FILM FEATURE: MICHAEL MOORE IN WESTWOOD

Michael Moore in Capitalism: A Love Story.

Comarades, let us seize the time


By Ed Rampell


Michael Moore and his Capitalism: A Love Story were snubbed this year by the Oscars, without a single nomination, let alone win. Perhaps this is payback for being such a provocateur. Moore’s 2003 Bowling for Columbine Oscar acceptance speech as the Iraq War began, boldly proclaiming: “Shame on you, Mr. Bush!” In 2008, when Sicko -- which was shot in part on location in Cuba and praised Cuban healthcare -- was also up for Oscar gold, Moore joked the Motion Picture Academy should invite Fidel Castro to the ceremony to boost ratings. Maybe Capitalism: A Love Story did not get any requited love from the Academy in 2010 because of Moore’s outspoken critique of the not-so-free enterprise system, credit card debt, maximizing debt, democracy, the coming uprising and puts Pres. Obama on notice.


Nevertheless, Moore is the foremost nonfiction filmmaker of our times. Moore appeared at a Sept. 16, 2009 private screening of his new documentary Capitalism: A Love Story in Westwood, near the UCLA campus, where Huffington Post publisher, Arianna Huffington, who is from Greece, likened Moore to the ancient Greeks’ teller of unpopular truths, calling him “our Cassandra, with a baseball cap.” (That night his red cap bore the word “Rutgers.”)


Moore is to 21st century America what the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, the director of the Kino Pravda (Film Truth) series, was to the Russian Revolution: the man with the movie camera, who sees and chronicles social rights and wrongs, interpreting reality through a roving, relentless, restless, rabblerousing camera lens, determined to tell all to the masses out there in movie-land.


The release of a new Moore doc is a major media event. Indeed, shortly before his latest work was released, the Oscar and Cannes winner appeared on Jay Leno’s revamped NBC-TV program and on Sept. 23 (the day it opened in L.A. and New York) was a guest on Larry King’s CNN gabfest. By the end of the week he visited Amy Goodman on Pacifica’s Democracy Now, Bill Maher’s Real Time HBO show and other outlets. What other nonfiction cineaste can say that and has such ballyhoo heft?


The good news is that Capitalism: A Love Story is another Michael Moore instant classic, and in his considerable, 20-year-long oeuvre – which spurred revitalization of the documentary as an art form, as well as an entertainment medium -- is second in quality and power only to his 2004 masterpiece, Fahrenheit 9/11.


Premiering almost exactly a year after the financial meltdown, Capitalism: A Love Story has all of the usual suspects and ingredients of that film formula which makes Moore’s movie magic. There’s plenty of the tongue and cheeky characteristic that has spread to TV parodies of news exemplified by the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert brand of topical comedy. Capitalism opens with security camera footage of real bank robberies –- what better metaphor for bank bailouts with taxpayer money? (As well as a playful rumination on the nature of cinema verite by a practitioner of the documentary art form.) Then there are clips from other films – one on ancient Rome, another from an instructional piece on private enterprise, and hilarious “what would Jesus do?” bits.


Capitalism features some insider exposes and incisive investigative reporting -– another hallmark of Moore’s filmmaking technique -- which in Sicko exposed healthcare insurance scams, and in Fahrenheit revealed the battlefield costs of the so-called “cakewalk” in Iraq, where the mission wasn’t quite as accomplished as Moore’s nemesis, George W. Bush, had falsely claimed. In Capitalism, Moore exposes a scandalous life insurance practice for “Dead Peasants,” and more mind boggling practices.


The quintessential ingredient in Moore’s motion picture recipe has been his own proletarian persona, which works because like so many movie fat men, he’s funny, but unlike many U.S. leftists, he is literally a son of the industrial proletariat. There’s lots about his boyhood at Flint, Michigan, where both his father and uncle worked on GM assembly lines, mass producing cars in some bygone autotopia, once upon a time before America was de-industrialized, downsized, outsourced and union busted.


At the Westwood screening, Moore reminisced about this simpler, less greedy age: “Remember when… maybe mom had a J.C. Penney department store card, or something like that? But that was it – there was no credit card debt. The beast started [thinking] how it could get more money out of people: ‘We need more money. So let’s get them all charging things. Then let’s get their kids, when they go to college, into these 20 year loans.’ You know, when we were college age we didn’t go to a private bank to get a student loan. There was a thing on the college campus called the financial aid office [that provided] one or two percent loans… Around when Ronald Reagan became president, the concept of putting your pension into the stock market [began], which wasn’t going to be a guaranteed pension from the moment you started to do that,” said the 55 year-old, lamenting “the slow creep of… the takeover” by capital.


