Michael Moore gets the Michael Moore treatment in a new documentary created by a fellow Michigan resident. Accountant turned filmmaker Kevin Leffler isn’t a dyed in the wool Republican trying to score cheap shots off the liberal gadfly. He’s just a regular Midwesterner who knew the guy being trumped up in the press as the straight talking Everyman wasn’t the real deal.

Leffler grew up in the same part of Michigan as Moore, attending the same Catholic Church and even working together on a local youth hotline. So when Leffler calls out Moore, it means something.

“Shooting Michael Moore” lets Leffler deconstruct the Moore myth. It’s a project with a tiny budget and little Hollywood razzmatazz – Leffler is a CPA and college professor, not a slick documentarian.

But he digs deep enough into Moore’s activities to reveal a more complicated, and damning portrait of the Oscar winner.

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Larry Post doesn’t mince words regarding Michael Moore’s body of work. Post recalls seeing Moore’s first documentary, “Roger & Me,” which blamed corporate misconduct for the decline of the auto industry his hometown of Flint, Mich. “I consider myself pretty knowledge about the subject matter, and the movie was totally distorted,” Post says of a film which failed to critique the “unions and the workers who had squeezed these companies” into oblivion.

“Every movie since ['Roger & Me'] has been a piece of crap,“ Post says.

So when he read a story in the Wall Street Journal last October about a neophyte filmmaker’s documentary slamming Moore it caught his attention. Post, an investment adviser by trade, is renting a Los Angeles theater next week to generate fresh buzz around the film. “Shooting Michael Moore” will be screened at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 25 at the Westwood Crest Theatre in L.A.

Post hopes “the trades” will take an interest in the screening or “maybe someone from Hollywood will come see it and pick it up for distribution,“ he says. (more…)

If the evil men do lives after them, the legacy of dishonesty, demagoguery and hypocrisy that Michael Moore has been enabled to legitimize in film and the body politic will endure for a long time after he quits making documentaries as he says he may. That hopefully means his disingenuous indictment of capitalism now making him millions in theaters will be the last time he’ll project his puerile class warfare demons onto a movie screen and insult our intelligence by calling it a documentary.

Don’t get me wrong. Moore came up with a clever shtick that can be amusing, but he doesn’t make real documentaries. He makes sophomoric  agitprop that violates the Oscar’s rule against fiction in that form which other documentary makers must apparently follow — a double standard point I’ve made to the Academy awarders twice. Only the first of those letters is listed below because of space limitations, but a key point made in that second note is that there should be a separate category for Moore’s type of fabricated political schlock if such stuff is going to be receiving awards .  Sans that, “anything goes with documentary film … there are no standards … it’s all a game,” as University of Texas film professor and indie producer John Pierson put it. (more…)