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."

Comments

i don't see how this is news, but

[siddesu]

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.

Re:yet another...

[misanthrope101]

Please post an actual lie that Michael Moore had in his movies. The arguments in Fahrenheit 9/11 were presented in terms of evidence--government documents, congressional transcripts/testimony, interviews, books, etc. You can interpret the facts differently if you wish, but that doesn't mean he's lying.

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.

Re:Uh Oh...

[squiggleslash]

but aspiring to present both arguments in as equal a light as possible.

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.

Re:Uh Oh...

[Elemenope]

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

[Descalzo]

I don't know about Heston being old. I don't know how old he was at the time. From what little I have read about Heston's response to Moore, he is not going to waste any more of his life on responding to jerks, or something like that. I'll try to look it up later.

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.

The oddest of all the smears thrown at "Bowling for Columbine" is this one: "The film depicts NRA president Charlton Heston giving a speech near Columbine; he actually gave it a year later and 900 miles away. The speech he did give is edited to make conciliatory statements sound like rudeness." Um, yeah, that's right! I made it up! Heston never went there! He never said those things! Or.... The Truth: Heston took his NRA show to Denver and did and said exactly what we recounted. From the end of my narration setting up Heston's speech in Denver, with my words, "a big pro-gun rally," every word out of Charlton Heston's mouth was uttered right there in Denver, just 10 days after the Columbine tragedy. But don't take my word - read the transcript of his whole speech. Heston devotes the entire speech to challenging the Denver mayor and mocking the mayor's pleas that the NRA "don't come here." Far from deliberately editing the film to make Heston look worse, I chose to leave most of this out and not make Heston look as evil as he actually was. Why are these gun nuts upset that their brave NRA leader's words are in my film? You'd think they would be proud of the things he said. Except, when intercut with the words of a grieving father (whose son died at Columbine and happened to be speaking in a protest that same weekend Heston was at the convention center), suddenly Charlton Heston doesn't look so good does he? Especially to the people of Denver (and, the following year, to the people of Flint) who were still in shock over the tragedies when Heston showed up. As for the clip preceding the Denver speech, when Heston proclaims "from my cold dead hands," this appears as Heston is being introduced in narration. It is Heston's most well-recognized NRA image - hoisting the rifle overhead as he makes his proclamation, as he has done at virtually every political appearance on behalf of the NRA (before and since Columbine). I have merely re-broadcast an image supplied to us by a Denver TV station, an image which the NRA has itself crafted for the media, or, as one article put it, "the mantra of dedicated gun owners" which they "wear on T-shirts, stamp it on the outside of envelopes, e-mail it on the Internet and sometimes shout it over the phone.". Are they now embarrassed by this sick, repulsive image and the words that accompany it?

At this point, there's nothing more to say, really. Judge for yourselves if Moore is being honest or dishonest.

Re:Uh Oh...

[madcow_bg]

What bothers me especially is that he will distort positions where the facts already support his claims, just to make them support him 'better'. For instance, in Bowling for Columbine, he presented gun-related fatality statistics for various countries, and stated that this demonstrates how that the US has 'more' gun crime than Japan and Canada (or wherever, I don't recall precisely). The US does in fact have more gun crimes per capita than Japan or Canada - but since it has a higher population, the contrast seems bigger if the numbers are presented as (meaningless) absolute values instead of values per capita. Yes, you're right, but the good thing when he says that this way is that people who notice and oppose this go and calculate it for themselves, and then see the gross misproportion of the gun deaths in USA vs the rest of the civilized world. The others ... they already see the point so no need to enlighten them more.