The conservatives have let me down again. For several months now, I've had this movie in the bottom of my subconscious (right next to a mental note to buy a new shower curtain), knowing that eventually I would see this movie and it would piss me off to no end. The hype behind this movie, half or more of which was generated by conservatives, was sufficient to convince me that I would need to spend weeks or months behind a LexisNexis-linked computer in order to refute every deception subtly conveyed by the skillful hands of a master propagandist.
Little did I know what a truly terrible movie this would be. Not terrible in the sense of "misleading and dishonest" (which of course, it was), but terrible in the sense of "tedious, badly edited, and incompetently directed". Michael Moore is far less than a dishonest, fat, disheveled slob. He's a terrible filmmaker. Now I know why he was incapable of smiling during that marathon of forced applause he received at Cannes. He knew the audience was full of shit.
Michael Moore is like a kid who sticks his hand in front of a projector and picks the actors' noses with the shadow of his hand. The difference is that Moore thinks he's making an argument. He thinks that showing video of Paul Wolfowitz spitting into his hand and rubbing his hair is a way to argue against waging a war. Or showing Britney Spears voicing her mindless support of whatever the President does is a way to refute George Bush's words and actions.
"Hey, if Britney Spears is for it, it must be wrong!"
The number of minutes in this movie devoted to George Bush getting his hair combed and twitching his facial muscles is more than inordinate. First of all, it's boring as sin, though I guess if you hate Bush with a passion, you'd be laughing uncontrollably. But it's in the movie for a reason. It's there because something needs to fill the vacuum when Moore has no intellectual arguments to raise. It's the equivalent of a kid calling someone a "big poopy head" when he's just been intellectually cornered and doesn't know how else to deal with it.
