Capitalism: A Love Story (12A.)
Written, Directed and narrated by Michael Moore. 127 mins.
This latest Michael Moore polemic was the Surprise Film at last year’s London Film Festival in October and when the title came up the reaction from the expectant crowd (the previous two years had seen No Country for Old Men and The Wrestler fill that slot) was apparently not one of universal enthusiasm.
It’s been some time since the terms Fresh and Exciting have been used in conjunction with a Moore film and this one in particular provokes feelings of, “But Sir, we already did this lesson.” Previously The Corporation has demonstrated that the behaviour of multinational corporations is fundamentally psychopathic, while compared to the BBC’s Adam Curtis, Moore efforts at using archive footage to construct a counter history is quite mundane.
Moore is very much a genre film maker and this is standard Moore fare. You get the archive clips, the human interest stories, the Flint bit, the moments of humour. And if you like Moore films than you should enjoy this one as it outlines a potted history, from FDR to the present day, of how the purpose of business stopped being about creating jobs and communities and became about ruthless exploitation.
It’s an insular film, aimed solely at American audiences though it’s amazing how the American and British stories overlap. The grey disappointment of Carter and Callaghan in the Seventies opened up the opportunity for Reagan and Thatcher to get the free market going. The Nineties saw a bit of thumb twiddling from Clinton/ Major before Bush in the States and Blair/ Brown over here finally let big business run wild, free of any constraints. Now prospective figures of hope have emerged with Obama in the States and ….. well no analogy’s perfect.
A regular charge against Moore is that he makes sweeping, unsubstantiated statements. Here he claims that the 2008’s financial meltdown was an artificial crisis, a financial coup d’etat trumped up to allow the bankers and financial sector to make off with more than $700 billion of taxpayers’ money. Suddenly we're all ears but there’s no real follow up, no idea of how this could have been organised or what exactly it consisted of.
There are fewer stunts in this one, which is an advance because the sight of Moore getting turned away by the security officer at the ground floor of a major multinational was becoming evermore pointless.
It makes you wonder what the next generation of agit prop film makers will come up with. Perhaps kidnapping a prominent politician or financier and executing him when their demands aren’t met – and then getting bad reviews that complain about their reliance on 70s retro.
Capitalism: A Love Story (12A.)
Written, Directed and narrated by Michael Moore. 127 mins.
This latest Michael Moore polemic was the Surprise Film at last year’s London Film Festival in October and when the title came up the reaction from the expectant crowd (the previous two years had seen No Country for Old Men and The Wrestler fill that slot) was apparently not one of universal enthusiasm.
It’s been some time since the terms Fresh and Exciting have been used in conjunction with a Moore film and this one in particular provokes feelings of, “But Sir, we already did this lesson.” Previously The Corporation has demonstrated that the behaviour of multinational corporations is fundamentally psychopathic, while compared to the BBC’s Adam Curtis, Moore efforts at using archive footage to construct a counter history is quite mundane.
Moore is very much a genre film maker and this is standard Moore fare. You get the archive clips, the human interest stories, the Flint bit, the moments of humour. And if you like Moore films than you should enjoy this one as it outlines a potted history, from FDR to the present day, of how the purpose of business stopped being about creating jobs and communities and became about ruthless exploitation.
It’s an insular film, aimed solely at American audiences though it’s amazing how the American and British stories overlap. The grey disappointment of Carter and Callaghan in the Seventies opened up the opportunity for Reagan and Thatcher to get the free market going. The Nineties saw a bit of thumb twiddling from Clinton/ Major before Bush in the States and Blair/ Brown over here finally let big business run wild, free of any constraints. Now prospective figures of hope have emerged with Obama in the States and ….. well no analogy’s perfect.
A regular charge against Moore is that he makes sweeping, unsubstantiated statements. Here he claims that the 2008’s financial meltdown was an artificial crisis, a financial coup d’etat trumped up to allow the bankers and financial sector to make off with more than $700 billion of taxpayers’ money. Suddenly we're all ears but there’s no real follow up, no idea of how this could have been organised or what exactly it consisted of.
There are fewer stunts in this one, which is an advance because the sight of Moore getting turned away by the security officer at the ground floor of a major multinational was becoming evermore pointless.
It makes you wonder what the next generation of agit prop film makers will come up with. Perhaps kidnapping a prominent politician or financier and executing him when their demands aren’t met – and then getting bad reviews that complain about their reliance on 70s retro.