Of course, Capitalism has the de rigeur Moore merry prankster stunts – 20 years after Roger and Me, GM throws the prodigal proletarian son out of their HQ yet again. (When will they ever learn?) But correct me if I’m wrong: Moore’s current Wall Street shenanigans seem like replays of the escapades on his 1990s’ TV Nation and The Awful Truth television series, when he and Crackers, the corporate crime fighting chicken, confronted white collar criminals. While droll, Capitalism’s tomfoolery never rises to Sicko’s audacious, inventive level of Moore trying to bring a boatload of ailing Ground Zero survivors to the one place under U.S. jurisdiction that guarantees universal medical care: Guantanamo Bay, where suspected terrorists are imprisoned. (Denied entry at Guantanamo he instead transports the suffering 9/11 emergency responders and victims to Castro’s Cuba, where socialism provides free healthcare to all.) Nor does Moore’s return to the scene of the crime in the Financial District in Capitalism match the sheer panache of his dispatching actors clad as Salem witch-hunters to the home of Pres. Bill Clinton’s grand inquisitor, Kenneth Starr (now ensconced, God help us, at Pepperdine University!) during the multi-million dollar probe of the Monica Lewd-insky scandal and impeachment imbroglio.


Capitalism has its share of talking head notables –- social critic Wally Shawn (My Dinner With Andre), Catholic clergymen who denounce the capitalist system for its sinfulness and wickedness, etc. But, more importantly and at the core of Moore’s movie method, is his putting the so-called “forgotten man” (and woman) front and center, giving them a prominent platform to tell their heartbreaking, gut wrenching stories of an America where uncontrolled greed has run amok, laying waste to the common people. Just as Roger and Me presented out-of-work autoworkers, including down on their luck Flint residents reduced to catching, skinning, eating and selling rabbits to survive in the wake of the economic cataclysm that destroyed their once thriving city, Capitalism gives voice to Americans being evicted, including a family farmer close to snapping. As one victim of the capitalist system says onscreen: “There’s gotta be a rebellion between the people who have it all and people who have nothing.”


Moore defines capitalism as “legalized greed,” and after the Westwood screening noted: “Our laws demand that corporations have the fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to maximize profits. So they are legally required to make as much money as possible, any way possible…. Health insurance companies –- it’s not their fault that they deny claims or take you off the rolls… The laws demand this because they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to make as much money as possible. And you’re not going to make as much money as possible if you start doling out checks to people when they get sick. So they work night and day trying not to hand out any money to the doctors or hospitals or any of the people who need help. That is a sick system,” which Moore likens to one person at a table taking nine slices of pie and leaving the last slice for the other nine people.


Compassion and a strong sense of social justice are the heart and soul of Moore’s movies, and indeed, of the man who dared denounce Pres. Bush as the Iraq War started on live TV during his Oscar acceptance speech for 2002’s Bowling at Columbine. In Capitalism Moore raises serious points about the free market, pondering why a so-called democracy allows so many dictatorial practices in the workplace. (Jean-Luc Godard once asked why one boss has more power than 100 workers?) Moore also rails against America’s disparity in wealth, wondering what’s democratic – and Christian – about one percent of the population owning as much as the “bottom 95 percent of the population?" He includes scenes of workers rebelling against inequality and injustice, from archival footage of the 1930s sit-down strike at the Flint auto factories, to news clips of contemporary workers successfully occupying the Republic Windows & Doors factory in Chicago and demonstrators at Wall Street.


In his critique of the not-so-free enterprise system Moore spares no one, Republican or Democrat –- including the current president, whose candidacy Moore had supported. He likens Pres. Barack Obama’s economic team, especially U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, former CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of N.Y., and adviser Larry Summers, to the bank robbers hired by bankers to explain to them how banks are robbed.


