Michael Moore's New Film Leaked To BitTorrent 1088
Jared writes "Michael Moore was afraid the Feds might sieze his new documentary Sicko, a scathing indictment of the US health-care system, because part of it was filmed in Cuba despite the US embargo. So he stashed a copy of the film in Canada just to be safe. He might as well not have bothered — the film has shown up on BitTorrent and P2P networks everywhere. So it's safe now."
Re:Uh Oh... (Score:3, Interesting)
I can be certain that he needs his films to make enough money to fund making more films. I'm sure he also wants to eat, I'm sure enough pepople will purchase this movie as a symbolic gesture that he doesn't get too upset.
If he got upset prior to actually knowing if this really hurt his wallet, well, I think he'd be defying the very sense of logic that makes him so appealing to many people.
I would never see his movies otherwise, I refuse to buy them in the store because I don't like the license and restrictions that come with them. So I have to watch a copy that someone else obtained. I'm not picky on how they obtained it
i don't see how this is news, but (Score:5, Interesting)
"I make these books and movies and TV shows because I want things to change, so the more people that get to see them the better, so I'm happy when that happens. I think information and art, ideas should be shared."
So far so good, hats off to the guy for the message.
Now, onto part two. The funny thing is that there are some people in the so-called "blogosphere" (who seem to disagree with Moore), who have posted the movie for download, pasted a ton of ads on their website, and then gone to write something like so:
"Now I fully expect [...] Moore's people asking me to take this down. Which I will, because unlike Moore and most liberals I actually do respect things like copyright laws and property rights. "
Ain't that sweet, and ain't people on the internet nice -- you rip someone off while saying you "respect" copyright, you're making money off ads on it, and you have the audacity to say the movie is all bulshit. Cheers for the copyright 'lovers' on teh internet, really.
Re:Those evil cubans! (Score:3, Interesting)
It was sort of an extension of the Monroe Doctrine, trying to prevent a European power from establishing control in the region. In this case, they especially didn't want a *communist* power to establish itself.
To that end, they built Cuba into a boogey man of a magnitude that, even after the threat was gone, the public would have reacted badly to resuming trade relations. Now it's just kind of a political convention in the United States that, no matter what happens, Cuba is bad.
All in all, things would have probably gone better if Walt Disney had let Nikita Kruzchev into his park to see Mickey Mouse and if Castro had actually made the cut and gotten into major leauge baseball instead of going back home and going into politics because he wasn't good enough on the field.
Re:Those evil cubans! (Score:3, Interesting)
Short but also wrong.
A long time ago, cuba was very friendly with the usa. Then cuba had a (communist) revolution, and seized a lot of property belonging to americans. So the usa wasn't very happy,
They had an, at most, Socialist revolution. Major factories were confiscated and farmland redistributed to the poor. Fairly typical stuff. Compensation were offered to the American companies who previously owned most anything, but the offer was denied. It was because of that, that the US decided to embargo Cuba. Eisenhower imposed a limited embargo on Cuba in 1960 which Kennedy extended to all trade with Cuba in February 1962, eight months before the Cuban Missile crisis. An embargo that the US forced upon all other Latin American states. The Cubans had no choice but to unwillingly ally with the Soviet Union and become "Communist."
Editors: I before E, except after C (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry, ex-English teacher, had to say something. (Sidenote: always nice to see an old spelling mistake in a new word. I see far too much of "concieve" and "beleive" and not nearly enough "siezing". Of course, that is because I don't typically teach children older than middle school, and they don't have much call to say "seizure" unless it is in the context "Spelling nearly gives me a seizure".)
Also... (Score:2, Interesting)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=900641484
Re:That's just scaremongering (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:You would think that he'd find a less obvious r (Score:1, Interesting)
Roger and Me - what happens when huge companies abandon factory cities that spent the last 30 making them profitable. Wow really anti conservative cause he's looking out for the average dedicated american laborer. If it's right wing to mismanage a company and take it out on your employees then I think many right wingers will disagree.
Bowling for Columbine - Core message wasn't guns... it was about fear in our society and how it's used, and then how it affects us. So I guess the pro conservative view would be that it's alright for corporations to use fear to profit from us. Cause in that movie he was saying the opposite. It's really neither left or right wing.
Fahrenheit 9/11 - This one was hugely Anti Bush. If you think Bush embodies the conservative ideology, then you must hate ron paul too. This was a rant, but the message in this movie was bush was incompentant and he will f*** up america.
Three years later, sure the movie was average, but moore was right, bush is a moron.
