The Michael Moore era appears to be over – or at least needs to prepare for its Last Rites. And the Oscar winning filmmaker seems to know it.

It’s one thing that his last two films (“Capitalism: A Love Story” and “Slacker Uprising”) failed to haul in big bucks or the critical raves usually afforded his propaganda films. Some critics even started to call him out on his shaky grasp of reality – better late than never, gang!

Now, it appears Moore will say just about anything to generate press – assuming it will get him back in the public eye.

This week on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Moore told the HBO show’s crowd that the McDonald’s restaurant near Ground Zero had killed more people than the 9/11 terrorists who brought down the World Trade Center.

Did he really say something that stupid? Yawn.

The filmmaker also went on record recently in support of the mosque planned for a site two blocks from Ground Zero. Moore would rather the mosque be built ON Ground Zero. Nothing else will do for him, and the failure to build said mosque means America as he knows it is no more. He even offered to put up as much as $10,000 of his own money to support the mosque project. (more…)

Okay, here’s my favorite headline of the day – no, make that year.

Take a look-see, for yourself, see.

Yes, the AP headline reads: “NY car bomb suspect cooperates, but motive mystery.”

Yeah it’s only a mystery if you’re in the media, and really stupid. Everyone else pretty much understands why the terrorist left a fuel bomb in an area filled with families.

He hates us. He hate our country, our culture. He wants you dead.

But the media – an entity full of fragile egos and bubble-encased boobs – just can’t see that. In fact, it’s kinda awesome how huge and gaping their blind spot toward radical Islamic fundamentalism is. If only there could be other motives for the mayhem, so they’d never having to place blame on anything (except America, of course).

So I thought I’d help them out, and find motives the media could be comfortable with.

So why did Faisal Shahzad try to blow up Time Square? (more…)

Michael Moore’s publicist contacted me to set up an interview about his new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, but then Moore canceled at the last minute. I wasn’t surprised. It’s unlikely that he would have been able to hold up to hard questions about this patently dishonest film. 

In Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore describes America has having been founded on genocide and having gotten rich on the backs of slaves. This is egregiously false. Ayn Rand explained the truth: “Capitalism cannot work with slave labor. It was the agrarian, feudal South that maintained slavery. It was the industrial, capitalistic North that wiped it out—as capitalism wiped out slavery and serfdom in the whole civilized world of the nineteenth century.” 

Moore kicks off his movie equating America to ancient Rome, running stock footage of Rome from bad B-movies, and draws all the wrong conclusions. Rome grew its greatest in its period of freedom as a republic, and collapsed after it morphed into an empire with the uncontrolled growth of government controls, including welfare state measures – bread and circuses. 

The growth of taxation and government control destroyed the Roman economy and caused the collapse of Rome – yet more taxes and government control are the very things that this fat bastard is advocating. He mocks America’s predominance in the auto industry by saying that we eliminated our competition, Germany and Japan, when in fact we saved the world from Germany and Japan not in order to destroy their auto industry but to protect the world from the tyranny and darkness they represented. Moore mentions that we destroyed Japan and Germany and claims that that’s why our auto industry became number one, but he neglects to explain why we destroyed Japan and Germany. And he says nothing about how we rebuilt Japan and Germany. In fact, we made it safe for Germany and Japan to dominate the auto industry.  (more…)

And does the self-proclaimed defender of the working and middle classes actually know anything about them and how they live?

My questions were prompted after a “letter from Michael Moore” popped into my inbox.  It was promoting the DVD launch of his documentary Capitalism – A Love Story.

Mr. Moore acknowledges that some may not have watched it in the movie theater because they were working too hard but then blames poor ticket sales on the behaviour of the very workers he pretends to defend in his documentaries.

He seems to detest working people and how he thinks they behave in the movie theater.

But for those of you who didn’t get to the theater, what’s your excuse? Didn’t want to sit through 20 minutes of TV ads up on the screen before the movie started? Don’t like sitting next to people who have 6 important cell calls to make during the film? Feet get stuck to the floor after two hours of people spilling their 164 oz. sodas, thus preventing you from getting up when the film’s over?

So in Mooreland the workers of the world are boorish, inconsiderate slobs who eat and drink to excess and mess up their theaters.

It is clear Michael Moore despises his audience, but perhaps even more tellingly, he does not even seem to know how they live or even what the inside of a movie theater looks like these days. (more…)

After nearly two months in theaters and all the hype that normally surrounds a Michael Moore film — much of it free thanks to a fawning media, “Capitalism: A Love Story” has flopped. Production costs, advertising costs and whatever Michael Moore takes above the line makes spinning a measly $14.2 million theatrical haul into anything other than a flop impossible.

