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Whatever you may think about Michael Moore, he has a sure hand when it comes to choosing his subject matter. FAHRENHEIT 9/11, so topical about the US invasion of Iraq and its background, won 26 major awards including the 2004 Palme d’Or at Cannes, and grossed more than $220 million worldwide. While SICKO in 2007 pretty much presaged the current US healthcare entanglement and, at a modest budget of $9 million, generated almost $25 million at the US box office alone, with an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary. CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY is his most topical doc to date. Only one year after the Wall Street crisis, which practically led to a global financial meltdown, Moore takes an in-depth look at democracy, the free market, lax regulatory authorities, who’s getting rich at the taxpayers’ expense, the dishing out of backhanders, and basically asks “where did the money go?” It’s “the movie I’ve been making for the past twenty years,” he says. It is, indeed, massive in scope, although his somewhat diffused efforts at providing clarity are laudable and his confrontational, sometimes clownish, approach is more than just amusing. In just over 2 hours, Moore touches upon a plethora of issues. Ranging from the plague of mortgage foreclosures complete with tear-jerking interviews with families being evicted from their homes and the helpless officers forced to expel them; to the destruction of the unions under Reagan and the subsequent decline of US industry (especially the automotive industry in his hometown Flint, Michigan); to the privatization of public services and utilities; through to the dire treatment of airline pilots. The latter illustrated by a little-known excerpt from the congressional testimony of US Airways pilot Chesley B. Sullenberger III (who recently made the news when he heroically landed his aircraft on the Hudson River) stating that his salary had been reduced by 40% and his pension cancelled. Moore accosts Wall Street financiers, asking them to explain derivatives (which none of them can do), turns up at AIG headquarters in an armoured truck to make a “citizen’s arrest” of its CEO, demanding return of the government bailout the conglomerate received ($144bn), and encircles the New York Stock Exchange with yellow crime scene tape - to underline his standpoint that it’s a den of thieves. “When did Jesus become a capitalist?” he asks at one point in the film, where an old Bible epic is over-dubbed with free enterprise clichés; just one of his many entertaining and inventive uses of archive footage.
Michael Moore has never pretended to be an objective reporter of unbiased news. His outrage at capitalism and its principle of rewarding incompetence, negligence, greed and downright thievery as opposed to hard work and excellence is clear from the start. After all, someone’s got to say it and he does it so well. He - and many, many others - are disgusted at America’s glorification of profit, where nothing matters but money and no venture is off limits if it generates sufficient revenue. And he provides some shocking cases in point: a privately-run juvenile detention centre in Pa., for example, where two judges were given millions in bribes to cavalierly sentence over a thousand youngsters to imprisonment. Or the macabre habit of many large companies who take out life insurance policies on their workers and employees - not just at the executive level, mind - which, in the event of death, pay out to the employer instead of the deceased’s families and loved ones: Cynically known in the trade as “dead peasant” policies.
He points out the circumstantial fact that the Treasury Department seems to be almost entirely composed of former executives from Goldman Sachs; how the $700bn government bailout bill was rushed through Congress and the Senate before the incoming administration took office - who got it, and his theories on how and why - and lots more besides. Whether you agree with him or not, there’s a lot to take in, and Michael Moore's latest and most fervent invective against the rich, the powerful and the greedy is a riveting and informative two hours. I left the movie theatre totally enraged! CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY (USA 2009), (German title: Kapitalismus: Eine Liebesgeschichte); Genre: Documentary; Running time: 126 mins.; US distributor: Overture Films; US release date: September 23, 2009 (limited); German distributor: Concorde Filmverleih; German release date: November 12, 2009; Director/writer/star: Michael Moore; Cinematographers: Daniel Marracino, Jayme Roy: Composer: Jeff Gibbs; Editors: Jessica Brunetto, Alex Meillier, Tanya Ager Meillier, Conor O’Neil, Pablo Proenza, Todd Woody Richman, John W. Walter |
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