Libertas in The LA Times + Moore’s Shoddy Legacy in Documentary Film

Endless proliferations of self.

By Jason Apuzzo. Yesterday’s LFM post on Michael Moore being voted to the Motion Picture Academy’s Board of Governors was mentioned yesterday in Patrick Goldstein’s LA Times piece on the controversy.  We want to thank Patrick for his regular readership of our site.

I also wanted to respond to one point made in Patrick’s article:

Inside the industry, reaction was more muted, with one screenwriter musing: “If the academy has any brains at all, they’d better frisk Moore before every meeting to make sure he doesn’t try to bring a hidden camera. If you thought Wall Street and General Motors were fat targets for muckraking, that’s nothing compared to the academy.”

This is actually the first thing I thought of when I heard about Moore’s election – not so much that he would bring a camera into board meetings (a droll idea, by the way), but that he would grandstand in public over matters that might otherwise be kept in-house.  The basic métier of people like Moore is to turn everything into a public, political controversy – essentially a circus spectacle, with him as ring master.  It’s all too easy to imagine this sort of thing happening in the case of, say, the awarding of honorary Oscars.  An acquaintance of mine on the Board, for example, was involved some years back in the controversial decision to give Elia Kazan an honorary Oscar.  What would Moore have made of that?  Would he really have kept his mouth shut?

The ironic thing here is that Moore’s career has basically been on the slide since Fahrenheit 9/11, and all this sort of thing does is reanimate him like some shambling vampire from an Ed Wood movie.

Beyond this, it’s come to my attention that certain on-line conservatives are actually praising this election of Moore on the basis of him being a gifted documentarian. What a farce.  Moore has absolutely destroyed documentary filmmaking, turning it into a cheap vehicle for filmmaker narcissism and half-assed propagandizing.  Moore has absolutely reversed all the advances that Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker (Primary, Monterey Pop, The War Room) or Albert and David Maysles (Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens) brought to documentary filmmaking from the 1960s forward, in terms of letting the documentary camera tell stories without the intrusiveness of narration or editorializing.  This is what American documentary filmmaking represented at the height of its influence on the world cinema stage – when filmmakers as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard, George Lucas, Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese cited the American documentary school as their chief influence.

D.A. Pennebaker's famous shot of Jimi Hendrix from "Monterey Pop."

As Pennebaker said back in 1971:

“It’s possible to go to a situation and simply film what you see there, what happens there, what goes on, and let everybody decide whether it tells them about any of these things. But you don’t have to label them, you don’t have to have the narration to instruct you so you can be sure and understand that it’s good for you to learn.” Continue reading Libertas in The LA Times + Moore’s Shoddy Legacy in Documentary Film

Hollywood Round-up, 7/8

He's de-friending David Fincher.

By Jason Apuzzo.Delicious irony: David Fincher’s new Facebook movie The Social Network (about Mark Zuckerberg) won’t be able to advertise on Facebook. Not surprisingly, Zuckerberg isn’t too thrilled about the project, and so this film will just have to resort to … My Space?

• The new Mad Max reboot is looking more interesting all the time.  Shooting on the 2 new films has apparently been delayed until February, but today word comes that George Miller will be lensing the films in some new, exotic form of 3D – and that Weta will be involved in creating the film’s FX.  Of course, the original films got a lot of their energy from the fact that the dangerous action sequences were real, rather than a digital construct.  As a side note, Miller has been tilling in the 3D fields for as long as James Cameron, and it’s exciting to consider what action sequences in the wide open Australian deserts will look like in this new film series.  It’s probably also a good thing that Mel Gibson isn’t involved anymore.

• MGM’s debt restructuring has meant that the James Bond franchise is on hold, but not gone.  In related Brit superhero news, Sherlock Holmes 2 may shoot as soon as early fall.

Avatar: Special Edition will be released in theaters on August 27th, with 8 new minutes of footage. There were apparently a few more American soldiers Cameron thought he could kill.

Bar Refaeili.

Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio may team up for The Wolf of Wall Street, about (need we ask?) Wall Street Corruption. (Did these guys miss Wall Street 2?)  Probably this won’t happen, though, because they’re both booked up with other projects.  Still, it’s interesting to imagine how dull this film might have been.

• The Emmy Nominations have been announced, and if you care here’s the list.

Fanboy obsessiveness with Inception continues apace (“Nolan joins the company of Coppola … Lean”), and has spread to critics, and really at this point there seems to be no point in even watching the film since the fix is in.  I’m not trying to be cutely contrarian here, it’s just that the decibel level is so high among Mr. Nolan’s admirers that I’m wondering whether anyone will even listen to a contrasting opinion?

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Bar Refaeli’s back!  After we reported on this extraordinary story yesterday (in which Ms. Refaeli waxes philosophical, as it were, on her own beauty), we learn that the Gilad Shalit march she’s participating in in Israel (estimated at 15,000 strong) just entered Jerusalem on the last leg of its two-week journey.  This cross-country march is designed to keep the case of kidnapped soldier Sergeant Gilad Schalit in the public eye.  This 23-year-old Israeli sergeant has not been seen since he was captured by Hamas during one of their raids in 2006, and Refaeli has joined thousands of supporters and other Israeli celebrities on the walk.  Good for her.

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood …

Posted on July 8th, 2010 at 12:26pm.