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Michael Moore's New Film Leaked To BitTorrent
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."
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
here are two takes on it, one interesting, and the other bordering on the ridiculous. first, apparently michael moore himself approves of people sharing. he was quoted to have said that:
"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.
The bans came about because of Cuba's dealings with the Soviet Union.
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.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Here is the short version.
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."
Football Odds
Or when sounded as A, as in neighbor or weigh.
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".)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
you can find it on Google Video.
4 032752909
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=900641484
Ever put up with specific instances or shut up.
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.
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.
If cuba is so bad, and Fidel is so evil and they want him dead (isnt that against the law somewhere?)
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.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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?
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
You forgot the supply side of the Canadian system. If you are a good doctor who wants to earn real money, you move to the States. This especially works well if you are willing to live in a relatively small town when you get there.
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)
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
It's not like artists are forced into signing the distribution deals. It's all well and good to apply your own logic to the situation, but in the beginning, there was a contract entered willingly.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I am from the US. I went to see my doctor about a year ago and she wanted an MRI. She called the hospital and I was in the machine within the hour. And to tie this in with a post below... everyone should have quick access to these machines. Even for small, "non-emergency" reasons. Considering that a headache is not an emergency but the cause may be, I would like my prognosis now please.
Your constant appeasement of the current US administration is one of the reasons they're able to get away with what they do. Encourage your politicians to impose massive sanctions, if you feel the way you do. The fact is, they won't, because that would hurt your economy just as badly as our own --- the hypocrisy goes both ways.
There has never been a time in history where a journalist with any self worth has tried to break a discussion of fact into two opposing arguments, and present both the one he knows is wrong and the one he believes is right as "equal".
A journalist's job is to report the truth, not invent debates.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Well, that's unarguably correct, so about two seconds of analysis of Moore's argument should result in something to tell us what he was actually complaining about. Now, let's see. The argument was something like "9/11 first responders got worse healthcare than suspected terrorists at Gitmo." We've eliminated the possibility Moore might be complaining about the standard of healthcare given at Gitmo. So, that just leaves us with the 9/11 first responders.
Now, here's a thought. I realize you have to stop typing for a second to think it, but could it be, maybe, that Moore's problem is with the healthcare of the 9/11 first responders? You know, what he could be complaining about isn't that healthcare given to suspected terrorists is too much, it might be that the healthcare given to genuine heroes is too little?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.)
"Why we fight", a documentary by the BBC and ARTE, is much better in that respect. If you really want to get depressed, I suggest you see the following movies:
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".
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
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.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
As for the speech, here is a comparison someone transcribed from F911 and from Heston's actual speech.
Here 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.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
willing to ignore, or even justify, Moore's lies.
Just waiting on you to point some out, sunshine.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Because like Al Franken, I know the comedic value of a funny name like Norm Ornstein.
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.)
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
You can't take the sky from me...
It all started with "Roger & Me" Moore documentary, he claimed he had NEVER interviewed Roger. There is clear and overwhelming evidence that he had interviewed him TWICE. ... they did the prep work for 30 (THIRTY) days so he can show up and get his rifle at the bank. Yes, it's moronic that a bank would give away rifles as a promotion, but, to show it as if you could just walk in fill in some papers and then walk out wit a rifle is a lie.)
It's all downhill from there. (The rifle stunt in Columbine
Anyhow, have a look at the "Manufacturing Dissent" documentary.
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
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.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I agree with your first two sentances. However..
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.
Eternity is a time bomb.
Consider how the economy has done quite well during the Bush tenure, and all you hear is how the prosperity is just a pause before the financial storm.
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 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.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
It's interesting to me that the total failure of Hostel 2 at the box office is being attributed by the filmmakers and studio to a workprint of the film being released onto the net, and now that Sicko has also leaked (methinks it's likely a Lions Gate vendor -- probably someone at the sound mixing company -- or someone internal at LGE) Michael Moore is publicly defending P2P. P2P Torrents DON'T help the box office, and I think studios are rightly justified to closely guard their IP through release. Moore seems to think that everyone out there who downloads his movie will also see the movie, but that really wasn't the case with Hostel 2.
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
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Whaa--t? I'm afraid your category of "left" probably includes 2/3 of the American public. "Openly liberal?" Hunh? True, higher education often creates increased concerns with the rights of all people, and less of an inclination to hold biased or racist points of view, so of course college graduates of journalism would be what you call "liberal."
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?
lol.. I love that part in the film where Moore is in the UK talking to staff in Hammersmith hospital and they're just laughing at him for suggesting that someone should pay for healthcare. It's a shame that we in the UK are blatant commies for having such a system of healthcare-for-all. Oh well. :D
Requiem for the American Dream