Oh, you can be certain Moore’s fellow travellers in the entertainment media will try: “It’s the 5th highest grossing political documentary of all time!” But that’s like saying , “This is the fifth best car accident I’ve had this month!” A good rule of thumb is that after theaters take their cut, 55% of ticket sales make it back to the studio, and there’s no way $8 million is anything more than a sea of red. (more…)

Ann Althouse:

“The most striking thing in the movie was the religion. I think Moore is seriously motivated by Christianity. He says he is (and has been since he was a boy). And he presented various priests, Biblical quotations, and movie footage from “Jesus of Nazareth” to make the argument that Christianity requires socialism. With this theme, I found it unsettling that in attacking the banking system, Moore presented quite a parade of Jewish names and faces. He never says the word “Jewish,” but I think the anti-Semitic theme is there. We receive long lectures about how capitalism is inconsistent with Christianity, followed a heavy-handed array of — it’s up to you to see that they are — Jewish villains. (more…)

Tough times for leftie Hollywood. Nothing’s gone right this week. None of this is their fault, of course. In order to understand that it might not be a good idea to rally around a child rapist, bash religion in a religious country or trash capitalism in a capitalist country you have to live in the real world…

Steve Mason:

Michael Moore’s CAPITALISM tanks!

Ricky Gervais has launched his second consecutive box office bomb as The Invention of Lying (Warner Bros) only mustered $2.2M or so to start the 3-day. The comedy should finish #5 with approximately $6.5M for the weekend. … (more…)

Last weekend, Michael Phillips and A.O. Scott reviewed, among other films, Michael Moore’s latest farce, “Capitalism: A Love Story.” I don’t know their track records or political leanings, but Phillips for one noticed that Michael Moore is growing tiresome. He didn’t mention the blatant hypocrisy of a multi-millionaire who has reaped the benefits of capitalism calling for its demise, but still, he’s getting tired of the schtick, which leaves me hopeful.

A.O. Scott raved about the movie, and I agree on one hand that Michael Moore has finally chosen the most logical topic for his kind of film. At least Michael Moore has the nerve to finally say it: he doesn’t like capitalism. It’s absurd, it’s ridiculous, it’s akin to Lieutenant Kaffee rising and sleeping under the very blanket of freedom that Colonel Jessep provides, then questioning the manner in which he, Colonel Jessup, provides it.  I’m sure Goldman Sachs would rather Mikey just thank them and go on his way… but I digress… (more…)

A friend recently invited me to a private screening of Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story. The September 16 invite, not surprisingly, leaned in a certain direction: 

“Moore takes us into the homes of ordinary people whose lives have been turned upside down; and he goes looking for explanations in Washington, DC and elsewhere. What he finds are the all-too-familiar symptoms of a love affair gone astray: lies, abuse, betrayal and 14,000 jobs being lost every day. Capitalism: A Love Story is Michael Moore’s ultimate quest to answer the question he’s posed throughout his illustrious filmmaking career: Who are we and why do we behave the way that we do?” 

Considering Moore was going to be there for a Q&A after (moderated by Arianna Huffington), I quickly signed on. Now before painting a picture of Moore’s new film, let me be honest: my belief set is essentially libertarian (“Government out of my bedroom and my pocketbook”). Not only do government solutions not excite me, they scare the living blank out of me. Remember when George Bush declared, “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse”? He might as well of said, “Hide your money, kids — ’cause I’m coming to take it!” 

Oh sure, in theory I would like to see everyone with their own homestead, money in their pocket for regular shopping frenzies, and no health worries despite eating at Burger King 24/7, but arriving at those goals is not exactly doable unless government robs Peter to pay Paul and/or starts up the printing press.  (more…)

Firing a red-hot cannon blast at both parties and the excesses of America’s capitalist system, filmmaker Michael Moore’s latest documentary “Capitalism: A Love Story” is also his most stylistically and emotionally mature work to date. Launching with a string of film clips that parallel the fall of the Roman Empire to our present societal hot mess, the film serves up big laughs with its harrowing vision of just how far off the rails our present economic crisis has taken the nation. 

Moore has made plenty of claims that “Capitalism” is the summation of two full decades of work, harking back to the 1989 release of his seminal “Roger & Me,” and that this film is lobbing bombs at the figures involved.  Yet much of the time, the film has a mournful, yearning approach in showing Moore’s desire that America return to the capitalism of the pre-Jimmy Carter years: he shows that the system’s promises worked out splendidly throughout most of the nation’s history, and in particular from the boom years after WWII all the way through Ford before the nation hit Carter’s infamous assessment of “malaise” in the late ‘70s.  (more…)

If only he would use his talent for goodness instead of evil!

