I love scooping a movie – thus, our long-standing tradition of attending film festivals and lots of films on the big screen. Last night we attended a preview of Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story. I recognize that Michael Moore could hardly be a more more controversial figure in American society and yet, as the founder of the Traverse City Film Festival in my last home town and Ed’s original home town, I have a warm spot in my heart for him. And I have enjoyed watching him evolve as a filmmaker through the years. As a Michigander (that is really what we call ourselves – kind of makes me proud to be a Minnesotan now), Roger and Me in 1989 introduced me to the wit and sometimes irritating manipulation of Mr. Moore’s film making style.
This movie, however, Capitalism: A Love Story, is a nearly perfect Michael Moore film. The subject is so real, so raw and so sad that the humor is hard to laugh at – the irony of it all brings a sigh rather than a grin. And yet he shows a side of himself that has been left on the cutting room floor in the past – his spiritual beliefs, his moral outrage in a manner that left me feeling not at all manipulated. I did not feel sorry for even one of the "bad guys", and I have left many of his prior films with questions about the relative fairness of the representations. I am certain there are questionable statements and undoubtedly inaccuracies within the film and yet I can live with them for one statement Mr. Moore made during the length Q and A following:
and I quote…
"I refuse to live in a country like this and I am not leaving."
To an audience of largely young people, he made a plea to see change in his lifetime and I awake today renewed in my commitment to see the same.
It’s so simple…some things are just wrong. I’m grateful we have Michael Moore’s in our life to remind us, however imperfectly they may do this, that there is right and wrong and there is no one but else to change the course, to write our history. And it’s not yet time to leave to all to the next generation.
I guess I’m not yet leaving either.