Michael Moore is a name you probably know, but may be a bit fuzzy on why. He has always used his talents as a writer, editor, producer and director to pursue what he feels are important issues from the perspective of everyday people whose lives of quiet desperation are not normally the materials from which the Dream Factory makes movies. I've seen bits and pieces of his debut effort, "Roger and Me" (which is how I watch all movies) though the manner in which it was offered has proven to be a template for how he works through film and video.
Roger and Me is in its way, a variant of Dicken's Tale of Two Cities, in this case, both cities are Flint, Michigan (GFR! Terry Knight and the Pack!) and through a hundred moments, large and small, Moore takes the viewer through what happened when General Motors' Chairman Roger Smith simultaneously closed several manufacturing plants, a move that cost 30,000 people their jobs and created a ripple effect across the upper Midwest (and USA) that seemed to be a tsunami, though not for Roger Smith. Moore spends the movie trying to speak to Roger Smith and never succeeding.
It was muckraking of the first order, somewhere Sinclair Lewis was smiling, whose anger and outrage were well camouflaged by its irony and humor, but whose fundamental premise, well in advance of the New World Order, was this is a dark ride and the new world in the morning will be a lot less friendly. In the course of the nearly twenty years since, Moore has been pretty unblinking about that (Brave) New World.
I fell in love with him during the summer of 1995 when NBC gave him a slot for TV Nation-a show that the more frequently I viewed it, the more convinced I was they didn't even know they'd green lighted it. When the grown-ups came back from The Hamptons and/or Vail in the fall, the show disappeared only to return at some point, later, on Fox where you just knew Moore's politics and those of Roger Ailes, who was driving their TV news effort, were on a collision course. They certainly were and he was gone for good, except for a stint at Bravo with The Awful Truth so it was probably for the best that he kept his day job, film maker.
You just flashed on it, right? The guy who made Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11. Tall, bumbling kind of fellow, always wears a ball cap and seems to be in need of shave. Yeah, that's him-sort of resembles an unmade bed on two legs. Always seems to be reasonably pleasant right up until the on-camera moment when someone underestimates him and the situation and then it gets very nasty very quickly. He won an Oscar for the former in 2002 and caused a lot of consternation on all sides of the political aisle with the latter. He writes books when he's not making movies and he's making movies when he's not too upset at a world of gilded greed that seems to infuriate him.
He's not a guy, once you've experienced him, about whom you have no opinion. Basically, he's Pets or Meat. He's not a gray area in the rainbow in which we all live. Polarizing, caustic you'd have guessed he might be an Irish Catholic and you'd be correct. He is indeed a true son of Holy Mother church, while confessing to problems with the very religion that helped him fashion his moral universe. As a thank you to everyone with whom he has ever interacted, in any manner, his next movie, timed for release before the November Elections (there's a shock, right?), Slacker Uprising, will be available to watch online for free and is in all likelihood yet another variation on his life-long theme which will frustrate those who go to his work to complain as there'll be no place to get your money back. Somehow, I think he'll find that part most attractive of all.
-bill kenny
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