Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Following on from here, a few more thoughts on Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man.
The chapter that looks at the inaccuracies in Bowling for Columbine is pretty devastating, if even a half of it was accurate. The following chapter, by Anthony Zoubek, on the people that have made excuses for Moore's facts being wrong is equally strong. As someone who tends more to Moore than conservatives I'm annoyed that Moore doesn't seem to defend himself anywhere on his site. However, these two chapters are probably the best part of the book.
'Moore's Money' paints Moore as a miser who is always trying to get the most money out of everyone while giving away the minimum of his own but skips around back and forth through his life, ending up at a time in his life when compared to these days he had little. 'Michael Moore's Last Days in Office', things the authors want Moore to do before stepping down from public life, is just mean-spirited, especially as they claim that Moore was wrong about Shrubya being a deserter but I don't remember that issue ever being settled, just passed over. Then there's 'And the Oscar for Acting Out Goes To...' where the authors stress they have no knowledge of psychiatry before then proceeding to attempt to psychoanalyse Moore from a great distance. They say Moore writing a chapter of Dude, Where's My Country? as God is proof of narcissism, rather than a well-known humorous device. I suppose they also believe Dame Edna Everage is a biological woman or that Helen Fielding lives under an unfortunate delusion that her name is Bridget Jones. Similarly they decide not to understand the point of his open letters and pretend that he's really writing to people like Shrubya or Yasser Arafat but accidentally posts them to his website or in his books instead of popping them in the post.
Writing on Fahrenheit 9-11 before seeing it because you want to publish a book now rather than wait a few months so you can properly critique the work is pretty shoddy, even justifying it by saying that Moore would obviously be copying Stupid White Men is no excuse. (I can't be sure but didn't Moore say before he made Fahrenheit 9-11 that he would be using the same material from SWM?) The 'Moore Stories' chapter looks suspiciously like free advertising for another anti-Moore project, before finishing on a high-note of seeing how close they can come to tying Moore in with Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism, confusing Moore giving an explanation for why groups of people in the world might want to attack the US with a justification for doing it.
Read this book for everything up to the end of Bowling For Columbine. After that it just goes terribly wrong as the authors realise that while websites can be as big or small as you like it's a bit more tricky in book form.
The chapter that looks at the inaccuracies in Bowling for Columbine is pretty devastating, if even a half of it was accurate. The following chapter, by Anthony Zoubek, on the people that have made excuses for Moore's facts being wrong is equally strong. As someone who tends more to Moore than conservatives I'm annoyed that Moore doesn't seem to defend himself anywhere on his site. However, these two chapters are probably the best part of the book.
'Moore's Money' paints Moore as a miser who is always trying to get the most money out of everyone while giving away the minimum of his own but skips around back and forth through his life, ending up at a time in his life when compared to these days he had little. 'Michael Moore's Last Days in Office', things the authors want Moore to do before stepping down from public life, is just mean-spirited, especially as they claim that Moore was wrong about Shrubya being a deserter but I don't remember that issue ever being settled, just passed over. Then there's 'And the Oscar for Acting Out Goes To...' where the authors stress they have no knowledge of psychiatry before then proceeding to attempt to psychoanalyse Moore from a great distance. They say Moore writing a chapter of Dude, Where's My Country? as God is proof of narcissism, rather than a well-known humorous device. I suppose they also believe Dame Edna Everage is a biological woman or that Helen Fielding lives under an unfortunate delusion that her name is Bridget Jones. Similarly they decide not to understand the point of his open letters and pretend that he's really writing to people like Shrubya or Yasser Arafat but accidentally posts them to his website or in his books instead of popping them in the post.
Writing on Fahrenheit 9-11 before seeing it because you want to publish a book now rather than wait a few months so you can properly critique the work is pretty shoddy, even justifying it by saying that Moore would obviously be copying Stupid White Men is no excuse. (I can't be sure but didn't Moore say before he made Fahrenheit 9-11 that he would be using the same material from SWM?) The 'Moore Stories' chapter looks suspiciously like free advertising for another anti-Moore project, before finishing on a high-note of seeing how close they can come to tying Moore in with Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism, confusing Moore giving an explanation for why groups of people in the world might want to attack the US with a justification for doing it.
Read this book for everything up to the end of Bowling For Columbine. After that it just goes terribly wrong as the authors realise that while websites can be as big or small as you like it's a bit more tricky in book form.
