Some docu filmmakers he'd helped with some scouting came and showed him how to use the camera. He was unemployed when he started. He really wanted to save his town, and it shows. It's full of humor and real people being real people.
A lot of the context is provided by stock footage and by excerpts from local newscasts. He was lucky, in some ways. Like the time Ronald Reagan took unemployed workers out for pizza, and somebody stole the cash register? You can't make stuff like tat up.
What about the woman who was selling rabbits as PETS or MEAT?
Yes, I'm sure Flint wasn't ALL broken-down houses and people getting evicted, but he made his point effectively. I'd never seen this before, though I had seen some TV Nation, which was cool.
I have Bowling for Columbine and F9/11 in my queue, and I kNOW they have some of his typical misleading images and so forth. I just want to wait until I've seen them to discuss them (and to decide if it's a where-did-he-go-wrong scenario, or not).
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Unfortunately, I never got to finish it, but the parts I did see I liked. I also liked his short-lived TV series, TV Nation.
That was a long time ago, and I'm afraid he has changed a lot. I haven't seen his newer stuff, but I doubt I would like it.
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posted
One problem I had with the film was that it was all righteous anger and no suggested solutions.
GM HAD to close down some plants, or they were going to go out of business, and all their plants would close. As best I could tell, Moore thought Flint's plants should get preference in staying open simply because GM was founded there.
posted
But they were still making profits when they thought it would be good to move their plants to places with cheaper labor and make higher profits.
Yes, I think we can agree that there probably wasn't an easy solution, but it is STILL worth seeing. With uncomfortable, prosperous people saying things like "They just don't want to work."
If people behaved in a compassionate way toward others, even in business, isn't it possible that some of this misery could be avoided?
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posted
I took a class on Film & Politics last year, and the book briefly talked about Roger and Me. The book, Here's Looking At You by Ernest Giglio says, used it as an example of the blurring line between fiction motion pictures and documentaries. It says on p.43, "Moore considered his film a documentary, but eventually it was revealed that he had taken liberties even beyond editing adn teh rearranging of scenes. For example, Moore charged that the plant closings resulted in 30,000 workers being laid off but the actual figure for the Flint plant was a more modest 5,000. The 30,000 figure actually referred to jobs lost in plant closings in four states over a twelve year period. Furthermore, Moore has insinuated that while GM was closing its plant, teh city spend milions on projects that eventually failed. In fact, the three city projects that failed were underway before, rather than after the 1986 shutdoens. There were other minor discrepancies as well. One scene showed President Reagan touring the city, leaving the viewer with the impression that all the hoopla surrounding the president's visit contrasted sharply witht he image of a dying city. In actuality, Reagan visited Flint in 1980 as a presidential cnadidate rather than as presdient six years leader."
I think this is just more proof that you can't take Moore or his films at face value.
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posted
I watched it too, Olivia-surprised myself, in fact, by watching it the entire way through and sympathizing with his position and Moore in general than I had before.
I still think he's wrong and much of his later work is schlock, BS, and primarily propaganda...but in Roger and Me, at least, I can see some motivation in it behind pure politics.
I thought it was a well-done though obviously one-sided, unfair film. There were no solutions proposed, there was not one wealthy white person who appeared even halfway decent, and it didn't go more than ten minutes without reminding us that evil fatcats at GM are to blame for sticking it to poor Flint.
But I came out of it thinking, "Would I care about that? My hometown was evacuated and gutted!" I don't think I would, really-I'd be pissed.
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posted
Oh, I knew it was when Reagan was a candidate, but he did make it seem like it was the President visiting. I was actually wondering about that last night. I guess it was too good a story not to tell. Though I agree the placement of the news footage was intentionally misleading, I thought the bus they got into was obviously a campaign bus.
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Yes, Rakeesh, I know what you mean. I really, really enjoyed the TV Nation bits I saw, and this was that same kind of thing. Though I think if Roger Smith had just granted one interview, even under controlled circumstances, he wouldn't have seemed so evil. Like when they actually caught him giggling about having Moore's mic turned off atthe shareholder's meeting (his crew was till plugged in to the system, and the 'fat cats' mics hadn't been turned off yet). That was rich.
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posted
I've only seen one episdoe of TV nation. I loved the sketch where they had Hitler go into all these european banks withdrawing money.
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I missed that one. I liked the one where they moved into a house and painted half of the garage red, then started burying huge metal drums in the yard. And put shadows on the curtains that looked like somebody stabbing something and played recorded screams.