Following the Westwood screening Moore told the enthusiastic audience, “I put the scene in about Obama receiving all that money… out of these Wall Street firms and banks [and] the thing about Goldman Sachs being his number one private contributor. The thought was: I’m really not doing this for the general audience. I’m doing it for Obama to see it. I’m doing this scene for an audience of one. Because I want him to know that we know, and I want him to know that I’m telling everyone else. As much as I love and admire the guy, I want to put him on notice that if he doesn’t do what’s in our best interest, and sides with this organized crime family, banks and investment firms – really, seriously, they’re just a legalized form – you talk about Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme, that’s exactly what they do everyday. They con the system. They hold out this carrot to everybody, you can be on the top if you just sell enough Amway. But actually, at the top are only a very, very few people who have most of the wealth. If [Obama] doesn’t side with us, and if he sides with them, then the next film will make the stuff I did about Bush look like a Disney movie,” Moore declared as the crowd applauded and laughed.


Moore hopes that his documentary will be a rallying cry that will trigger some sort of mass movement. He believes capitalism is an “evil” that’s “going to collapse and be done away with, regardless of what the people with money want. Because the people are being screwed… There’s a foreclosure filing in this country once every seven and a half seconds. If you do this to that many millions of people, the man from Peoria with the guns who wants to blow up the bank – there’s a tipping point. You can choose to deal with this now nonviolently… because eventually people won’t take it anymore,” the baseball capped Cassandra warned.


While the movie calls for an end to capitalism, it stops short of advocating revolution. Moore does not claim to have an economic blueprint to save us from unbridled greed and economic collapse, but he said: “I want democracy. I want you and I to control this economy. I want a say in what the decisions are that are made. And if you’re not going to give you and me a say, quit calling this country a ‘democracy.’” Moore also predicted that future archaeologists would unearth evidence that we called ourselves a democracy but allowed one percent of the population to call all the shots, causing tomorrow’s anthropologists to laugh at us the same way we now laugh at people who believe bloodsucking leeches would cure patients.


More than any other popular artist and entertainer, Moore is asking the questions that need to be asked. He is a bellwether, Fahrenheit preceded public disenchantment with Bush’s ill-fated war, while Sicko anticipated the healthcare debate we’re now having. Who knows where, a few years after his brilliant, must-see Capitalism, the public debate will be at. Meanwhile, it’s interesting and amusing to note that the name of Godard’s next movie is Socialisme.


Capitalism may not have been Oscar-nominated this year, but, in a tie with Amreeka and Sunshine Cleaning, it won a Progie Award – bestowed by the James Agee Cinema Circle, an international group of left-leaning critics – for Most Positive and Inspiring Working Class Screen Image.

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FILM NEWS: THE END OF POVERTY?

The End of Poverty? Director Phillip Diaz. Photo by Ed Rampell.

Food for thought

By Ed Rampell

The End of Poverty? is a kind of bookend to Capitalism: A Love Story. If Michael Moore’s movie examines how private enterprise operates at home, writer-director Philippe Diaz’s documentary explores what happens when that economic system is exported to the Third World. As scathing exposes of exploitation these nonfiction films share much -- ironic titles, onscreen social critics and most importantly, the down and out are ready for their close-ups. At an Los Angeles screening of Capitalism Moore told me he liked The End of Poverty? and “showed it at my theater in Traverse City, Michigan.”

With The End of Poverty? Kenya and Tanzania location shooting, Diaz’s doc -- which has played on the film festival circuit from Cannes to Nairobi to Sao Paulo to Calcutta -- was a natural for L.A.’s Pan African Film Festival. PAFF’s Executive Director, ex-Black Panther Ayuko Babu, was so enthusiastic about The End of Poverty? he watched it twice; last February the 104-minute film won an Honorable Mention in that PAFF’s Best Documentary category. Activist/actor James Cromwell, the farmer in 1995’s talking pig comedy, Babe says, “This film should be discussed and seen by as many people as possible.” 

The End of Poverty? activists, academics, authors and experts include ex-CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson, former World Bank chief economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera and John Perkins, who wrote Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. 

The interviewees and filmmakers assert:

Every 3.6 seconds someone starves to death. Sixteen thousand children die daily due to hunger. Over eight hundred million people go to bed hungry, including 300 million children. Nearly three billion people live on less than $2 a day; more than 1 billion survive on less than $1 per day; one hundred and sixty-two million people subsist on less than 50 cents daily. The developing world spends $13 in debt service for every $1 it received in grants. The world’s richest 1% owns 32% of its wealth. In Latin America, the richest 1% receives over 400 times as much income as the poorest 1%. The greater the disparity wealth, the more violent societies are. There are 60 million-plus slaves around the world today.

