The new trailer for Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story debuted yesterday on CNN.com, but obviously the world (including me) was too busy crapping on the Avatar trailer to notice. Even the Wolfman spot received more notice. For awhile last night I thought maybe people, even those on the left, were tired of Moore completely. But no, there has finally been some discussion of the thing today.

And the consensus appears to be that Moore isn’t making films any fresher or more groundbreaking than James Cameron is. In fact, Moore’s latest seems surprisingly dated. This is something we’ve expected, of course, given the ongoing story of the economic meltdown, but it is interesting to see so much Bush as well as a complete lack of footage that appears to have been shot since Obama was elected.

Worst of all, everyone agrees, is the use of M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on the soundtrack. Even if that song hadn’t been used to death by Pineapple Express and Slumdog Millionaire ads, I would think I was watching a trailer from 2008. How about, given the current events, Moore just rereleases Sicko instead?

Check out what the rest of the film blogs are saying about the film/trailer after the jump:

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Barack Obama gave a speech to the American Medical Association yesterday in an attempt to get the organization’s members on board with his plans for healthcare reform. The president’s appearance alone may have been good for his cause, given that it was the first such address to the AMA in 26 years, but many doctors are apparently still skeptical of the government’s ideas and how they’ll actually work.

Meanwhile, the issue of healthcare reform continues to be a difficult topic in Congress, and the road to legislation is sure to be long and filled with much debate. So, to help Washington in the process, or at least to keep the politicians sane with a little entertainment, we’ve come up with a little healthcare movie marathon.

The ten films selected are admittedly more left-leaning in their potential influence, but that’s not necessarily a political move on our part. We simply chose titles we like, and maybe it just so happens that we like movies that show charity as good, greed as evil and healthcare as a right that all humans should be afforded.

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There’s usually not much to write in response to a release date announcement, but when the film in question is Michael Moore’s, any kind of news is good bait for the haters. The Fahrenheit 9/11 documentarian is back with an untitled film about the current financial crisis, which would seem to be a topic accessible to all kinds of moviegoers. Even the ones who are usually anti-Michael Moore. But when this new doc opens on October 2nd (notably 1 year and 1 day after the $700 billion Wall Street bailout), there will still be plenty of people against it.

Already, Moore has issued a statement in which he reveals the film to be a sort of jab at the rich, so obviously there will be few wealthy moviegoers driving up to the theater in their gold Mercedes in order to see how they’re to blame for the present economy. But will any poor conservatives show up? And what about those of us leftists who’ve grown tired of Moore’s tactics? All I can say is, hopefully this doc at least has as few onscreen Moore scenes as his last major effort, Sicko. But despite the fact that he’ll clearly be focusing somewhat on the auto industry, this still won’t be anywhere near as good as Roger & Me, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this fall.

Let’s see what the blogs and blog commenters have to say this far in advance about the next Michael Moore film:
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It’s already been called the most important civil rights film of the decade, but only time will tell if Milk has any real impact on the gay marriage issue or any other related civil rights matter. Obviously the film, which is set thirty years in the past, can be appropriated by the campaign to overturn Proposition 8, but if that campaign is successful, it will be difficult to prove with certainty Milk contributed to the end result.

The Birth of a Nation may have inspired a reformation of the Ku Klux Klan and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner may have opened some minds to wider acceptance of interracial marriage (which had just recently been legalized). However, as Time magazine reported earlier this year, it’s quite rare for cinema to really change the world. A movie like Philadelphia easily gets moviegoers thinking about AIDS and discrimination, for instance, and Sicko exposes some of the supposed benefits of universal health care, yet most of these kinds of message films preach primarily to the choir.

But at least five films have made an actual difference, either on a local or national level. Will Milk join the small group of movies detailed below?
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Oprah Winfrey can certainly create a best seller when it comes to books, and her pick of the presidential candidates is on his way to the White House. But can she get behind a movie and contribute to its success? 20th Century Fox seems to hope so, because the studio apparently allowed the talk show host to screen an unfinished cut of Australia in preparation for her November 10 show, which featured the film’s stars, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, as well as a live-via-Skype call-in from filmmaker Baz Luhrman. Fortunately for Fox, Oprah raved about the film, and now the media has latched on to the endorsement, creating some much-needed positive buzz for the Oscar-hopeful. Yet there’s a big problem with all the excitement: Oprah’s film recommendations have hardly been sure-fire champs in the past.

