No, he won it, get over it. Or does that statement only apply to Bush?
even sven, as long as you are presenting facts and your interviews are real, then I’d agree it’s a documentary. However, if you instruct people how to act, or tell them what to say on camera, or reenact situations that never happened, then you’re moving into the realm of fiction.
Once you stop relaying facts, you stop being a documentary.
gex gex
I never said I expected a documentary to be entirely factual, I said it was a clear advocacy piece of filmmaking. OK, I guess every filmmaker is advocating something, but I think there is a line and Moore crossed it, IMHO, of course.
I think you have a very, very naive view of filmmaking. Not that you’re alone in that. I can’t believe how many people I’ve seen go on about the Heston speech sequence, as if they somehow had never realized that documentaries are edited, just like other movies! If Moore crossed a line it was the line that normally keeps the contrivances behind every film ever made from being obvious to the audience.
Are all people who are annoyed or angry with Moore in this thread also against his message? I might be very wrong here, but I see a tendeny that the arguments are basically: “Moore is a piece of shit, therefore, the things he did is not defensible. He lied!”
Gangster Octopus - all, I repeat, all documentaries are staged. As a maker of the film, or in my own case, the newsstory, a call is made to the subject being interviewed. A date is set, filmmaker arrives with camera and starts shooting. Then the filmmaker tells the subject to please say the same thing again, but more like the subject said it on the phone. and the subjects suddenly gets cold feet, and the interviewer pushes a little to get the right answers. There have been so many times, when I had a busted story because I couldn’t get anyone to talk. Local industry has done something shabby. Calling around to people in the work crew to find someone who’s willing to say what we all know is true, and do it to a microphone.
It’s done the same way with biographies. Che - a revolutionary life, portrays him as an utter slimeball. Abusive to women and people around him. As a reader, my respect for the man, which was low as it was, gets even lower. Of course, that was one purpose the writer had. Had those facts been omitted, I would have a diferent view of Ernesto Guevara.
Shodan - I could try to argue that you’re on a slippery slope. But instead, I’m going to say that since my outlook is that media can’t be trusted to be objective, and that I view documentaries the same way, then yes, you’re right. I am interested in the debate that spawns from Moore’s documentary. If there was a documentary about Gore and child abuse, I would be interested in the debate that would ensue after that. It would be interesting to follow the libel suit. And BTW, I haven’t read about any of those against Moore.
Haven’t seen Roger & Me, have you?
If you had, you would see that Moore is quite fond of most of white middle America and tries to stick up for them (though some of his attempts are misguided).
Many of the complaints lodged against the film, such as those in the infamous Forbes magazine article awhile back, have been proven wrong. I’m sure many of the new complaints will be, as well. I doubt Moore blatantly made anything up. More likely, he got his facts from one source, and another source now says those facts are wrong. That’s life. It’s not a reason to revoke an Oscar.
As for editing “tricks”: It’s a movie. No matter what genre, movies used editing to save time and make their point, whatever that point may be. As long as what’s actually on the screen is what really happened, I have no complaint. Besides, we all know by now what Charleton Heston’s positions are. Moore’s movie showed him in specific instances I hadn’t seen before, but my view of Mr. Heston’s political views did not change one iota.
Did anyone notice the word “creatively” in the rules which Cheesesteak kindly posted above? If Moore had made a film that was entirely factual with no opinion, invention or judgment then he would not be eligible for the award.
Winners of the documentary award are quite often controversial in their own field. For instance, the 2000 winner One Day In September was widely attacked for being anti-German and anti-Palestinian, but I don’t recall anyone on either side saying it wasn’t a documentary. Evidently the Palestinian lobby is less powerful than the NRA. About 80% of best documentary winners are about either the Holocaust or people on death row, two topics traditionally provoking extreme controversy.
If people had actually watched any of the past winners, I’m sure plenty of them would be calling for the whole category to be scrapped. But you can’t argue about the documentary form unless you have experience of watching long form documentaries. And maybe this promotion of the documentary form is the greatest achievement of Moore.
My point being: good documentaries are inevitably highly controversial.
Lamia & The Gaspode
I understand quite well how films are made. I understand that the material used, the way it is edited, all the decisions color the film and of course there is always the filmakers tastes, opinions, etc. worked somehow into the film. But it is a matter of degree. Think of the difference between a reporter and a columnist, a reporter reports, yet none is completely objective and their decsions the words they use etc. color their reporting. The same for a columnist, but there is clearly a difference. But the line between the two is not firm, it is gray, I certainly understand that.
Is advocacy filmmaking still documentary filmmaking? In my opinion, no, and when I am King of the World that is how it will be 
In my opinion B4C is such a film. I understand it is a Documentary by the academy rules, so i have no problem with him winning an Oscar. It si just my opinion that his movie is not a documentary.