How did this massive injustice and inequality come about? The End of Poverty? goes to globalization’s beginnings, to 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean -- not blue, but red, with blood spilled by empire. As the film documents, “It’s what the wealth of Europe, for the most part, was based on, when you consider not only the exploitation of the ‘New World’… but also what happened in Africa,” says the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-nominated Cromwell. “The Europe the explorers left was basically economically, physically and spiritually bankrupt... It was the exploitation of all the Third World’s resources that allowed Europe to exist at all… America… was built at the expense of indigenous people, and… to a great extent, by slave labor imported from Africa or China,” notes Cromwell, who played presidents in the 2002 film, The Sum of All Fears, LBJ in the 2002 film, RFK and Bush Senior in Oliver Stone’s 2008 film, W, plus Prince Philip in the 2006 film, The Queen, and Pope Pius XII in an upcoming mini-series.

Diaz explains the doc’s name adds a question mark to the title of ex-Harvard professor Jeffrey Sachs’ book because “we’re attacking the economists and politicians who say these stupid things about poverty… Sachs is considered ‘Mr. Poverty’ in the U.S., he’s running all around the world with [U.2's singer] Bono, to promote his solution to poverty, which are, very simply, mosquito nets and fertilizer… They help… but don’t solve anything. By promoting these ideas, you just prevent people from understanding poverty’s true cause.”

In stark contrast The End of Poverty? exposes the structural causes of mass misery, tracing their 500-year-old imperial origins. Diaz points out before the conquistadors “there was no massive starvation as we see it today,” after traditional land-based “natural economies” were replaced by “consumer societies,” turning what was commonly owned into commodities. The roots of contemporary wretchedness are vast land confiscations, resource misappropriations, extraction and export of raw materials -- all benefiting foreign elites and local lackeys. This topsy-turvy system makes “Germany the biggest export of coffee; Germany doesn’t have one single bush of coffee,” Diaz observes.

To enforce their rule and these inequities, Johnson and economic hit man Perkins contend the metropoles use bribery, indebtedness and in the case of nationalists -- such as Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh, Guatemalan agrarian reformer President Arbenz or Chile’s socialist President Allende -- deploy CIA “jackals” or military intervention.

Diaz and other Sachs detractors, including Naomi Klein, also contend Sachs’ neo-liberal “shock therapy” privatization programs for harming workers in Bolivia, Russia, and Poland. 

“This man should be in jail, he’s very dangerous,” Diaz declares. If Klein reveals the rise of “Disaster Capitalism” in The Shock Doctrine, Diaz documents the 500-year rise of “Disaster Imperialism.”

Why should downsized, outsourced Western workers care about Third World penury? Given declining U.S. living standards, unemployment, evictions and Moore’s contention in Capitalism that one percent of Americans own as much wealth as the bottom 95%, Diaz says, “We could have made the same movie about America and the northern countries… Everywhere, it’s the same thing. The poor pay for the system. They pay to put more and more money every year into the pockets of the elite and corporations. But the problem is much more deep, burning and dramatic in the south because… they can’t survive, they’ll die.” Diaz thinks the difference in northern and southern suffering is in degree, not kind. Capitalism discloses corporations profiteering from employees’ deaths, but The End of Poverty? literally deals with “dead peasants.”

Diaz says Martin Sheen narrated The End of Poverty? for donations to causes, such as Catholic Worker. Cromwell notes: “Our celebrity allows us to be heard, which, if you use that appropriately… to express opinions people might not necessarily hear in the corporate media, that tends to stifle any expression of opposition or analysis… Martin Sheen is an extraordinary activist, deeply committed… he’s always been involved… in issues of war and peace, individual rights, the rights of oppressed, environmental… social… I heartily, heartily applaud and support him. He’s done an extraordinary job.”

Cromwell believes the post-9/11 surge in documentaries “is always healthy; the illness of our country is the concentration of power into the hands of fewer and fewer people who control more and more of our means of expression... The amount of information that can be conveyed is extraordinary, and it informs people about the world they live in and empowers them… one reason why I believe they’re suppressed. Luckily, Michael Moore and a number of others have become popular enough that they can’t be suppressed.”

