Today’s Gazette had a nearly full-page opinion piece by Michael “Bush shure is stoopid” Moore. Here’s the original link from the Los Angeles Times.
In the lengthy, self-serving drivel, Moore claims that his “mistake” (yeah, right!) was caused because he went to church the morning before the Oscars, causing him to want to cleanse his soul by saying what he truly believes, about how wrong the war truly is because people die in war, yadda yadda yadda. He went on to exhaustively try to explain why he chose to come out with his anti-American rantings at the Oscar ceremony.
We already know why he said it! I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Moore craves attention possibly more than anyone I know. This doesn’t exactly make him unique in Hollywood, but it’s fairly clear that his book and movie sales and popularity are at an all-time high thanks to the media attention he got with his speech. And he’s not exactly humble about it either:
My book “Stupid White Men” still sits at No. 1 on the bestseller list (it’s been on that list now for 53 weeks and is the largest-selling nonfiction book of the year). “Bowling for Columbine” has broken all box-office records for a documentary. My Web site is now getting up to 20 million hits a day (more than the White House’s site).
The trouble with people like Moore is that they crave fame so much that they’ll say or do just about anything to get in the spotlight. Moore isn’t following the dictates of his conscience, he’s following the dictates of the media who are looking for a juicy story. If he’d thought that making a pro-war speech at the Oscars would have made him more famous, he’d have done that, too.
My favourite part was this:
We are continually bombarded with one fictitious story after another from the Bush White House. And that is why it is important that filmmakers make nonfiction, so that all the little lies can be exposed and the public informed. An uninformed public in a democracy is a sure-fire way to end up with little or no democracy at all.
Yeah, I guess that’s why your films are so “factual”, right Mikey?
mm’s documentaries are fiction.
Moore’s only funny jig is when he goes to corporate america with crackers the corporate chicken and shows how chickens are treated at processing plants.
The title of Moorers non fiction book is “Stupid White Men”. I think it would be more appropriate title for his autobiography.
Moore has a battle he wants to fight with a president he rightly contends has no respect for the international law forged by trial and error in the bloodiest century on the planet. He wants to take out a man of dubious electedness.
Moore’s not perfect, but he has his principles, he did a movie on them, he spoke about them when honoured for the movie and the Academy surely knew who they were giving an award to. Now he writes a piece on those principles and how he expressed them. Sounds good to me.
Agree with Erk — Moore is being perfectly consistent.
I have no problem with his political message: I agree with loads of it, and the gun control thing is a no-brainer for many of us up here.
What irks me about Moore, though: he’s all about democratic politics and all that as an end — that’s his claim — but his means are anything but. His films, and his TV show before, are basically a string of stereotypes and sloganeering. This kind of pigeonholing and make-fun-of-[insert identifiable group here] is just not cool. It’s the same thing that bugs me about Adbusters, clever though it may be, because it always ends up trying to make its point by demonizing somebody and straw-manning somebody else. And if you’re going to do that, then what’s the point, really?
Hey, parts of his message are perfectly sound. Except that contrary to surface appearance, James, he really isn’t making a movie about guns or gun control at all. And what REALLY irks me about his methods is that his so-called “documentaries” are pure fiction – all staged and manipulated for the camera, sequences taken out of context. It’s dishonest filmmaking, in order to use an audience, and that’s what gets me.