Cool. Let us know what he says–it sounds like he had some good insights.
This is a little off topic (well, not exactly), but apparently Trey Parker and Matt Stone were pissed at Moore for showing the interview with Matt Stone right before the cartoon (the one with the white people coming over to America and getting frightened of non-whites) because it implied that Trey and Matt were responsible for it–which they weren’t. Did you guys who saw it think that was misleading? I remember assuming the cartoon was a Trey and Matt production when I was watching but when I read about it later, I realized it wasn’t. It seems like a small thing, but apparently they were very angry about it.
The movie was a piece of idiotic fluff that had a tenuous core message, cherry-picked facts to support the central thesis and just involved Michael Moore going around being a fat douchebage in order to garner cheap accolades from the choir.
Read my link above. The swiftboaters were liars. They had a purely political motive for casting aspersions on a military hero. SB is simply uninformed or somehow able to ignore facts that cast doubts on his biases.
I love Trey and Matt, and don’t really care too much one way or the other about Moore, but I thought they were in the wrong that time. It never even occurred to me that they had something to do with the cartoon. I think they just decided that they didn’t want to be involved in such a politically charged project. They’ve worked really hard to maintain the impression that they bash all political ideologies equally (though they are pretty clearly libertarian-leaning) and didn’t want to disrupt that.
And when I say “they” I mostly mean Matt. I don’t recall if Trey actually had anything to do with this.
Wow. I didn’t know that, and that’s very misleading - because the animation looks like Parker/Stone’s work, and I made the connection that they did it. It makes a very strong statement, and I can see why they would be quite upset.
The interview with Stone wasn’t right before the cartoon, it was about 20 minutes before the cartoon. IIRC, the Charlton Heston “Out of my dead hands!” clip came shortly after the Stone interview. There was a lot of material between the interview and the cartoon.
When I saw the movie (rental, not in the theater) I did think “I wonder if the South Park guys did this cartoon?”, but then I thought “Nah, because if they had it would have said ‘With a cartoon by the creators of South Park!’ all over the box.”
I guess I can see Parker and Stone being annoyed that people thought the cartoon was theirs if it wasn’t, but it’s not like they have a monopoly on animation. If Moore wanted an animated segment in his film he had every right to include one, and the real animators were properly credited in the closing titles for anyone to see.
But I think it’s quite obvious that Moore didn’t have a problem with us assuming that it was Parker & Stone’s work. It looked like a South Park clip. The voices sounded like South Park voices. Was it coincidental that the cartoon was so similar to South Park? Probably not. Hell, it would have been easy to throw up a card that said “By Jones & Smith” or whoever the animators/writers were and that would remove any confusion. Why didn’t he simply do that?
I generally agree with a great deal of what Moore tries to convey in his films, but I always get the feeling I’m being hoodwinked. This is a good example of that feeling.
Agreed. This was especially noticeable to me during the “look how safe Canada is” section. When Moore was going door to door and acted amazed that people didn’t lock their doors I almost ejected the disc right then and there.
Instantly I began bitching to my wife about…
a) how many doors he probably opened before finding the unlocked one
b) how stupid it is to be amazed because the couple that owned the house were sitting right there watching TV because
b2) why should they lock their door if they’re right there? And…
b3) is Moore so stupid that he doesn’t know millions of people in America do the same thing?
Yeah. Some people think we’re crazy but we literally never locked our doors in the house I grew up in. We lost the front door key a couple years after moving in and we never had keys to the sliding glass doors in the back.
In my old house, we never locked it either. Well, at night, but when we were there, no, and not in the day even if no one was home. We lived in an insanely safe town, though.
I think the problem is that Michael Moore lost his sense of humor.
I went from *Roger & Me *to Bowling for Columbine and couldn’t believe the difference. *Roger and Me *was a hoot and kind of heartbreaking at the same time time: Perfect. You felt for the people of Flint, Mich. (Moore’s home town) but at the same time his attempts to see Roger Smith, GM CEO at the time, are sort of like an early Letterman sketch. It was a nice blend of pathos and laughs.
Fast forward to* Bowling for Columbine*. The juxtaposition of the views wasn’t funny anymore. Mr. Moore was just beating his drum for a cause I don’t totally disagree with, but without some amount of humor it fell flat for me.
The animated sequence in the movie was created by FlickerLab, and looking at their website it seems the style they used in Bowling for Columbine is consistent with their other work. Their philosophy statement and list of clients indicate that, along with their purely commercial projects, FlickerLab is interested in promoting social and environmental causes and has worked for leftwing groups like Greenpeace and Moveon.org. It’s unsurprising that Moore would want them to handle his animation or that they would want to take on the job.
*I doubt a card saying “By FlickerLab” would have made any difference at all, because FlickerLab is hardly a household name. People who already assumed the animation was by the creators of South Park just would have assumed that FlickerLab was the animation studio that produced South Park.
*Maybe because no one does that? The normal procedure is that behind-the-scenes workers be named in the closing credits, which is exactly what Moore did. I don’t see why he should be held to some different standard when it comes to crediting people who worked on his film.
The whole “Swiftboat” crew was far more misleading than Moore has ever been in any of his films. “I served with John Kerry”, misleading the public into thinking “This guy was in the boat with John Kerry”, when in fact “served” means “was in Viet Nam at the same time as John Kerry”. But the people who were actually in the boat with John Kerry supported his story.