Before Farenheit 9/11 and the award winning Bowling For Columbine, this is the movie that filmmaker (director, writer, producer) Michael Moore started off with. Filmed in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, we follow the chronicles of (what he wants you to believe) the town's love-hate relationship with General Motors.
General Motors started off in that town, before it became the automotive giant that it is today. Michael Moore's from that town too, and start off the documentary fusing together his family's career (most were GM staff) together with the rise of GM. That is, until massive layoffs were made.
At some points in the movie, you can't help but feel that that is the way corporations go about, worrying about their bottom line, and outsourcing jobs to the cheaper alternative. But from Moore's point of view in the movie, he's taking it from an everyday working class person's, who naturally, will not be happy with being laid off.
We follow him, in his now familiar guerilla styled interviews, to various families in Flint, to see the conditions they live in, and following the deputy sheriff to evict those who are too poor to pay their rent. His main motive in this movie, besides showing us the working class America, is actually to interview the General Motors chairman Roger Smith, and get him to go down to Flint to take a look at the situation himself.
Naturally, being a new independent filmmaker with no credentials, he's being turned away each time he's at the GM head office attempting to make his way to the 14th floor. Staking out the chairman's regular haunts did not rake in any results, but it's kinda hilarious in the canned response that he gets each time he engages with a spokesperson.
State officials and their seemingly enthusiastic attempts in lifting Flint out of its depression, like getting evangelists to bless the town out of its current mood, and trying to build its tourism industry, while in good faith, somehow became ineffective, and of course, subtly laughed at.
It's seriously not a bad first attempt, sprinkled with the style, humour and satire that you'd come to expect from a Michael Moore movie.
Code 3 DVD extras: Commentary by Moore (not to be missed), and trailer.
No comments:
Post a Comment