I’m not totally convinced that this is not a joke, but the Huffington Post claims that the Weinstein Company is going to start running this TV ad for Under the Same Moon today. The immigration drama broke the record for the biggest opening for a Spanish-language film in the States last week, and essentially became TWC’s first Miramax-style success (acquire small/foreign film; identify and laser-target natural audience; use success with that audience to push film as general arthouse hit) since the Weinstein brothers divorced Disney in 2005. Apparently, Harvey thinks the way to maintain that success is by going after the segment of the audience that gets off on the idea that their movie choices could turn CNN pundit Lou Dobbs into a weepy little girl.

Each of the ad’s three pullquotes––from TIME, the Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly––claim that Moon’s portrait of one family’s border struggle could wring sympathetic emotion from hardass Dobbs, who preaches almost nightly about how immigrants should be rounded up and launched into outer space, our agricultural and service economies be damned. And maybe that’s true––maybe Dobbs has been waiting his entire professional life for the indie film that would turn his schtick around––but with the three references lined up consecutively, the ad plays like an unfunny spoof of mainstream film critic laziness. Is “Lou Dobbs will cry” such internationally recognized shorthand for “this is a good movie about immigration that will appeal to your liberal sensibilities and change your conservative asshole friend’s mind”, that 90 percent of the print film critics who still have jobs simply could not conceive of stating the matter any other way?

Oh, and an Impending Snake Eats Tail media alert: TWC has apparently booked the ad on CNN in five major markets.

As political polemic and as entertainment, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is mostly unsuccessful, but as a statement of purpose on behalf of its co-star and executive producer, Tom Cruise, it’s mildly fascinating. Through sheer force of star power, Cruise manages to temporarily hijack this lumpy lecture, and turn it into a battle cry against the corporate media that both built and destroyed him.

You probably don’t need to be reminded that Cruise has had a rough couple of years, culminating in the announcement in November 2006 that he and long-time producing partner Paula Wagner had signed a deal to resurrect MGM’s dormant United Artists. Some saw this as a savvy move for both Cruise and MGM: disappointing box office on Mission Impossible: 3 aside, there’s still no one on the planet with Cruise’s international name-and-face recognition, and as he proved with War of the Worlds, which made $65 million in its first weekend just a scant month after the couch jumping incident, the guy can open the right project regardless of what’s going on in his personal life. But skeptics (myself included) wondered if MGM was just throwing Cruise a bone—if they weren’t doing anything with UA anyway, was handing the brand over really a sure sign of confidence?

The guy had—has–something to prove. With his career at the crossroads, the choice of Lions For Lambs as the vehicle to drive him over the hump is not an immediately logical one. It’s worth noting that Cruise didn’t go looking for politically relevant story to tell—Redford signed on to direct the script, and then called Cruise, looking to cast him. And I may get permanently disinvited from Sundance for saying this, but I’m not sure if Redford fully knew what he was getting into.

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Sicko director Michael Moore submitted a question to the CNN/YouTube debate, but it didn’t make the final cut. (Hmmm….wonder why?) After the debates, he posted his question–along with a lengthy explication–at the Huffington Post.

So you know how yesterday I posted about Michael Moore’s appearance on CNN, and my basic take was, “Michael Moore’s just looking for attention/I don’t think the Gupta piece was that bad”? Well, yesterday afternoon, Gupta admitted to getting one fact wrong in his piece: he misquoted a number used by Moore in Sicko in regards to per capita health care spending in Cuba. Later, Gupta appeared on Larry King Live opposite Moore. The first of three parts of that segment is embedded below.

In this segment, Moore says his people spoke with Gupta’s people on June 29th about inaccuracies in the piece; The Huffington Post posted email evidence of that conversation shortly before Larry King Live last night.

Was it irresponsible for CNN to re-run a clip that they knew contained inaccuracies? Sure. But post-CNN apology, what is Moore trying to achieve by continuing to beat this dead horse? It seems to all boil down to an issue of linguistics: Moore is upset because Gupta’s piece said he “fudged facts.” In reality, Moore probably didn’t really “fudge” as much as selectively included statistics that bolstered his argument, and omitted facts that contradict or confuse his stance on the issues. CNN isn’t guilty of libel, per se; can you sue a TV network for an imprecisely worded voiceover?

