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Originally Posted by Marvelous Marv
No, that's me.  |
Don't worry Marv, I didn't forget you
But Ustwo was the one being nailed here so I kept it simple
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You get points for consistency, even though I hugely disagree with not paying attention to past abuses. Even superbelt chimed in with some good stuff.
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Oh, I never said you should pay no attention to the past abuses. I said the past abuses of one person does not excuse the current abuses of another. I cannot kill you and then claim that I should get away with it because, gee, Jeff Dahmer killed AND ate his victims so what I did wasn't really all that bad now was it.
Of course we should pay attention to what happened in the past. For example we should pay attention to what happened in Vietnam so that we never again get ourselves into a situation where soldiers are dying for noth. . . oh. . .wait a minute. . .
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It's terrifying to agree with you so much. Especially when you at least hinted that Michael Moore's "documentary" wasn't.
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It was, but that's only because the term "documentary" is as meaningless as "therapist." I can hang out a shingle right now and call myself a therapist and charge people to get "therapy" from me, and I'll be in absolutely no legal trouble as long as I don't tell them I'm a shrink or a psychologist. Because of that the term "therapist" means absolutely nothing.
By the same token I can throw anything into a script and call it a documentary, and I won't have broken some Law of Film.
So yeah, Moore's films are documentaries. They're not balanced coverage and while I think his heart is (for the most part anyway) in the right place, he really didn't need to use some of the tactics he did in order to get his results. Just one example would be the "I can go into any house in Canada and the doors will be unlocked because they're not afraid of stuff" scene that, it turns out, he had to do a jillion takes of before he finally found a house where the doors were actually unlocked.
I think his premise there was valid - Americans are scared of everything and the higher-ups encourage that fear in order to maintain control - we really do have a culture of fear - but I think he could have been much less lazy, and much more truthful, in making that point.