Michael Moore is back and is time is lambasting capitalism.
Moore’s “Documentaries” are strange beasts, I’m not even sure they should be called so. They usually attract a lot of criticism about how they present data and even their factual accuracy.
Limiting us to “Capitalism: a love story” there is a big one at the core of the movie. Moore present the house crisis like a sinister plot made by the banks to get the houses of the poor American people while, in reality, when the banks get those houses they are losing money and therefore they don’t really want them.
I’m simplifying things a little bit here but in the end the house crisis started because the banks where lending money to people who couldn’t repay them using an over inflated values of their houses as the base mortgage value. That’s the reason they are called subprime, because they are sub optimal. I’m not saying this to defend the banks but is stupid to pretend that they are run by twisting moustache villains, reality is much more sad, they are run by idiots who devised a system that simply couldn’t work.
That’s how Moore fails in a pretty spectacular way to get to the origin of the crisis.
He also fails, in my opinion, to give the right amount of attention to the incredible bonuses that the big executives were and are still getting. He instead devotes an inordinate amount of time to practices like the “Dead Peasant” insurance that, while certainly not very ethical, is not that evil as he paints it.
Now far for me to say that this Documentary is full of lies. He actually gets most of the other stuff right and he raises a lot of good points about the folly of a culture based on greed and on how they insist on pretending that this is actually a very religious thing to do.
It is still Moore of course, he got his opinions and he is not afraid to show them, quite the opposite indeed. He actively manipulates the movie to give more strength to his point of view. A lot of people don’t like it; they feel like he is pulling them in a direction to blatantly. In this case I honestly did find it refreshing; where other documentaries are very underhanded in their tactics in his case I could see his footprints everywhere.
He is honest about it, those are his views and you can see them in plain sight, knowing it beforehand is easy to enjoy his movies.
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