Who's In It: Michael Moore
The Basics: The U.S. economy is still in the toilet and Michael Moore is here to point fingers. Now, you don't have to have been paying attention for long to know who's to blame: the one-percenters. They're the rich white guys who have 95 percent of all the money in the country. And since they run all the corporations and banks, they also own a lot of members of Congress. Everyone's in bed together and they stole 700 billion of your tax dollars to bail themselves out when they failed at free-market capitalism. Moore explains that when Ronald Reagan took office, that was the beginning of loosening or discarding restrictions on financial institutions as well as lowering taxes for the richest people in the country. It was supposed to trickle down to the middle class and the poor but it never did. You're not loving this synopsis yet, are you?
What's The Deal: Throughout this entertaining agitprop lesson, Moore does what he does best by throwing a lot of infuriating facts and incidents at the audience, peppering them with funny, ironic vintage film clips and casting himself in the role of lumpy blue-collar hero out to bring down "evil" capitalism. And that's his genius, taking a subject everyone knows too well and is already pretty bummed out by, and making his lefty outrage swing along like an adventure movie where you wonder if there'll be a happy ending. Unfortunately, this movie's version of the cavalry is news footage of some successful grassroots rebellion (laid-off factory workers who locked themselves inside for their severance pay, which is great) and the election of Barack Obama (jury's still out while the health insurance industry tries to stage a coup).
Where You've Seen It Before: Roger & Me, Moore's 1989 documentary about the destruction of his hometown, Flint, Michigan, due to auto industry greed. And while that movie was a scrappy piece of guerrilla filmmaking, this one just feels like the sad sequel where we learn that the only thing that changed was that it all got a lot, lot worse. The sight of Moore standing out in front of AIG holding a big bag with a "$" sign on it, attempting to collect the $700 billion in bailout money, then cordoning off the building with "crime scene" tape is funny, but you've been there with him already.
Who'll See It: Moore fans and hard right TV commentators. The former will cheer along Moore's politics but leave the theater wondering what they're supposed to do about it all. The latter will use the film's gleeful excoriation of the late Ronald Reagan as fuel for their ongoing fires. But it's still good to have someone saying it out loud now that the former President has been nearly deified by everyone but the far left.
Better Anti-Capitalist Doc You Should Watch: The Corporation. No laughs in that one.