Although Diaz grew up in Paris, his grandfather migrated to France from Spain after Franco seized power. Diaz studied philosophy and law at the Sorbonne; he began professionally making films at 19. He produced an early AIDs-themed feature, 1986’s Mauvais Sang, which helped launch the careers of Juliette Binoche and Julie Delpy, and 1988’s Calcutta-shot La Nuit Bengali, starring Hugh Grant. Diaz relocated to L.A. in the 1990s, co-founding Cinema Libre, a distribution (theatrical and DVD) and production company of progressive, independent documentary, feature and foreign films. Cinema Libre’s motto is: “Opening eyes and minds one film at a time”; its animated logo depicts an eye opening and shattering prison bars.

Cinema Libre titles include the award-winning, Diaz-directed, Sierra Leone-shot The Empire in Africa, Giuliani Time, McLibel, Deflating the Elephant with Sean Penn, Tim Robbins’ Embedded, Robert Greenwald’s Uncovered: The War on Iraq and Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, plus Jean-Jacques Beineix, Jean Gabin and Brigitte Bardot pictures. Cinema Libre’s Speaking Freely series, derived from footage shot while making The End of Poverty?, features progressives such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Located in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, Cinema Libre “is a mini-mini-studio where everything is under one roof… shooting equipment, the entire post-production chain, we do everything in-house: editing, special effects, sound, we even transfer digital to 35mm,” explains Diaz.

Throughout The End of Poverty?, which was largely funded by the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, are haunting, lingering shots of children, whom Diaz calls “the innocent victims of the system,” the meek inheriting not the Earth, but disaster imperialism’s consequences. While the doc’s commentators have insightful analyses, it’s the dispossessed themselves who speak most eloquently. During the three year-plus shoot in Latin America, Africa and Asia Diaz discovered “most poor people I met had a very clear understanding why they were in this situation and of the political and economic situation around the world.” Brazilian sugarcane cutters movingly describe the 21st century slavery of landless peasants. Grace, a Kenyan tea plucker, sums up the poverty-stricken’s plight: “Our stomachs are small.”

The End of Poverty? proposes solutions far more radical and sweeping than nets and fertilizers: agrarian reform, redistribution of wealth, and sharing of resources. In Capitalism, Moore calls this new system “democracy;” others, like Chavez, call it “21st century socialism.”

Diaz’s next film is a sort of sequel -- a drama called The Last Days of Karl Marx. 

The End of Poverty? opens in New York on Nov. 13. It opens Nov. 25 in L.A., followed by a platform national release. For more info see: www.TheEndofPoverty.com.

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FILM REVIEW: THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD

The Yes Men fix roll a little fun at terror with Halliburton's Survivaball.


Sí se puede!

By Don Simpson

Directed by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno (a.k.a. the Yes Men), and co-directed by Kurt Engfehr (editor-producer Bowling for Columbine; Fahrenheit 9/11), this humor-injected political documentary makes Michael Moore’s most recent effort seem utterly uninspired. Posing as high-ranking representatives of evil corporations, the Yes Men con their way into business conferences and television interviews in order to wake up their audiences to the dangers of passively allowing greed to rule the world. The results are more than just silly activist pranks; the actions of the Yes Men are thoughtfully conceived acts of protest designed to reach the largest possible audiences, inciting discussion, debate and action.

One example, Bichlbaum, in the guise of a Dow Chemical spokesperson, appears on a BBC News interview (viewed by over 300 million viewers) and announces that Dow will finally clean up the site of the largest industrial accident in history, the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. As a result people celebrate worldwide while Dow's stock value free falls, losing over two billion dollars. But the reality is Dow will never clean up Bhopal because the stockholders will never stand for it. With the market guiding our morality, our whole planet is at risk. But, there is a bright side: the audience of the BBC News was instantly re-educated on the subject of the Bhopal tragedy and presented with a perfectly viable solution that would only hurt the greedy capitalistic interests of Dow Chemical and its shareholders. The stunt resulted in over 600 articles in the US press about how Dow had purchased Union Carbide but was refusing to deal with Union Carbide’s liabilities in Bhopal.

Another example is when The Yes Men appear in New Orleans in front of 1000 contractors as representatives of HUD (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development). Bichlbaum (alongside an unsuspecting Mayor Ray Nagin) turns the tables on the government’s plan to tear down livable housing projects (to build new mixed-income developments) as he announces that HUD’s revised strategy is to keep the existing housing projects in tact. The most surprising part is that the contractors appear to agree. Bichlbaum also announces that Exxon and Shell have agreed to finance the rebuilding of New Orleans’ wetlands (a natural barrier to hurricanes) from part of their 60 billion dollars in profits this year – a claim less believable, but met with a welcome reception. The result of the Yes Men’s shenanigans: the contractors and people of New Orleans now know that the housing projects are being knocked down by the government out of pure greed. They also know that Exxon and Shell made their city much more vulnerable to hurricanes.

