CandidGamera better not watch my home movies, because I use the exact same “pick-up segment” technique all the time! :eek: 
Hm. Well, I do knows things about documentaries… filmmaking… and journalism. And while no, I wasn’t personally being lied to, that really doesn’t change my point of view that Michael Moore is a liar.
And yes, I know that news crews do second takes for reaction shots and the like, and yes, I know they don’t need to put a disclaimer indicating that they’ve done this. The difference between them and Moore is that A.) Moore, when asked about that shot… when explicitly asked if he had to go back and film, said No, they hadn’t, because they’d had two cameras. And B.) Moore’s doing something in the shot that’s quite a bit more than a reaction shot. He’s actively questioning Heston. If I were presented with strong evidence that a local reporter, when interviewing someone, had spliced the interviewee’s responses to the wrong question, I’d call that reporter a liar too.
I’ve been mulling a somewhat lengthy post in this thread for some time, so hear goes.
Before seeing BfC, I had heard a lot of extremely harsh talk about how it flings lies around, misleads constantly with statistics, “isn’t really a documentary”, etc. I’m generally liberal, but I can’t stand intellectual dishonesty, so I was all ready not to like it. But I was pleasantly surprised. I have two general comments to make:
(1) BfC doesn’t really have a point. This is a weird thing to say, and it’s not necessarily clear what it has to do with anything, but bear with me. Some movies, or, more generally, works of political art, have clear goals and points. Others just bring up topics for discussion. For instance, one might make a movie about seatbelt laws that very clearly and openly argued that seat belt laws are a bad idea and should be repealed, with statistics and arguments and so forth. One might also make a movie about seat belt laws which was just a general overview of the topic.
If a questionable statistic about the efficacy of seat belt laws were presented in a movie of the first type, I would find that vastly more damning of the movie as a whole than if the same statistic were presented in a movie of the second type.
Bowling for Columbine is not, in its entirety, an anti-gun movie. It’s a movie about the culture of fear and violence in the US. It certainly isn’t a pro-gun movie, but you don’t come out of it (or at least I didn’t come out of it) thinking “Michael Moore wants guns to be banned”. Rather, you come out of it thinking “Michael Moore is disturbed by the amount of gun violence in the US, and was exploring various factors concerning it”.
This is not to say that it’s OK for a movie without a clear point to lie. But this is why the context is so important. BfC is 120 minutes (or whatever) of interesting discussion of the culture of violence. Even if Moore went deliberately out of his way to deceive people about what precisely was said at a particular NRA rally in Columbine (and it’s not particularly clear to me what he would gain from doing so, or how it would make the movie better, or how it would make him more money), that doesn’t invalidate the entire movie, the way pointing out an error in one step of a mathematical proof invalidates the entire proof.
(2) Is this the best you’ve got? So there’s a full-length feature film which is so outrageously riddled with lies and deceit that people want to go to the somewhat extraordinary length of revoking its oscar and officially declaring it to be a non-documentary, and the most damning and glaring lies they can come up with are the ones being discussed here? The fact that they are being discussed here is proof that they’re open to discussion. Reasonable people can disagree about them. And they’re the big glaring lies and deceits that make you emit so much anti-Moore spittle? (“you” being the generic you).
Look, I’m not crazy about Moore as a spokesman for the left. He is a bit of a hand-waver at times, and seems willing to twist facts to a certain extent to make a point he’s arguing for. He also seems like an egotistical blowhard. But there’s a huge difference between that and someone who will cynically make up any lie or make any statement if it will line his own pockets.
I truly believe that he passionately and honestly believes in the causes he backs and the opinions he holds. And they are causes which are not discussed enough in mainstream America, despite the so-called-liberal media.
Let me offer up one more analogy: The infamous “white house dog”/Chelsea Clinton incident is a truly heinous instance in which Rush Limbaugh (a) made a joke in incredibly poor taste, and (b) lied about it. Does the existence of that incident mean that I can automatically and pompously dismiss every word Rush has ever said, and can categorically criticize books of his I haven’t read?
I’m unfamiliar with this incident, but I’d categorically disregard anything Limbaugh has to say, yes, having listened to him once or twice.