Sicko, I haven't seen it yet, but I don't remember when being against inefficiency and to have compassion for every man to be a left wing view. I really don't suspect this to be a left wing or right wing view, just an expose on how close ring wing AND left wing politicians are in bed with Big Pharm and HMOs. Both sides will be brow beaten.
Only 1/4 movies could be deemed anti right wing
I don't think you need to be a left winger or a right winger to realize bush is a douchebag though.
Distorting the truth? (Score:2, Interesting)
We've heard that crap since Fahrenheit 9/11, and his movie has stood up to scrutiny. Take that incident with the gun and the bank. The bank *lied*, claiming they did not give guns in the bank office itself. Nevermind Moore is seen aiming the gun in the presence of bank staff.
Yet you still read idiots like yourself claiming Moore forged this incident. That's revolting.
Re:Uh Oh... (Score:1, Interesting)
Politically-based documentaries used to be about presenting the argument, presenting the sides, and maybe your take on it, but aspiring to present both arguments in as equal a light as possible.
Now? It's all about getting your agenda out. Your fucking talking points with amusing editing and post-production to make it flashy and sexy for the audiences to swallow. How is this different than our faulty intel reports on WMDs? "It gets us talking," don't it? It also causes damage.
George Clooney got his message out in Good Night, and Good Luck, without ever having to distort anything, because he made a biopic with artistic license. The whole point of documentaries is that those licenses are not to be used, that reality and facts are good enough to tell its own story.
Re:heh, OK, France is socialized (Score:1, Interesting)
You'll never get an answer from the lunatic.
You'll just more bullshit about 'socialized medicine' being bad because, well, it's 'socialized medicine'.
Ignoring the nutty rightwing ideology that keeps a significant portion of the US population from being willing to take the steps other countries have to create a universal coverage system, at the most fundamental level there is a deep rooted mindset in the nut you're responding to that for people like him to be happy and successful others MUST suffer. That is the American dream. Winners and losers. You can't have winners if there are no losers.
Seeing indigent people being tossed out of hospitals gives his type of ilk a warm fuzzy feeling of confirmation that the system is working by giving them an incentive to work harder to get the medical care they need.
Re:yet another... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've read a bit of the "Michael Moore is a liar" threads here and elsewhere, but their content is, from what I've seen, limited to re-interpreting the facts a different way, just leaving out the facts that led to his conclusion, all the while pretending that he's just spouting foundationless opinion, a la Rush Limbaugh.
why is cuba bad? compared to russia (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is Bush so chummy with a bad ass MOFO ex KGB guy like Putin that wants the old soviet russia back.
If Putin is so pro west (ie sanity vs insanity) then he would have made the KGB not so evil.
He is nothing more than a global school bully with nukes.
Re:Uh Oh... (Score:3, Interesting)
If that were true, its hard to see a motivation for him saying "I don't give a damn if people pirate my works so long as they see my message." Where's the "selling his books and movies are everything" profit motive in that?
Re:Canada not so nice (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:real sources of our health care problems (Score:3, Interesting)
Other than organ transplants (for obvious reasons), people don't die on waiting lists in the UK either. Waiting lists are for non-urgent operations. I realise that it must be frustrating for people to have to wait for a knee or hip operation but they do have the option of paying for it privately if they really don't want to wait.
Since we pay less in the UK per capita on government healthcare than the US does, and I could get full private, with no excess, for $80 a month, I can't see how the US system is in any way better (previous post on this with supporting links [slashdot.org])
Re:Uh Oh... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:why is cuba bad? compared to russia (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:That's just scaremongering (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:We'd love to, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Distorting the truth? (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:yet another... (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe if you only saw the first half of the movie. The other half paints her as a opportunistic corporate shrill that will sell her own mother to get into the presidential race. Since the movie is about nationalising the health industry in America, and H. Clinton was the only one to bring this up in the last 20 years, I would have been surprised that Moore would have not mentioned her
Personally, I loved the movie. His best since Bowling. I also think a lot of the French and British will complain in their own respective countries about how it paints their health system as pixies and fairies. But, the conclusions are still correct. (For instance a few nights ago the BBC showed a documentary about how dirty/unclean hospitals are in England and the huge cases of MRSA related deaths due to this. They also showed how other countries dealt with MRSA. They didn't pick America. They picked Denmark (or was it the Netherlands?) where, the biggest hospital there, has 0 deaths from MRSA.)
Re:gee thanks (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Why we fight,
2) Hacking democracy,
3) An inconvenient thruth (just for Al Gore's references to when he was running for president - less important in this context but still intruiging),
4) Shut up and sing (to show how the public got carried away with the war fever - it includes the historic lies of Rumsfeld saying there is no doubt that Sadam has WMD).