But, wait, that’s not all! The Yes Men get into plenty of other mischief, including: golden skeletons, SurvivaBalls, climate-victim candles and a fake issue of the New York Times.

Sure, The Yes Men Fix the World still suffers (just like Moore’s films) from preaching to the choir. The film itself provokes more giggles than action, but it’s the immediate results of their actual gonzo schemes that count (and those schemes are witnessed firsthand by people of various political persuasions). In fact, I see The Yes Men Fix the World as a public relations piece, highlighting the clever actions of Bichlbaum and Bonanno since November 2004 (The documentary, The Yes Men, was released in 2003). Of course, naysayers will discredit the Yes Men as liars because they misrepresent themselves, but sometimes a little white lie is necessary to discover the truth. The Yes Men’s lies are purely a means to unravel the web of lies spun by their targets.

Honestly, I cannot believe that the Yes Men have not been sued or incarcerated, and that large corporations, government officials and media still fall for their tricks. In fact, the Yes Men just pulled one over on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on October 19, 2009. Let’s hope that the effect of that stunt reverberates to influence effective climate legislation!

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AFI FEST 2009: THE ART OF THE STEAL

Argott’s Art Argosy

By Ed Rampell

If Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story attacks private enterprise, director Don Argott defends the sanctity of private property and creativity in his advocacy documentary, The Art of the Steal.

A Documentaries selection at AFI Fest 2009, Argott’s art argosy contends that the late Albert Barnes’ multi-billion dollar collection of Post-Impressionist paintings is being looted by the “establishment” of the so-called “City of Brotherly Love.”

The barbarians at the gates of the Barnes mansion, where the deceased collector’s canvases and an educational art foundation had been based for decades, include: The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly’s mayor, Pennsylvania’s governor, and assorted “philanthropists” such as the Annenbergs, who appear to be wolves in sheep’s clothing and make the home of the cheesesteak look pretty Philly cheesy.

According to the doc, these aesthetic vandals are violating Barnes’ will by ransacking his privately owned collection in order to relocate the paintings to a Philadelphia main drag – you know, near where Sylvester Stallone as Rocky ran up those steps as trumpets blared -- where the assorted Picassos, Van Goghs, Matisses, etc., can be turned into a major attraction to boost tourism to Philly as a world class city. (It’s akin to moving the Huntington Library's collection to Sunset Strip.)

Standing in the way of the powers-that-be are Barnes’ neighbors, who protest turning their ‘hood into a crowded tourist attraction (think The Getty), as well as moving the artworks, plus talking heads such as the L.A. Times’ critic Christopher Knight and NAACP standard bearer and ex-presidential candidate, Julian Bond. Along the way, the struggle includes a racial wild goose chase exploiting civil rights activism.

Argott’s cleverly named doc makes a powerful case, but still, there’s something to be said about making art more accessible to the masses, instead of cloistering it in a less accessible location for the edification of rarefied elitist aesthetes.

(The Art of the Steal is scheduled to screen Nov. 4, 7 p.m.,at Mann Chinese Theater 6, 6801 Hollywood Blvd. For more information: 866/AFI-FEST; www.afi.com)

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FILM REVIEW: CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY

Michael Moore looks at the crash on Wall Street in Capitalism: A Love Story.

Comrades, let us seize the time

By Ed Rampell

Michael Moore is the foremost documentarian of our times. He is to 21st century America what the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, the director of the Kino Pravda (Film Truth) series, was to the Russian Revolution -- the man with the movie camera, who see and chronicles social rights and wrongs, interpreting reality through a roving, relentless, restless, rabblerousing camera lens, determined to tell all to the folks out there in movieland.

The release of a new Moore doc is a major media event. Indeed, shortly before his latest work was released, the Oscar and Cannes winner appeared on Jay Leno’s revamped NBC-TV program and on Sept. 23 (the day it opened in L.A. and New York) was a guest on Larry King’s CNN gabfest, and scheduled to visit Bill Maher’s Real Time HBO show at the end of the week. What other nonfiction cineaste has such ballyhoo heft and can say that?

