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irate: you might read any--and i mean any--history of documentary as a form.
dictionary definitions are often kinda like cut analyses--they show what the state of a word is at a present, but not how it got there. the oed is an exception, but at the level of the examples of usage across time more than across the various definitions.
from the outset, documentary was understood as a form of critique of the existing order, not its reproduction.
but whatever.
moore is often an embarrassment, its true. i do think that similar points can and have been made by other films--for example "control room" is a far more effective film demolishing various aspects of the bushworld-specific fantasy that is the war in iraq than anything in f911 is...but it is geared for a different audience.
the only interest i have in debating moore--ever--is that there is a tendency--which you reproduce--to throw the baby out with the bathwater (a curious cliche)--that moore's film about the war in iraq has some data problems does not mean that the critique is not basically correct--nor does it mean that all critiques of the war and the bushworld view of it are identical to that done my michael moore. similarly on the question of bfc--a film that i thought was more ambitious and better than f911, but which was still problematic in some ways.
you are not really interested in the question of moore's films, it seems to me. you are more interested in trying to do what i pointed to above: using moore's films and the problems you may find with them to dismiss the arguments he makes in toto, as if the critique of the war in iraq originated with michael moore, as if questions about american gun culture did not exist publicly before bfc.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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