Around Oscar time, I wrote a somewhat rhetorical question: “how is it that Moore - the man who made his career claiming that the liberals are too often humorless and demonstrating through his filmmaking that humor can be the left’s best weapon - came to launch such a predictable and humorless screed at the Academy Awards?” In a short but scathing critique, a piece in the Guardian suggests that Moore in general has become tragically unfunny:
[H]e sells despite the fact that much of what is in his latest book was in his previous book. Despite sentences like this, concerning the Maginot line: “The only problem was, they built the bunkers facing the wrong way and the Germans were deep into France before you could say, ‘Garçon, more stinky cheese please!’” That manages to be both factually wrong and unfunny. Yet it tops the charts.
The author, David Aaronovitch, credits that early anti-corporate stuff was fun and fresh, but I’d venture further and say that what made Roger and Me so sharp was not the anti-corporate thesis, but its observational eye to both class structure and the post-industrial decay of the American city. On the first count, the film was a warm but satirical splaying open of every class fraction of Flint, from sub-prole through petit bourgeois town boosters to the upper management country-club set. At the same time, it’s one of the most chilling documents of public life and urban landscape gone wrong. (For more on this, I’d recommend a great site my friend Matt recently sent to me on the Ruins of Detroit.) What the example of the documentary reminds us is how crucial observation is to satire.
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