The good news is that Capitalism: A Love Story is another Michael Moore instant classic, and in his considerable oeuvre – which spurred revitalization of the documentary as an art form, as well as an entertainment medium -- is second in quality and power only to his 2004 masterpiece, Fahrenheit 9/11.

Premiering almost exactly a year after the financial meltdown, Capitalism: A Love Story has all of the usual suspects and ingredients of that film formula which makes Moore’s movie magic. It has the tongue and cheeky characteristic that has spread to TV parodies of news exemplified by the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert brand of topical comedy. (Moore also appeared on the Stephen Colbert show.)

The documentary opens with security camera footage of real bank robberies. What better metaphor for bank bailouts and other debacles? (As well as a playful rumination on the nature of cinema verite by a practitioner of the documentary art form.) Then there are clips from other films: one on ancient Rome, another from an instructional piece on free enterprise, and hilarious “what would Jesus do” bits.

Capitalism features some insider exposes and incisive investigative reporting – another hallmark of Moore’s filmmaking technique -- which in Sicko exposed healthcare insurance scams and in Fahrenheit revealed the battlefield costs of the so-called “cakewalk” in Iraq. The quintessential ingredient in Moore’s motion picture recipe has been his own proletarian persona, which works because like many movie fat men, he’s funny and is literally a son of the industrial proletariat. There’s lots about his boyhood at Flint, Michigan, where both his father and uncle worked on GM assembly lines, mass producing cars in some bygone autotopia, once upon a time before America was de-industrialized, downsized, outsourced and union busted.

Of course, there are the usual Moore merry prankster stunts – 20 years after Roger and Me, GM throws the prodigal proletarian son out of their HQ yet again. But, correct me if I’m wrong, Moore’s current Wall Street shenanigans seem like replays of the escapades on his 1990s’ TV Nation and The Awful Truth television series, when he and Crackers, the corporate crime fighting chicken, confronted white collar criminals. While droll, Capitalism’s tomfoolery never rises to Sicko’s audacious, inventive level of Moore trying to bring a boatload of ailing Ground Zero survivors to the one place under U.S. jurisdiction that guarantees universal medical care: Guantanamo Bay, where suspected terrorists are imprisoned. (He transports them to Castro’s Cuba instead, where socialism provides free healthcare to all.) Nor does Moore’s return to the scene of the crime in the Financial District in Capitalism match the sheer panache of his dispatching actors clad as Salem witchhunters to the home of Pres. Bill Clinton’s grand inquisitor, Kenneth Starr (now ensconced, god help us, at Pepperdine!) during the multimillion dollar probe of the "Lewdinsky" scandal and impeachment imbroglio.

Capitalism has its share of talking head notables – social critic Wally Shawn (of My Dinner With Andre fame), Catholic clergymen who denounce the capitalist system for its sinfulness, etc. But, more importantly, and at the core of Moore’s movie method, is his putting the so-called “forgotten man” (and woman) front and center, giving them a prominent platform to tell their heartbreaking, gut wrenching stories of an America where uncontrolled greed has run amok, laying waste to the common people. (Moore defines capitalism as “legalized greed.”) Just as Roger and Me presented out-of-work autoworkers, including unfortunate Flint residents reduced to catching, skinning, eating and selling rabbits to survive in the wake of the economic cataclysm that destroyed their once thriving city, here, in Capitalism, Americans are being evicted, including a family farmer close to snapping.

This compassion is the heart and soul of Moore’s movies, and indeed, of the man who dared denounce Pres. Bush as the Iraq War started on live TV during his Oscar acceptance speech for 2002’s Best Documentary winner, Bowling at Columbine. In Capitalism Moore raises serious points about the free market, pondering why a so-called democracy allows so many dictatorial practices in the workplace. (Jean-Luc Godard once questioned why one boss has more power than 100 workers.) Moore also rails against America’s disparity in wealth, wondering what’s democratic – and Christian – about one percent of the population owning as much as the “bottom” 95% of the people.

Moore calls for an end to capitalism, but stops short of advocating revolution. He does not claim to have an economic blueprint to save us from unbridled greed and economic collapse, but he, more than any other popular artist and entertainer is asking the questions that need to be asked. Moore is a bellwether. His Fahrenheit preceded public disenchantment with Bush’s ill-fated war, while in Sicko he anticipated the healthcare debate we’re now having. Who knows where, a few years after his brilliant, must see Capitalism, the public debate will be at. Meanwhile, it’s interesting and amusing to note that the name of Godard’s next movie is Socialisme.

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