After last week's insanely varied weather in Columbia, Missouri, it was a bit of a relief to land in Austin, Texas yesterday to a balmy 80 degree day. And it was just plain great to be back in Austin. I was last here in 2002, when my first feature film, Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns), had its world premiere here. That, by the way, was kind of a seminal year for docs at SXSW, as it was the year that Spellbound, OT: Our Town and Journeys With George also debuted.
I spent most of Saturday trying to get my festival legs. Went to a couple parties and saw some of the usual suspects, then went to see the hyped-about premiere of the new anti-Michael Moore film, Manufacturing Dissent, which even had a long piece in the New York Times boosting it's pre-premiere status.
Well, what to say.
You can certainly add Manufacturing Dissent to Kurt & Courtney in the annoying sub-genre of films in which the central conceit is that the celebrity at the heart of the film wants nothing to do with the film or the filmmakers. In Manufacturing Dissent, the directors seem to think that they've pulled a gotcha on Moore - after all, didn't he invent the genre by chasing down GM's Roger Smith. And they seem to think that they've hit upon the breathtaking realization that Michael Moore doesn't play by the rules. He makes shit up. He cares more about entertainment and storyline than in literal truth. J'accuse! Stop the presses!
Next up, my new film in which I shockingly reveal that John Kerry wasn't a particularly good presidential candidate.
The problem with a film like MD, is that if you're gonna call Michael Moore a hypocrite, then you better play by those same rules you so smugly accuse him of breaking. The NY Times article made a big deal about the fact that the Canadian filmmakers were fans of Moore and that the project changed when they started to sense his hypocrisy. This was evidently to separate their film from the many anti-Moore docs that have sprung up on the right. But in their rush to make their case about Moore (he's not a nice person, he's actually rich!, he doesn't play by those famous documentary "rules") the filmmakers leave out some key details that exonerate Moore.
One of the film's worst moments comes when Moore is being interviewed about his sole fiction film, Canadian Bacon, by a creepy Canadian film critic. In a current-day interview, the film critic self-satisfyingly exclaims that he really gave it to Moore in this interview. And cut to the tape in which the critic basically changes the tone of the interview and starts telling Moore he's made an awful film. Moore is taken aback at first, but then makes a few jokes, and handles it with more grace than I could have. Cut to critic present day basically saying, "If you go after people like he does, then you better expect people to come after you, and you better be able to handle it," implying that Moore did not. But the opposite, as seen in the tape, is in fact true.
Moore is far from a saint and it actually would, at some point, be interesting to see him as the subject of a balanced film that explored not just his affect on politics but also on the craft of documentary filmmaking (which this film avoids). But Manufacturing Dissent is one of the most incompetently crafted films I've seen on any of my festival tours. You know that you're in trouble when you're trying to tell people to watch out for this guy who cares more about entertainment than truth but the biggest laughs in your film come from a TV Nation segment in which actors in puritan costumes stage a "witch hunt" outside the home of Kenneth Starr.
More soon about the first good film I saw at SXSW - Hell on Wheels. Now off to brave a rainstorm and get something to eat.
Hey - saw About a Son yesterday at SXSW and really enjoyed it. In the first few minutes I wasn't quite sure how it would work, but it turned out to be much more evocative and powerful than I expected. Good work!
Posted by: Greg | March 13, 2007 at 09:45 AM