The bumbling fictional spy Maxwell Smart often used this phrase to describe some of the super-villains he faced on the TV spy show “Get Smart” in the 1960s. The same statement may be applied to Michael Moore, the filmmaking darling of the Left who has made another polemical documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story.” This time, Moore calls for the replacement of America’s capitalist system with a socialist system, including, of course, pro-communist proposals to share all wealth or profits equally.

A talented filmmaker (see our full review here where we list most of the major problems with Moore’s new subversive, Marxist diatribe promoting his radical utopian nightmare), Moore begins his latest movie by comparing the United States to the Ancient Roman Empire, where, according to his sometimes pompous and condescending narration, society became divided between the super rich and the super poor (clearly an exaggeration). He then discusses the post-war economic boom in the United States in the 1950s and early 60s. (more…)

Director Michael Moore has a new movie coming soon – “Capitalism: A Love Story.”

It could only mean one thing – OK, many, many things:

• Rave reviews from at least 80 percent of film critics. And I’m being conservative.
• More press coverage than any documentary filmmaker could ever dream of.
• Few, if any, labels associated with him in the press. Liberal? Nah, he’s a muckraker, an iconoclast, a rebel, a truth teller…
• Oscar buzz aplenty. Feel badly for any other documentary filmmaker who did great work this year. Chances are you won’t be taking home the Oscar for your troubles. Better luck next year.
• More softball questions thrown his way by alleged journalists – this time, Oprah herself will get in on the action.

Moore, who won the Best Documentary Oscar for “Bowling for Columbine” and gave us the factually challenged “Fahrenheit 9/11,” has helped shape the film industry for better and worse. (more…)

Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” premieres at the Venice Film Festival today. Reuters has most of the details, the usual-usual from the 55-year old mega-millionaire. But buried below the usual-usual is the real story — a point of agreement with we right-wingers:

Amid the gloom, Moore detects the beginnings of a popular movement against unbridled capitalism, and believes President Barack Obama’s rise to power may bolster it.

Well, let’s hope Ted Kennedy’s enjoying his day on the slopes because Mr. Moore and I just found some common ground.

Here are the other bullet points. To save you time, the following words are not used together in describing the film: ”personal” and “responsibility” — “taxes” and “too high” — “Michael Moore” and “gave all his wealth to the federal government.”    (more…)

Michael Moore is a big fat idiot — or, is he?  Actually, he is a big fat Academy-Award winning capitalist who is making a movie sarcastically called “Capitalism: A Love Story.”  In it, he’ll use his magical megaphone to expose, in his words, “an economic system that is unfair, it’s unjust and it’s not democratic. And now we’ve learned it doesn’t work.”   So… will he also park his little white ice cream truck in front of movie theaters and chastise patrons who wish to pay for a ticket?  Will he offer the film for free — perhaps even share part of the proceeds with all of us? Of course not, he’s a millionaire.

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We’ve seen this film many times before from Mr. Moore. The Bush years were kind to him as he tapped into the fears of Americans as they questioned the post 9-11 world, or worried whether there were bogey men hiding in the front offices of America. Now, he’s able to exploit the recession and all the hardships we endure in one great big Mike Moore spectacular! In Moore’s world, free enterprise is unfair, health care is unfair, the 2nd amendment is unfair, life is unfair, paychecks, layoffs, mortgages and democracy itself is unfair — and America is the bad guy.  (more…)

This week, as the buildup to the upcoming movie “G.I. Joe” continues, the L.A. Times claimed that…

Yet overseas, where big action films often earn 60% or more of their ticket sales, rah-rah American sentiment doesn’t play well. So those references have vanished from the advertising.

Big Hollywood’s John Nolte gave that theory a thorough fisking, providing numbers showing that while “rah-rah America” movies aren’t guaranteed big foreign box-office returns, they aren’t automatically guaranteed to fail. He also points out that many “anti-rah rah” movies have even less appeal.

Oh, is it still okay to say “foreign?” Just checking, seeing as many schools are replacing “foreign language” departments with World Language departments. We’re all just one, big, happy World Family, right?

Okay, back to the topic at hand. John’s post got me to thinking. If anti-war movies such as “Rendition” and “A Mighty Heart,” despite the hype and the A-list star roster didn’t bring in the beaucoup bucks, how about anti-American movies made by one of the biggest anti-Americans on the planet, Michael Moore? (more…)