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I agree Moore is talented at what he does. He would have been very helpful in the 1940s directing those newsreels.
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I loved watching Rush on TV. He has this boyish and entertaining "I gotcha you PC suckers!" look on his face 90% of the time that just cracks me up.
The only thing I disliked about his performance is his tendency to make crinkling sounds with the papers in his hands. That drove me nuts for some reason.
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posted
I lived in MI for those years, and Moore got a lot more right than he did wrong. GM was paying millions to guys who didn't do squat but make the situation worse, while laying off thousands of workers in the Flint area.
It was a lot more than 5,000 people, although that might be the "official" number.
Also, GM made the workers a ton of promises and then reneged, while keeping the concessions they got for making those promises.
Moore was a great filmmaker, but his movies have gotten more and more "false" since Roger and Me. R&M rang true...even if you didn't agree with it, you understood it, and unless you were one of the people he was complaining about, you probably empathized with him.
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thank you, Kwea. R&M had more heart than agenda, and I liked it. TV Nation was fun entertainment. I look forward to seeing his more recent work, just for the sake of comparison.
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posted
I really like Roger and Me. It's extremely interesting and the Neo-Victorians annoyed me a lot. People aren't unemployed and poor because they dont' want to work. It's because they can't find jobs... plan and simple. But, considering how crummy some jobs can be, who can blame them? I like Michael Moore. He's a cool guy with an interesting sense of humour who makes good points.
Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote: I'm sure Flint wasn't ALL broken-down houses and people getting evicted,
Flint is Detroit without the charm. I haven't seen the movie, though. Could I see it without getting upset?
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posted
Just to answer Kat's question, by telling some of the single most disturbing images in the flick.
***SPOILERS****
There was some disturbing news footage of the police wounding a guy who was crazy and wearing a cape like he thought he was a superhero, but then you also see the guy going into an ambulance and looking mostly fine.
The hardest thing to watch was something MM claims the one lady was about to do when they were changing film, so the scene jumps a bit. One second they are talking to her, and she's explaining that the bunny she's holding is one she raised for meat. The bunny keeps nipping her. Then suddenly she's clubbing it and dressing it out to cook.
The bunny-clubbing was much harder to watch than the guy getting shot in the leg by police, at least for me. Made me wonder if my priorities are really messed up. Then I thought, well, the crazy guy had a gun, too. And the bunny was cute.
posted
I listened to an interview with Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein (author of No Logo) about their new documentary very similar to Roger and me called The Take. It follows a group of plant workers in Argentina just after the economic collapse in late 2001. That's where the similarity to Roger and Me ends: instead of striking after their plant was closed, the workers locked themselves in, took the machines hostage, and refused to stop working. The plant is still open and it is still productive. Each worker gets the same pay and everything is decided by committee. Talk about a solution! I've never heard of such a thing before. Are there any Argentinians here on Hatrack? You might be able to explain it better than I did. In any case, I can't wait to see the film. Has anyone seen it already?
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posted
Flint is a very industrialized city, and 5,000 jobs (even if it was more like 10,000 within one and a half years) is a ton of people out of work.
At that time MI was going through a hug recession, which hit us a lot earlier than the rest of the nation. There WERE NO JOBS! None.
Here is an example...I have been working since I was 12...I had a Detroit Free Press rote at 12-14, and a Detroit News (bcak then they were different papers...they consolidated later, after I moved) route from ages 15-17. My dad made me quit every summer so we could go on family vacation.
In 1987 I went to get my paper route back for the fall, and I was told that I couldn't have it. One of the local guys, who had been working at the local GM plant for 28 years, was layed-off, and HE was now the new paperboy.....
My senior year I didn't have a job the whole year...a first for me, since age 12. I put my name in at McDonalds....something I had sworn to never do....and I was told I was the 27 th person they would call...there were 26 people in front of me on a waiting list.
For $3.35 an hour.
I wasn't lazy....and neither were any of the other people out of work. Most lost their jobs, and a lot of them lost their families and houses too.
I was the kid who, at age 12, was delivering the paper that had to be at the door of the last customer by 6 am. I was up at 4 am every morning, 3:30 on Sundays.
posted
The former. I can handle disturbing images that are part of life, but I see no reason to devote two hours of my life to getting mad at Michael Moore because he's an idiot.
The movie sounds interesting, though. I've heard of it before, and I'd heard that MM used many of the same questionable practices in making that movie as he did in his others.
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He went up, with no prep at all, and no warning to these fat cats who were making millions while laying off thousands of hard-working men (and women), and confronted them at a time when everyone else was still deferring to them.
