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

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.

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.