Watch in that order for maximum effect. After that, you'll never think of the USA as "land of the free" again, but more like "land of the morons".
Huh? (Score:2, Interesting)
No offense, but where do you get your info? There are thousands of people in Miami who actually used to live in Cuba, who would disagree with pretty much everything you just wrote. You won't find many Cuban expats who are fans of Castro. Quite the opposite, usually.
Re:Uh Oh... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure the guy means well, but I don't share his views, I don't trust his facts, and I don't plan to watch this movie.
Begging your pardon, but that alone isn't a great reason not to watch the movie. Truth is, there are no 'trustworthy' collections of facts, for all facts are collected by interested parties, tainted at the very least by preconceptions. Even in hard sciences this human subjective effect cannot be entirely banished (thouh it is minimized). That you don't trust the guy's facts doesn't mean that you won't get anything valuable from the film.
In point of fact, I think that because you don't take all his facts at face value that you may gain more from the film than someone who is critically unreflective, because you have a motivation (from your prior experiences and conceptions of Moore) to remain aware, and thus have a a sense of which facts to accept and which to take skeptically. You know, for example, that his distortions tend to be pro-populist, a bit histrionic, and has a tendency for broader generalizations than are warranted; taking that information, you know exactly how seriously to take each scene with histrionic antics and also to filter through towards the narrower facts that might have inspired overebullient sweeping statements.
As a conservative, I read The Nation as much as I read the Wall Street Journal. I even sat down and read Obama's "Audacity of Hope" a month or so ago. Just because I didn't believe every bloody word (of any of those three) doesn't mean I don't/didn't gain valuable understandings of different perspectives and exposure to different arguments from those publications. And when an argument was sufficiently intruiging, it spurred me to search for corroborative and refutative evidence; sometimes, I was honestly surprised by the results.
I also tend to believe that Orwell was right when he said that all public (and many private) issues are political issues at bottom, and so those entanglements are unavoidable. What is more important in documentary filmmaking as well as other documentary enterprises is the ability for the viewer/reader to be able to identify probable biases. Our obsession with unencumbered facts is damn unhealthy, because it tends to convince us to outright ignore or minimize the importance of issues that seem too one-sided.
The Speech (Score:5, Interesting)
As for the speech, here [hardylaw.net] is a comparison someone transcribed from F911 and from Heston's actual speech.
Here [michaelmoore.com] is a link to Moore's website where he responds to attacks on his movie. The page is long and there is a lot there, so I'll copy the text where Moore responds to this specific charge. I'm going to leave it as is, without correcting the paragraph/formatting errors.
At this point, there's nothing more to say, really. Judge for yourselves if Moore is being honest or dishonest.
Re:Canada not so nice (Score:1, Interesting)
Jim worked for a small private company that didn't provide insurance. If you live in the US you know damned well that if your employer doesn't offer it, it is simply out of reach. Well, Jim's appendix burst.
They called 911 and got him to the hospital and did an emergency appendectomy. He spent the next ten years paying for that operation. His credit was ruined, his kids did without just so the corporation that owned the hospital could make their money. Had he been a lazy bastard who didn't want to provide for his family he'd have been all right, but he worked for a living. He swore never to again go through the hell of having health providers hound him for their thirty pieces of silver.
Two weeks shy of his fortieth birthday he told his thirteen year daughter, who he was raising by himself (as well as raising his son and another daughter, by then grown) that he didn't feel well and was going to take a nap. When she checked on him two hours later he was dead of a massive heart attack. He had confided to a couple of other friends weeks earlier that his "insides were messed up bad". But he still had no insurance, and a daughter to raise.
Thanks to our retarded method of paying for health care, my best friend who I had known for decades was dead. This was 1992. We still have the same idiotic method of non-mandated private insurance for workers, medicare for old people and medicaid for the destitute.
What you say doesn't matter at all. What matters is that by all metrics, from infant mortality [wikipedia.org] to life expectancy [wikipedia.org], and every other metric, we rank below every other industrialized country in the world as well as some third world countries while paying far higher for our health care than any other nation!
It's simply appalling that the private health insurance companies can continue to exist. The United States needs to get its head out of its ass and join the civilized world in caring for its citizens, rather than caring about the pockets of big rich corporations who put money before people's lives.
-mcgrew
Re:Uh Oh... (Score:3, Interesting)
Just waiting on you to point some out, sunshine.
Re:yet another... (Score:3, Interesting)
But I was still serious. I mean, sure, Al was on radio station that was financially fucked since day 1, but let's face it, he's leaving to PARTICIPATE in the process, not just kibitz and abuse drugs. Those were his SNL days.
