TIME: Michael Moore Goes for Broke With Capitalism

[marmar]

Michael Moore Goes for Broke With Capitalism
By Mary Corliss / Venice Sunday, Sep. 06, 2009


"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." So wrote Thomas Jefferson to a friend in 1816. Now Michael Moore, whose Fahrenheit 9/11 took on the U.S. Army, and the entire military-executive-industrial establishment, brings his latest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, to the Venice Film Festival. The land of Macchiavelli and the Medici is the perfect setting for Moore's nonfiction tragicomedy of greed and chicanery on Wall Street, in Washington, D.C., and through the entire economic apparatus. The movie will have its world premiere here tonight, before playing the Toronto Film Festival next week, opening Sept. 23 in New York and Los Angeles and achieving wide release Oct. 2.

Writing on his web site, Moore proclaimed, "The director of the festival said that our movie was 'incredibly symphonic' and that he was moved by its epic nature. Jeez, these Italians! Everything's an opera to them!" The movie is not opera so much as impassioned journalism — a broadside fired at the good ship Free Enterprise, with the hope of altering its course, and dislodging the pirates who have seized it.

Capitalism: A Love Story does not quite measure up to Moore's Sicko in its cumulative power, and it is unlikely to equal Fahrenheit 9/11 in political impact. In many ways, though, this is Moore's magnum opus: the grandest statement of his career-long belief that big business is screwing the hard-working little guy while government connives in the atrocity. As he loudly tried to confront General Motors CEO Roger Smith in Roger & Me in 1989, and pleaded through a bull horn to get officials at Guantanamo to give medical treatment to surviving victims of 9/11, so in Capitalism he attempts to make a citizen's arrest of AIG executives, and puts tape around the New York Stock Exchange building, declaring it a crime scene. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1920771,00.html

[L0oniX]

1. New York Stock Exchange building ...a crime scene indeed.

[boobooday]

2. I can't wait to see it! n/t