Capitalism: A Love Story is a documentary film by director Michael Moore that focuses on the late-2000s financial crisis. It examines the social costs of prioritising corporate interests and profits at the expense of the public good. Capitalism: A Love Story, Michael Moore’s new documentary, will be release by Overture Films on October 2, 2009. Capitalism will explore the root causes of the global economic meltdown and take a comical look at the corporate and political shenanigans that culminated in what Moore described as. Michael Moore's next film explores the root causes of the global economic meltdown and takes a comical look at the corporate and political shenanigans that c.
The bankrobbers caught on CCTV at the start of Capitalism: A Love Story are a forlorn and feeble bunch. We see a bedraggled old man in a Hawaiian shirt, and what looks to be a 12-year-old boy wearing a balaclava. For all their flailing efforts, they've got nothing on the real crooks: the banking CEOs who recently absconded with $700bn of public money, no strings attached. That's what's known as a clean getaway.
Michael Moore's latest documentary drew tumultuous applause at the Venice film festival today, suggesting that the veteran tub-thumper has lost none of his power to whip up a response. If the film finally lacks the clean, hard punch provided by the record-breaking Fahrenheit 9/11, that can only be because the crime scene is so vast and the culprits so numerous.
Undeterred, Moore jabs his finger at everyone from Reagan to Bush Jr, Hank Paulson to Alan Greenspan. He drags the viewer through a thicket of insurance scams, sub-prime bubbles and derivative trading so wilfully obfuscatory that even the experts can't explain how it works.
The big villain, of course, is capitalism itself, which the film paints as a wily old philanderer intent on lining the pockets of the few at the expense of the many. America, enthuses a leaked Citibank report, is now a modern-day 'plutonomy' where the top 1% of the population control 95% of the wealth. Does Barack Obama's election spell an end to all this? The director has his doubts, pointing out that Goldman Sachs – depicted here as the principal agent of wickedness – was the largest private contributor to the Obama campaign.
Capitalism: A Love Story is by turns crude and sentimental, impassioned and invigorating. It posits a simple moral universe inhabited by good little guys and evil big ones, yet the basic thrust of its argument proves hard to resist.
Crucially, Moore (or at least his researchers) has done a fine job in ferreting out the human stories behind the headlines. None of these is so horrifyingly absurd as the tale of the privatised youth detention centre in Pennsylvania, run with the help of a crooked local judge who railroaded kids through his court for a cut of the profits. Some 6,500 children were later found to have been wrongly convicted for such minor infractions as smoking pot and 'throwing a piece of steak at my mom's boyfriend'. The subsequent bill for their incarceration went directly to the taxpayer.
Moore's conclusion? That capitalism is both un-Christian and un-American, an evil that deserves not regulation but elimination. No doubt he had concluded all this anyway, well in advance of making the film, but no matter. There is something energising – even moving – about the sight of him setting out to prove it all over again. Like some shambling Columbo, he amasses the evidence, takes witness statements from the victims and then starts doorstepping the guilty parties.
Capitalism A Love Story Torrent
'I need some advice!' Moore shouts to some hastening Wall Street trader who has just left his office. 'Don't make any more movies!' the man shoots back. Moore chuckles at that, but the last laugh is his. This, more than any other, is the movie they will wish he had never embarked on.
Capitalism A Love Story Torrent
In his typically punchy, enthralling and entertaining new picture, Michael Moore takes aim at what Milton Friedman famously called socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor. After the big crash, the US government donated billions of dollars of taxpayers' money to bankers – those risk-taking alpha-heroes of free enterprise, who, on both sides of the Atlantic, have since gone on paying themselves massive wedges, content in the knowledge that if anything else goes wrong, the rest of us will once more obediently stump up. If merchant bankers fall behind with their debts, they get to stand under a gorgeous waterfall of public money. If ordinary folk get behind with their mortgage debts – such a delicious income stream for bankers – well, they get to live in their car.
Undoubtedly, Capitalism: A Love Story follows a now rather familiar Moore format: wacky clips, newsreel montages, interviews with the blue-collar victims, a big comedy stunt for the penultimate finish and then, for the ultimate finish, an emotional and positive story. For his comedy stunt, Moore has nothing quite as good as the kazoo-choir of cancer victims, or the spectacular financial rescue of that anti-Moore campaigner in Sicko, crippled with private medical bills. Moore tries wrapping Wall Street in 'crime scene' tape and attempts a citizen's arrest on the CEOs of merchant banks. He incidentally made this film at a time of great dewy-eyed optimism about Barack Obama, apparently believing that Obama would be the socialist that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin accused him of being. It must also be said there is one big omission in his film: how about a discussion of the most brutally capitalist business of all – the movie business?
But as so often with Moore, his sheer energy, wit and pertinence win you over. There are some extraordinary revelations. Before I watched this, naive soul that I am, I had no idea that companies were permitted to take out life insurance policies on their employees – called, with magnificent insensitivity, 'dead peasant' policies. These are there to make money from low-paid workers. They enable companies to make actuarially calibrated bets on the lifespans of thousands of low-ranking employees; they win big if young or healthy workers die, and the deceased's family is entitled to zilch. Perhaps the correct term should be 'dead serfs': these workers have, without their knowledge and without recompense, leased to their corporate employer their living bodies as gambling chips. Now, this is something Marx himself couldn't have predicted: we knew capital made money from labour, but actually extruding cash from dead flesh and blood? That really is something else.
Capitalism A Love Story Soundtrack
Criticising 'capitalism' will curl the lip of many a political sophisticate, on both left and right, but it is remarkable how the banker-shenanigans made this a live topic – but also remarkable how little it is discussed in the mainstream and how comfortably we have again returned to the status quo. Well, Michael Moore has succeeded in getting a film on this subject actually released in cinemas: a very sharp and entertaining one at that.