To address the one key point of the lengthy post : Does one lie invalidate his movie?
That depends. Does it invalidate his message, if such a thing exists? No, but I’m not here to discuss his message. Does it cast a broad pall of doubt over the entirety of the film, such that I come to doubt even its simplest claims? Yep.
I don’t often watch documentaries. When I watch them, I’m not there for a message. I’m not there to be entertained with funny jokes or clever filmmaking. I’m there to learn. Michael Moore has proven himself to be untrustworthy as far as I’m concerned … so because I do not wish to “learn” falsehoods, and cannot reasonably discern what is true and what is false in his films without a metric ton of effort, his films are of no value to me. What makes this doubly relevant is that Moore’s films are about political issues that are relevant to life today… so I must be doubly on my guard for falsity… and Moore just doesn’t have my trust.
:snort:
I suppose my response to that is that the relevance of your argument depends on the documentary.
If a documentary was 1.5 hours of statistics and numbers being thrown up on the screen, and you had reason to believe that the director was a blatant liar with a politicla agenda who was wiling to make up statistics and numbers, then indeed, there would be little point to seeing said documentary.
But BfC (and, for that matter, any decent documentary) is not like that. The vast majority of it is interviews with actual people, footage of actual events, etc. Much of which will be worth watching, and will teach you things, if viewed with a properly skeptical eye, unless the documentarian is FAR more deceitful than you seem to think Michael Moore might be.
For instance, one interesting part of BfC, IIRC, is a lengthy interview with the brother of Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols. This strikes me as basically interesting. It gave me insights into people who I didn’t know miuch about. And unless MM perpetrated a fraud of staggering proportions, there’s no reason not to think that the interview I saw in the movie wasn’t basically representative of an actual conversation with Terry Nichols’ brother. Sure MM chose questions, and led the conversation in directions, that reflect his political leanings. But I, as a viewer, can compensate for that if I feel I need to. That doesn’t render the entire interview moot.
Can I point something out, please? Michael Moore never describes his films as documentaries. He calls them films, movies, whatever - I’ve actually heard him ‘correct’ an interviewer who called BfC a documentary.
Rally?
So the annual member’s meeting that the NRA is required, because of its tax status, to have is a ‘rally’?
He also left out the fact that they cancelled every part of the convention they were not required by law to have, that it was planned years in advance, that the membership could not have been notified of a venue change, nor the venue changed, on such short notice, and that cancelling the meeting would’ve put the NRA in violation of tax law.
Yup, he’s so honest.
What, precisely, is your point? Has anyone on this thread been claiming that Michael Moore is a paragon of honesty? Or that there is not a single error in any of his movies?
The claim I’m trying to make is not that BfC is without flaws, or that MM is without flaws. It’s that it’s still an interesting movie which is worth seeing, and that dismissing it out of hand, not to mention his next movie, which hasn’t even come out yet, due to problems with some parts of it, says more about the person doing the dismissing than it does about the film itself.
But you don’t have “strong evidence” that Moore did any such thing. Unless cameramen were digitally removed from the final cut of the film (a distinct possibility), it does seem that the shots of Moore and the shots of Heston may not have been filmed at exactly the same time. But that’s not evidence that Moore “spliced the interviewee’s responses to the wrong question”.
Does it really seem plausible to you that Moore risked the future of the film, his entire career, and potential lawsuits he surely would have lost, on staging the entire scene, denying staging it in later interviews, and inventing a fairy tale about extra footage so as to further cover up the deception, all just to make Heston look bad? And his only motivation for faking the scene could have been to make Heston look bad. The scene, as it exists, doesn’t make a broader point about gun violence in America. It doesn’t make the NRA or its members in general look bad. It pretty much just serves to make Heston look bad – or to make Moore look bad for trying to make Heston look bad. (Although I disagree with Heston, my sympathies were with him at that moment.) I’ve seen nothing to indicate that Moore personally dislikes Heston so much that he’d go to those kinds of extremes to falsely paint him in a negative light.