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Michael Moore did not win an Oscar last night for Sicko, which may only mean that the Academy’s overwhelmingly left-leaning voter base are, like most rich people, far more concerned with the moral and historical implications of the current wars (and, particularly, the way we’re fighting them) than they are with the everyday lives of poor people here at home. But that’s okay, because even Michael Moore has stopped working the health care issue, at least temporarily. He’s too busy trying to Save Documentaries.

Moore made a speech at last week’s International Documentary Association awards, in which the filmmaker announced a plan to declare Monday nights Documentary Night at theaters across America. Mondays are traditionally the weakest night of the week for exhibitors, so, says Moore, with the right marketing small non-fiction films could match the typically low numbers produced by most studio films on that night. He’s essentially calling on studios to devote resources to, as the indieWIRE story on the matter puts it, “a consortium of PR and marketing people at the studios who would support and promote documentary, bolstering the work of smaller companies with limited resources.”

When this story broke last week, it was generally reported without comment, positive or negative (although AJ Schnack did take a small swipe at Moore for showing up at the IDA reception when he had something to promote, after failing to make an appearance when the body honored his career last year). But
Agnes Varnum is now asking some real questions about the plan, in this post. She suggests that a plan such as this might in effect marginalize documentaries further:

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It’s pretty upsetting when you see more documentaries than most Americans, and yet you haven’t seen any of the 15 docs deemed best of the year by the Academy. This is my case this year, and I guess I was slacking. Or maybe the real problem is that Oscar has shortlisted too many films that haven’t been released commercially. In his IN DEPTH look at the shortlisted docs, Kurt Cobain About a Son filmmaker AJ Schnack points out that only 6 of the films have pursued a true theatrical release and 2/3 have not been available for review by critics nor have they reported their box office. For commentary on Schnack’s earlier analysis of both this year and last year’s eligible docs, check out Karina’s post from last week.

So, there’s my excuse. Anyway, I still have many months to see the docs that are most likely to receive the five nominations. My guesses of what I need to see before Oscar night: Sicko, No End in Sight, Lake of Fire, Body of War and War/Dance (or Taxi to the Dark Side, if the Academy allows so many Iraq War docs). Of course, if I want to be a true doc fan, I should make sure to see all 15, as well as a lot of other films left outside the shortlist.

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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.

In the last ten years, movie screens have squashed podiums as the place for politicians to build a voter base. Should old entertainment formulas be used in politics? Do these politi-dramas spur us to action or whining? Under discussion: Sicko (2007), The Party’s Over (2000), Network (1976) and the sprawling entity known as Michael Moore.

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As I noted yesterday, conservative film blog Libertas is trying to push the meme that Sicko is a box office failure. To quote directly from the source:

Sicko [is] now taking in around the same per screen as the disaster License To Wed…Between the theatre and Moore\’s take, this looks to be a big-time money loser for the distributors and a stunning rebuke of Moore who no longer seems capable of convincing even the millions who agree with him to sit through two hours of his lies and obfuscations.

Obviously, this writer wants Sicko to fail, so no matter what the actual data says, he’s going to spin it to make his case (sound familiar?) But just for the sake of argument, lets take a look at evidence on both sides.

Sicko is a huge failure!!!

By this point in its release Fahrenheit 9/11 had grossed six times Sicko’s current take (although, it was also playing on over twice as many screens). Though the film opened undeniably strong, from week-to-week, Sicko’s per screen average has dropped dramatically, indicating that the pic has limited appeal beyond Moore’s choir.

As for the assertion that the doc is doing about as well as a certain Robin Williams trainwreck: according to the latest numbers from Box Office Mojo, Sicko’s daily per screen average is actually about 20 percent higher than that of License to Wed, although as both films are making far less than $1,000 per screen per day, that discrepancy currently only accounts for about a $100 each weekday. So yeah, it’s close. But…

Sicko is a huge hit!!!

…is it fair to compare the box office take of a documentary showing on 700 screens to a heavily-hyped, star-studded blockbuster wannabe booked at almost 4 times as many theaters?