Ahh.
But I see him as a columnist. And I have no problem with him in that role. Clearly he has an agenda. It’s quite obvious where he stands politically. Knowing that, I know that what he says should be taken with, not only a grain, but a whole truckload of salt. I actually prefer things that are so clearly biased, since I know what the agenda is. In the same way, I enjoy P.J. O’Rourke.
And for me, that’s great filmmaking, be it coming from the right or left. It’s a person taking a stand, showing the agenda, making a case and telling a story. I might not agree with Moore. In fact, I don’t, since he wants to isolate this to be an American thing, and it’s not.
Moore’s made a highly controversial and successful movie. I can’t remember the last time an Oscar winning documentary went up on theatres here in Sweden. I wonder if it’s happen in my lifetime. They usually get shown late night on our version of PBS, a couple of years later. I guess this means a lot of people will see it. Some will think Moore is totally stupid, some will agree. But just the fact that we’re having this debate - what, a year? - after it came out, shows me that this movie was important. This means more people are debating it at other places. When those wanting to take away Moore’s Oscar try to find facts, they have to see the movie and make up their own minds. Moore will likely not convert them, but the very process has put a very interesting a important subject in the spotlight:
What responsability has the so-called objective media?
I hope some people who have participated here and read this thread now have a higher awareness and a more critical eye. That’s not a bad thing.
Proven wrong? Not quite.
As has already been said, documentaries are not absolute truths. The filmmaker’s perspective is inevitably part of the documentary. I kind of like Moore, because in a town I used to live in an unarmed man was shot in the back about 20 times, in his own garage, by a police officer, and the officer was never even reprimanded. Moore came around and tried to publicize the issue.
In my opinion, it is a good thing to have someone publicize these issues, even if they get them wrong sometimes. How else will people hear about it? Now, I agree that Moore may have gone too far in parts of his movies. In fact, I think it was unnecessary to make it seem as though Heston was quickly going to sites of school shootings to hold pro gun rallies. Moore evidently thought it was worth it to lie about this, but I think his message would have come across without it. It isn’t as though it is the all important point in his message. So he made some mistakes, but it was still a documentary that serves a useful purpose.
Yeah, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences disagrees with you.
Nor have I heard of any libel suits against anyone who accused Clinton of murder. That doesn’t make it true.
My problem is that people will take what Moore said as if it were true in whatever subsequent debate his documentary triggers. It is like treating JFK as a documentary (it did not win the Oscar in that category, I know), and saying, “Let’s use this in a discussion of how the CIA killed Kennedy”. But some people believe what they read in the National Enquirer, too.
It seems to me that you will get a much higher level of debate if you stick to the facts in triggering it. Because if you need to make things up, and distort the facts, it supports a prima facie assumption that
[ul]
[li]You cannot and should not be trusted to provide information useful in a debate, and [/li][li]The situation is not as serious as you are implying, since you had to resort to fantasy to get people’s attention.[/ul][/li]
In other words, the US does not have a culture of violence that causes gun crimes, since Moore has to resort to distortion and misrepresentation to make it appear as if it did. If things are so serious, why does he need to make shit up when it comes to one of the most heavily publicized incidents of violence of the last twenty years?
Regards,
Shodan
It is a problem that there are people willing to believe anything they see in the media…but that is hardly Moore’s doing.
Or maybe you just disagree with Moore politically, and that is why you are getting all het up.
It is interesting that those of us who have made and are familiar with the techniques of documentary film (including myself) see no problem with what Moore did.
Wait, aren’t you the one getting all pious because Moore “made stuff up”? Have a look at what he’s being accused of. Aside from the alleged editing of the Heston incident (not an integral part of his thesis whatsoever), everything Moore has been accused of appeared in scenes that were primarily for comedic value. The bank handing out guns? Comedy. (Not to mention that should this not be true, the Bank has some stupid employees working for it, considering they handed Moore a gun and told him that they actually had the guns on the premises).
As for Charlton Heston’s speech, Moore neither removed nor changed Heston’s meaning (he only condensed it to arrive at the point quicker) and hence was a perfectly legitimate use of editing. Look at Hestons speech. He craps on about nothing in between the relevant points. Moore did not need to show that, and, quite rightly, he didn’t.
It is ridiculous to attack Michael Moore’s argument on the basis that he allegedly exaggerated certain events for comedic value.
Certainly their perogoative. Personally I couldn’t care less who they give their awards to.
Always? Is that true? Absolutely true?
:sigh:
JThunder: do you want to participate in the thread or just play stupid games? The process of making a film means that it is impossible not to bring a certain level of personal bias. It is impossible to show the complete truth in a film, whether one exists or not.