Bloggers have almost unanimously*** taken the filmmaker’s side. “[N]o nonfiction filmmaker is scrutinized in the way that Moore is. Hell, no journalist is scrutinized the way Moore is (oh, but if they were),” writes A.J. Schnack. “If [Moore's] right about nothing else (and even if his appearance last night bordered on the wild-eyed, which I’m not saying it did), CNN has plenty to answer for.” Rachel Sklar is more blunt: “Does it compromise my journalistic objectivity to say that Dr. Sanjay Gupta is a dick?”

At this point, it seems as though CNN is just embarrassing themselves by letting Moore and Gupta argue in circles. It’s easy to peg Moore as the winner in all this–not only does he get the satisfaction of having made a major news organization look bad, but he gets hours worth of free publicity for his film–but the flip side to Moore\’s triumph is the agony that is watching CNN dig their own grave.

**UPDATE: It’s not all sunny skies in the blogosphere for Mr. Moore. When forced to choose which of the two great Satans to side with between CNN and Michael Moore, conservative bloggers are showing a surprising surfeit of sympathy for the cable news giant. “While I can agree that our media establishment does not always serve the public interest well, listening to Michael Moore rant and rave about them is rich,” writes Pam Meister. Allahpundit calls Moore a racist and accuses him of beating on an easy target; Libertas also plays the “Mike’s a bully” card–”For Moore to get in a battle of wits with Wolf Blitzer of all people

Everyone’s talking this morning about this crazy segment on CNN last night. Wolf Blitzer ran a pre-recorded segment, produced by their medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, questioning some of the facts about international health care in Sicko. Michael Moore then went on a ten-minute rant, accusing CNN of treating him unfairly, producing biased reporting to please their sponsors, and lying to the American people.

Gupta isn’t exactly saying that Sicko is a ball of lies; he’s mostly focused on the facts the film fails to reveal. The basic crux of his argument is this: “It’s true, the United States is the only country in the Western world without free, universal access to health care. But, you won’t find medical utopia elsewhere.” Gupta even closes his segment with something resembling an olive branch: “No matter how much Moore fudged the facts–and he did fudge some facts–there’s one everyone agrees on: the system here should be far better.”

This just seems like common sense to me–as in, anyone with a brain who watches Sicko understands that there is a give-and-take in other countries, a not-so-swell side of universal health care that Moore declines to show in order to bolster his argument.

But Moore, apparently on a mission to become a parody of himself, is no longer willing to accept even a shred of criticism. When in doubt, he always pulls the “poor little Mike versus the big bad mainstream media companies” card. He criticizes CNN for running pharmaceutical ads, but as Blitzer points out, you don’t see him demanding that Harvey Weinstein pull all Sicko ads from CNN.

The clip embedded above closes with Lou Dobbs laughing off Moore as “more of a left-wing promoter than Hugo Chavez”, but oddly, Moore actually spends the majority of his CNN screen time deflecting attention away from his film. I guess he figures there’s more long-term value in turning the appearance into a stunt, demanding that Blitzer and CNN “apologize to the American people” for their failure to ask the proper questions about the war in Iraq, and even slamming Gupta in particular for embedding with the troops and not coming back with a scathing report (according to Blitzer, Gupta was too busy performing neurosurgery on injured soldiers to do much negative reporting).

Moore has a point-by-point rebuttal of Gupta’s piece posted on his own site. It’s not exactly a gleeful “smackdown”–the general tone is, “Gupta’s truth is sort of true, but it’s not the whole truth.” Nonetheless, he’s still demanding an apology from CNN, and, according to BoingBoing, asking that his fans do the same.

UPDATE: According to FishbowlNY, Michael Moore will be back on CNN tonight, “debating” Sanjay Gupta face-to-face. Fishbowl also confirms that I’m not crazy, and that Moore did seem to put a very strange spin on his enunciation of Gupta’s last name–they refer to it as “the Kwik-E-Mart pronunciation.”