At indieWIRE, Steve Ramos looks at Sicko’s gross in a different context: its success in relation to other high-profile documentaries, and amongst other sub-1000 screen releases. “It took the global warming film An Inconvenient Truth around six weeks to earn $11 million by early July 2006, a mark Sicko surpassed in just three weeks of release.” Apparently working off of these numbers for weekend gross, Ramos notes that in its third week, Sicko remained by far the smallest release in the overall top ten.

According to indieWIRE’s box office chart, which is based on Rentrak data and is limited only to “specialty” releases, Sicko is the highest grossing indie film currently in the market by a large margin. It’s #6 when ranked by per screen average amongst other indies, but it’s also playing on over 40 times as many screens as any other picture in the top ten.

Final verdict: As an indie film and as a documentary, Sicko is doing well, but it’s hardly looking like the mainstream phenomenon that Moore’s last two films became. Considering Moore’s star power, Sicko’s considerable marketing budget in relation to other indie films, and the fact that Moore’s last movie is the highest grossing documentary of all time, it is, so far, an unquestionable disappointment.

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.”

Let’s start with the facts: Transformers, which opened on Monday night, made $152.5 million domestically over its week-long opening weekend. That’s enough to give Michael Bay’s Ford commercial-with-kissing the record for the best opening week for a non-sequel EVAR; it was not, however, enough to break Spider-man 2’s record for the best July 4th opening weekend gross.

Now on to the spin: At MTV, Transformers “conquered”; at the LA Times and NY Times, it “dominated”. But Canada’s Globe and Mail holds Michael Bay’s film responsible for not being able to halt “the overall domestic box office plunge.” Yes, receipts were down 23 percent from the same weekend last year. Entertainment Weekly calls the fall “inevitable:, but I don’t know where you find inevitability in the statistics. Last year, the second Pirates of the Caribbean film grossed in five days about what it took Transformers seven days to produce. Are we to believe that the two mega-tentapoles were somehow playing on unequal fields?

Meanwhile, Variety called the Transformers bow a “boffo perf” –which is, according to the “slanguage” dictionary, the second-highest praise allowed. Pamela McClintock also notes that while Paramount Vantage’s bizarrely-spun A Mighty Heart screen slash didn’t much help that film, Harvey Weinstein’s slow-and-steady Sicko push is paying off. If Box Office Mojo’s breakdowns are to be believed, Michael Moore’s film is averaging about ten times Heart’s take on about the same number of screens.

Speaking of Box Office Mojo, the data kings are less back-handed than Variety in their assessment of Transformers‘ debut. Their generous writeup notes that the Bay flick “handily scored two minor records: biggest Tuesday daily gross with its $27.9 million opening day and top July 4th gross with Wednesday’s $29.1 million.” The always-thoughtful Brandon Gray pegged Transformers‘ success to a long lineage of disaster-themed July 4 hits.

In recent years, the industry has frequently and successfully associated Independence Day with disaster-themed spectacles from Terminator 2: Judgment Day to Armageddon to War of the Worlds, and Transformers fits that bill…DreamWorks and Paramount took a property of limited cinematic appeal—Transformers: The Movie was a theatrical bust in 1986—and sold it as another end-of-the-world event, bolstered by the visceral wonderment of seeing robots morph in live action settings.

Nikki Finke’s inside sources peg the success to Transformers’ ability to transverse cultural barriers. “The studio says that what is making the big box office difference is African Americans and Latinos flocking to see the film. But especially Latino audiences.” Dénos las robustezas del asesino!

In the hopes of resuscitating box office loser A Mighty Heart, Paramount is trying something new. The idea is to cut down from over 1,300 screens, to about 600 - a “retroactive platform release” designed to spread word of mouth and keep the pic in theaters longer. The Variety story is of the “let’s just keep the exec talking and count how many outside forces he manages to blame” variety. My favorite part is when Paramount blames John Cusack for stealing their older women quadrant with 1408.

“With no new wide releases scheduled to open Friday, the weekend dynamics already are in gear,” writes Gregg Kilday at the Reporter. “[T]he three dominant holiday players [are] on track to extend their winning streaks.”

Sicko will screen at the first Iran International Film Festival, but it’s maker is not coming with. A Sicko rep claims that a “right-wing promoted” rumor Michael Moore would follow his film to Tehran is “an urban myth right up there with alligators in the sewers of New York City.”