It is a beautiful thing. Really.
Not that I swallow it all whole..there are some things that are not the complete truth....not lies, precisely, but a warped, skewed perspective.
But some parts of it are brilliant...and that isn't a word I use lightly.
See it, even though it is old...it is some very original work.
posted
I promise this movie won't make you angry at MM. I can almost guarantee it, actually. He's not above looking foolish and uncomfortable himself. In this film, he's not a guy with a huge ego, and the story of Flint is very personal for him, and he ends up being part of it. He'd never made a film before. He'd never used the camera or anything. It's fresh and heartfelt, if not journalistically pprecise or linear.
posted
"Moore charged that the plant closings resulted in 30,000 workers being laid off but the actual figure for the Flint plant was a more modest 5,000."
The book you cite may have had an agenda to mislead of its own. As every major corporation likes to tell local elected officials when shopping for new business locations or plant expansions, there is a jobs multiplier effect when new jobs come into a community. Injecting new employed people into a community creates a demand for new/more goods&services from that community; which creates a need for more employees to fulfill that demand. That's why elected officials offer tax breaks and other sweetheart deals to major corporations as incentive to move their new plants/expansions into their neighborhoods.
In the case of manufacturing, the multiplier averages to about 4.2 extra permanent fulltime jobs per new fulltime plant employee. In the general case for manufacturing, the ratio is approximately the same as the average wage of the new fulltime plant worker divided by the minimum wage. Since GM autoworkers made more than the average, it is quite believable that the economic multiplier ratio in Flint and surrounding towns within daily-commuting distance of the GM plant was closer to 5 nonGM jobs per GM autoworker.
So when GM pulled out 5,000 jobs, it is plausible that the reduction in economic demand by those former employees in Flint sent the same-but-negative economic multiplier effect rippling through the surrounding city and bedroom communities. ie An extra 25,000 nonGM jobs could have been lost. Which totals to 30,000 lost jobs.
Unemployment insurance and savings could have slowed that loss. Other government retraining&rehiring programs could have mitigated the economic multiplier's effects. But it's fairly safe to say that 30,000 lost jobs was the number cited as the total by local elected officials and community planners in their meetings when GM announced that it was laying off its Flint workers.
posted
There were also more layoffs in stages after the first major one. Flint is currenly down some 50,000 GM jobs from where it was in the 80s. Or so I read recently. I think MM likes to show a lot of context, because much of his ideas are contextual. He likes to throw history in there for flavor.
Saw Bowling for Columbine last night, and I still like Michael Moore. He has his ideas, and he has fun with them. I'm holding off on F9/11 for a while, though. I want to absorb the context of MM's work before I see that one. For the sake of perspective.
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posted
Perspective is something YOU (as the viewer) has to bring to a Moore flim...he won't give you a sense of it, that is for sure.
I haven't seen F/9-11,and I don't think I will. I have read too much about his statements in it to enjoy them, and I strongly disagree with some of the statements he makes.....and as everyone should know by now, I strongly dislike Bush.
So it isn't all a Conservative lie about Moore.....even a centrist like myself has problems with him at this point.
Of course, I was reading some of the crap that Ann Coulter writes and tries to pass off as "intelligent"....and I was just as disgusted with her, if not more so. I guess over half of America are traitors, because we don't support W...over half of us, because according to the popular vote W should have never been president at all...
Idiots who play fast and loose with the truth abound on both sides of the line, people.
Which is why that "perspective" thing is so damn important....
posted
I guess by perspective, I meant the development of his thought. The humor in his films is his, I believe, and in itself is very telling.
People have said F9/11 is the only movie ever made to justify an Oscar speech, and I'm curious to see if that is true. I think on some level it is, but that it's probably also an explication of the ideas that led him to say that stuff in the heat of the moment (he wasn't expecting to win, and so didn't prepare anything).
posted
9/11 was not submitted in the documentary category, so the only way it is going to get an Oscar speech is if it wins Best Picture or Best Director.
posted
I don't think you'd really NEED to ask him, though somebody may have said, "Hey, get cracking on this, if you want to make a difference."
But asking him to make an anti-Bush movie seems like a fairly suspense-less question. I think I got that "justify and Oscar speech" thingy from whoever introduced him at Cannes. Billy Crystal? I dunno. It seemed funny in that kernel of truth sort of way.
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*thinks* I swear I heard somewhere that he got the funding along with the request to make the movie. I can't even remember where I heard it, though, so that's definitely not a reliable quote.
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