(Well, actually, most SNL insiders pegged Al as being one of the 3 guys on the set in the 70's who didn't abuse drugs. So there goes the fuckin' Rush/Drughead/useless pile of shit gag.)
yet another guy who misrepresents documentaries (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I blame Michael Moore for Bush's winning (Score:3, Interesting)
It's all downhill from there. (The rifle stunt in Columbine
Anyhow, have a look at the "Manufacturing Dissent" documentary.
Re:Uh Oh... (Score:3, Interesting)
A websearch on "Michael-Moore net-worth" certainly makes it easy to believe that he's worth a couple tens of millions of dollars.
Well, even if his networth is in the tens of millions, that doesn't mean that he can (or wants to) liquidate enough of it to finance a movie on his own. A sizable chunk of my networth is tied up in long term investments, some of which I can't even get at without a huge tax hit (retirement accounts).
But, regardless, my point was that generally speaking, unless your name is Lucas or Spielberg, going it alone isn't a viable option in Hollywood these days. It will (or already is?) be a viable option for music artists long before it becomes a viable option for cinema. Anybody can obtain the recording equipment to master songs and make CDs -- as far as I can see the only tangible benefit that RIAA provides if you sign with them is marketing.
Contrast that to a movie where you need actors, stunt people, effects people, sound people, filming people, extras, shooting locations, etc, etc, etc.
Re:yet another... (Score:2, Interesting)
I seem to recall the first four years of the Bush Administration being called a recession, I wouldn't call what we're seeing here doing "quite well" it's more of trying to catch back up to where we should be.
I think you also mean Screen Actor's Guild the acronym for which is SAG, while not nearly as amusing as FAG, it's more technically accurate.
Re:yet another... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've yet to see my personal economy recover. "The economy has done quite well"- only if you think the stock market is the economy, and can afford to invest instead of living life getting eaten by usury, credit cards, subprime loans, and bad bankruptcy laws.
Of course, if you're over the age of 37 [strappedthebook.com] you've already escaped all that- and "fuck the future, I've got mine" has always been the neocon liberal baby boomer's defiant motto anyway, never mind the broken homes, hearts, and lack of financial ability you left behind in your divorces and drug use.
Hostel 2 and Sicko are both Lions Gate films... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Uh Oh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Uh Oh... (Score:3, Interesting)
As does George W. Bush, Fox News, anti-environmentalist activists, lobbyists, the fast food industry, Creationists, people in favour of globalization, Greenpeace, PETA, environmental activists, the slow food movement, people opposed to globalization, and pretty much damned near everyone else in between.
People tend to see the world through the lens of their own beliefs and perceptions -- it's rather hard not to. And, you can't always trust the source of most information since many of these policy groups, think tanks, and comittees are comprised of people who have a very significant agenda -- they just want to make themselves sound official and authorative, but their 'conclusions' are inevitable as their raison d'etre is to put forth positions that help their sponsors.
See, his viewpoints are no more distorted (and, to many people they seem a lot less distorted) than those espousing opposite viewpoints -- Fox News being a prime example of people who claim to be reporting 'objectively' but are distorting the news for their own agenda and bias. Until recently, CNN seemed to have abdicated their position as an actual news source, and instead happily followed along with anything the administration said and refused to be the least bit critical. At least they've started to come back around, but they've got a long way to go. I sure as hell don't trust either of them to actually provide me non-biased information, and they're the so-called "news".
Yup, he's got an agenda -- which is to make you think, and possibly put forth a side of the argument that doesn't get much coverage because it isn't popular with the current powers-that-be (or because there is a vocal and well funded lobby that wants you to think otherwise). To the best of my knowledge, much of what he says has actually been fact checked (which isn't to say you can't spin facts).
If Michael Moore takes a few liberties to point out societal problems (like a completely busted health care system or gun violence), more power to him. If George W. Bush takes a few liberties with facts to make a case for going to war, then he should bloody well be held to a higher standard than Mr. Moore.
Wanna know what's really happening in the world? Read about topics from as many different points of view as you can find, from as far flung sources as you can locate. Try to decide for yourself what you think is bullshit, what you think has a kernel of truth, and what makes sense to you. Michael Moore is not an encyclopedia, he's a film-maker who wants to show a different side of the argument. He's just one source, but he usually makes for one helluva interesting argument.
Cheers
Re:Uh Oh... (Score:2, Interesting)
Very amusing post, especially the weird tangent about socialized medicine. So, you don't think the government should handle defense of the borders, interstate commerce, or the military either, right?
Re:yet another... (Score:2, Interesting)