Progressives recently gathered together to celebrate themselves and fake documentarian Michael Moore (D-NY) at yet another celebrity prize night. Robert DeNiro (D-NY) presented him with the Critics’ Choice Lifetime Achievement Award in a ceremony hosted by Bill Nye (D-CA), The Science Guy ™ Climate Change Activi$t Guy.
Joseph Goebbels created the Reichskulturkammer in 1933. It used compelled membership by filmmakers to guarantee that movies complied with Nazi artistic hygiene requirements. The Broadcast Film Critics Association doesn’t yet have the capacity to compel membership by all in the industry, but it, along with other movie industry associations, is trying to do the same work. They make sure Democrat policies are venerated and that ideas hostile to the progressive left are demonized in popular films.
One of the ways in which they do so includes filtering who they choose to honor and how. Moore is a not a documentarian. He produces fictional pieces which elevate socialist norms and denigrate individual rights that he then presents as documentaries to great critical acclaim and financial rewards. Like a Real Housewives production, he uses real people, but through deceptive editing gets to tell any “truth” he wants.
Fact or Fiction
[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=”24″]No one asked when Moore would start making non-fiction movies. [/perfectpullquote]
Moore read from a 15-year-old speech he wrote to accept the Academy Award for Bowling for Columbine. He said he wanted to talk about non-fiction, and how it can be used as a cure against lies. He was not able to finish the speech in at the 2003 Oscars because he used his time to declare George W. Bush’s presidency “fictional,” among other attacks against the Republican. No one asked when Moore would start making non-fiction movies.
Moore has been lying to his audiences since the get-go. His first film Roger & Me – about the closing of General Motors auto factories in Michigan – was wildly successful for a documentary. It was a piece of fiction, however. Famed New Yorker film critic Paulene Kael famously panned the movie’s untrue manipulations of facts, calling it “a piece of gonzo demagoguery that made me feel cheap for laughing.”
That came naturally for Moore, who bristles at the notion of personal freedom while using his considerable artistic gifts to proclaim the goodness of Castro’s health-care system and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, among others. His biggest success, commercially and critically, Bowling for Columbine, is another “documentary” where Moore presents lies in service to his message. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone say Moore stole their ideas and dishonestly juxtaposed animated footage in Bowling to make it seem as if they created it. They took their revenge by depicting Moore as a suicide bomber in their 2004 satire film Team America: World Police.
Albert Maysles, documentary director of Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter, among others, had this to say about Moore’s playing fast and loose with facts:
“In the case of Michael Moore, it sounds like a good idea – doing away with guns and doing away with Bush. Even if he’s telling us half-truths and he’s mean to people, and abuses them in that process, ‘[y]eah, it’s okay because we gotta get rid of this guy’ – and I don’t go for that.”
Robert DeNiro has for months had the following message to the world pinned on his Twitter account: “F#@k Trump.” Only the message has the full word spelled out, combined with an image of DeNiro raising his fists in the air. Obviously, he was the perfect choice to present Moore‘s award! DeNiro called Moore “a true, true American hero” and, “… one of the greatest truth tellers in this country right now.” Ahh yes, so much “truth” but alas, so little honesty.
Fake News for the Fake Documentarian
Mere hours after the ceremony, the first Fake News reporting of the night included this lie, now part of Moore’s lore:
“Fifteen years ago, Moore was booed off the Academy Awards stage for using his Bowling for Columbine acceptance speech to decry the Iraq War.”
What happened was that Moore had simply used all the allotted time for the winner’s speech. Shortly after the one-minute mark of his screed, the music cued in to play him off. It is, however, true, and given our recent history, somewhat shocking, that there were noticeable loud boos of disapproval for Moore’s anti-Bush speech in 2003. Can you imagine booing from the audience at a big-time artistic awards show for someone criticizing Republicans nowadays?
No? Well then, mission accomplished by the Broadcast Film Critics Association and its cousins.