Had I been editing the film myself I’d have cut the scene altogether, not just because it’s awkward and unpleasant but because it adds nothing to the movie. I can see how Moore, going into the interview with Heston, might have thought it was a good idea, but why he didn’t realize that the scene plays badly once he saw the footage? Perhaps with real footage in the can he’d have felt he should make use of it anyway, but why on earth would he stake so much on faking a scene that wasn’t even important to the film? He knew this was going to be a controversial project, and he knew people were going to be looking for any nit they could pick. He had a team of fact-checkers and lawyers to cover his back. But none of them could help him if it were proven that the whole scene was fictional, something that easily could be proven if the crew ratted him out or if someone leaked the raw footage. The theory about the scene that you’re advancing requires us not merely to believe that Moore is a liar, but that he’s actually insane.
Let me get your thought process correct, as my final argument in this thread.
Friend tells you Michael Moore is a Liar.
You go onto the internet and find Bowling for truth, and assume all its arguments are completely honest and without flaw
You refuse to see BfC, and insist the F911 will be full of lies, EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVENT SEEN EITHER MOVIE.
You then go onto the internet and start calling Moore a liar.
when pulled up on this, you refer to an inaccurate and biased website.
when called on this, you say it an opinion piece, but look at his references etc.
when shown that he is incorrectly, maybe even deliberately, manupulating the sources he is using, you stick your fingers in your ears and go la-la-la.
And finally, when thoroughly outclassed in this argument by Lamia, you do the equivalent of “I know you are, but what am I”.
Well, as we’ve discussed before, I feel the evidence is strong. You don’t. Oh, well.
Pretend for a second you’re Michael Moore. Why film the scene at all unless you want to make Heston look bad?
(Numbers added.)
1.) Nope. 2.) Nope. 3.) Nope. 4.) Yep. 5.) Yep, with the caveat that I am referring to a biased website that provides access to external sources that it has no control over. 6.) Since I’m only making use of the references, anyone arguing about the opinion pieces is missing the point. 7.) Nope, I’ve been responding to everything. and Finally, 8) Nope.
Wow, great summary. Just what I’d expect from the past evidence of your reading comprehension level. :rolleyes:
Have you read what he’s posted? Because this statement is blatently a lie. He’s stated before that he plans to watch BfC, he’s even moved it up on his ‘netflix’ queue.
Well, according to Moore, “I want there to be a human face on this issue. I don’t want her to be just a statistic to him.” Whether you buy that or not is your call, but wishing to personalize the price of gun violence in America isn’t a far-fetched motive considering what the film is about.
But let’s pretend that Moore really would love nothing more than to set Heston up just so he’ll look bad on film. For a person with such feelings, putting Heston in an awkward situation where he was unlikely to come up with an appealing response would seem well within reason. Heck, Moore’s done that sort of thing often enough in the past. It may be kind of sleazy, but it’s not actually criminal. But why on Earth would he put his own head on the chopping block just to fake such a scene? His hatred of Heston would have to be truly pathological.
So, is that what you believe? Do you believe that Moore is a madman so blinded by his hatred for someone he’d never even met before that he would be willing to put his entire career on the line in order to fake a few moments of not-very-damning footage?
My question stands… Moore’s quote only answers half the problem. Sure, send the picture to Heston… but why film it?
I don’t believe Moore’s put his career on the line… and I’m left uncertain as to his level of hatred of Heston. My current operating theory is that Moore likes to stir up controversy to sell DVDs. In largely a conservative regime, he’s pandering inflammatory rubbish to the disenfranchised liberals. That’s just my theory, mind you. I don’t see how his ‘career’ is jeopardized. Plus, I’ve repeatedly heard him described as wealthy… I think he has a safety net on the career thing.
I honestly didn’t see that, but that wasn’t the position held at the start of the thread.
you’re making use of the references on BFC, in particular the Heston interview.
I’ve shown you how BfT is incorrect, you waffle about “opinion pieces”.
whatever.
http://www.bowlingfortruth.com/bowlingforcolumbine/scenes/hestoninterview.htm
Here is the heston interview.
what parts are fact, and what parts are opinion?
Pictures. Quotes. Those are facts. Did I really need to explain this to you?