before I get going, let me say that I can’t stand michael moore… but I am sitting here watching “Roger & Me” and I still don’t know if I’ve ever seen a better documentary.
Am I the only one who loves this production but can’t stand any of his later work?
And also… what’s your favorite documentary?
So…it was before or after he went nuts?
I was let down to find out how much he put things out of order. I’m amazed anyone takes him seriously after his butchering of chronology in that movie.
Thanks for the cite, thats interesting stuff.
But I think the reason I liked R&M so much was not so much the political stuff and anger at big business. Just the polarizing highlight of poverty in America. Farenheit 9/11 is yell yell yell at George Bush, with immense controversial validity to the evidence (IMOO). I guess I always just liked R&M so much because it makes me feel very grateful for everything I have and how lucky I have it. I’m sure you can see the same, and even worse plight, all over the world… but this just seemed to hit closer to home.
I’m a conservative libertarian and I was a pretty big fan of Moore’s up to Fahrenheit 9/11. I enjoyed Roger & Me, his TV shows, and even his movie The Big One. While I didn’t agree with his politics, I appreciated his humor and enjoyed his style. His latest works, however, are simply propaganda pieces that skew the truth and have very little entertainment value if your politics are anywhere to the right of Nancy Pelosi.
Imagine how pissed I was the day, years after realizing it one one of my favorite comedies, that he did Canadian Bacon.
That movie made me realize he has the talent to be a good filmmaker. Documentarian? Meh. It seems he just takes himself too seriously and has over-inflated his ego to the size of his ass. A legend in his own mind and all that.
I actually LIVED in Flint at the time of all these events. Getting the chronology 100% right has absolutely no bearing on this movie. It fits what was going on.
Roger & Me is a brilliant documentary. Whether it’s a factually accurate documentary is a completely separate question (“Every cut is a lie,” said the Canadian cinema-verité folks), and one to which the answer is apparently “no.”
My favorite documentary? Tough call. Pretty much anything at all by Errol Morris is on my list of greats. Also off the top of my head, I think of American Movie, Genghis Blues, Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey, and Radio Bikini.
Almost forgot Dancing Outlaw. (The followup sequel was terrible, though.)
I’m going to stop now; I LOVE good documentaries, and too many to list are leaping to mind. Errol Morris is far and away the best working today, in my opinion; start with Gates of Heaven (about a pet cemetery) or Vernon, Florida (about the town by that name) to get a feel for his work.
Oh! One more: Grey Gardens.
I’m going to come up with more and more the longer I keep typing. Better stop here.
Cite? Well, not cite, but you know what I mean.
I really like a documentary called Brother’s Keeper about four brothers in up state New York. One of the brothers dies and they charge another one in the murder. It is a compelling character study and one of my favorite movies.
Looking at the Earl Morris page on the IMDB reminded me of one of my favorite documentaries, Vernon Florida.
Other films of that type that I really like are Hoop Dreams and The Kid Stays in the Picture.
I’ll check him out sounds interesting. I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention my other favorite film that dealt with poverty that I found deeply moving. That was LaLee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton. Except instead of a story about blue/white collar poverty it is purely devoted to one poor black family living in Mississippi, and how slavery is still affecting some black people to this day (IMHO). It’s absolutely devastating to see, but fortunately I cannot relate myself.
Generally attributed to Godard, actually.
I like what RM stands for, I agree with his politics, but I fall into the camp of people who feel that a documentary should accurately portray events, and not have parts that are made up or skewed, i.e. indirectly implying Charlton Heston made the “cold dead hands” statement the day after the Colorado shootings, things like that. His subject material is usually compelling enough, and a better documentarian could make it work by playing straight with the facts- just present the events, don’t put your dramatic spin on things, such as the putting the picture of the dead soldier (I think) wherever he put it, for dramatic effect.
Bus 174 is an unbelivably well made and well paced documentary about a bus hijacking in Brasil- It’s brilliant.
Some others- The Weather Underground, In the Year of the Pig, The Murder of Fred Hampton and Guerilla- The Taking of Patty Hearst.
Well, I didn’t claim they said it first.
(OK, actually I didn’t know that.)
Greatest documentarian? I nominate Herzog. A genuine powerhouse of filmmaking.
As to favorite documentaries:
Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” just jumped into the running. I’m also a fan of both of the “Paradise Lost” documentaries.
A good documentary that doesn’t get mention in the discussion too much is “Waco: Rules of Engagement”. That documentary, more than anything else, blew up the media in my eyes. After watching that, I just came to realize that every opinion I’d formed about the matter was based entirely on having a single viewpoint presented to me.
As to Michael Moore: I like his docs. I really can’t believe people get hung up on stuff like him cutting to “cold dead hands” after talking about Columbine. Documentaries that don’t purport to be timelines shouldn’t be taken as such. The documentary paints a portrait of gun culture in America and the point is that we live in a country where people say “you can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands” and that might be connected to the ideas that lead kids to shoot up their high school. By cutting them together, Moore stresses this.
It’s not presented as if that was Heston’s response to Columbine and a viewer who thinks it was should blame himself, not Moore.