05-27-2004, 05:49 PM
"You believe that what Moore offers the public is fact, while I belive it is film so edited and distorted as to make it fiction."
No. While you can write (for instance) a terrible, innacurate encyclopaedia, that doesn't make it a novel.
Clearly (not that this wasn't obvious from the s*%tstorm the movie set off when it came out) you aren't the only person who thinks Mike is playing fast and loose. But presenting facts in leading or even misleading ways does not create fiction. A "fact" which is false, or presented out of context, or in a way which is intended to draw false conclusions, is not a "fiction". It's just a fact behaving very badly. Like, for instance, Colin Powell's presentation about Saddam's WMD program. Not a bit of it was true, except for statements like "we believe" and "we think". But he wasn't giving a fictional presentation.
Indeed, here's the point, from the third article down:
"Post-war filmmakers gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary."
A mockumentary, like a novel, or an epic poem, is an intent as well as a form. What would a misleading, factually incorrect documentary be? I can't think of a better term than crockumentary. But it isn't the same thing.
Jester
P.S: Believe him or not, I will point out that most of the suggested errors in the fourth link have been answered by Mike, of course in the overwhelmingly negative. At least according to him, he did walk away from the bank with a gun exactly as shown and implied in the movie, and that the Lockheed-Martin plant has both a long past and a busy present producing exactly what he said they were producing, and so on. Mike's responses can be found a ways down on the page on the right sidebar. Not saying that everything he says is true either, but I'm fairly certain many of the earlier criticisms are "gotcha"s that weren't checked thoroughly enough.
No. While you can write (for instance) a terrible, innacurate encyclopaedia, that doesn't make it a novel.
Clearly (not that this wasn't obvious from the s*%tstorm the movie set off when it came out) you aren't the only person who thinks Mike is playing fast and loose. But presenting facts in leading or even misleading ways does not create fiction. A "fact" which is false, or presented out of context, or in a way which is intended to draw false conclusions, is not a "fiction". It's just a fact behaving very badly. Like, for instance, Colin Powell's presentation about Saddam's WMD program. Not a bit of it was true, except for statements like "we believe" and "we think". But he wasn't giving a fictional presentation.
Indeed, here's the point, from the third article down:
"Post-war filmmakers gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary."
A mockumentary, like a novel, or an epic poem, is an intent as well as a form. What would a misleading, factually incorrect documentary be? I can't think of a better term than crockumentary. But it isn't the same thing.
Jester
P.S: Believe him or not, I will point out that most of the suggested errors in the fourth link have been answered by Mike, of course in the overwhelmingly negative. At least according to him, he did walk away from the bank with a gun exactly as shown and implied in the movie, and that the Lockheed-Martin plant has both a long past and a busy present producing exactly what he said they were producing, and so on. Mike's responses can be found a ways down on the page on the right sidebar. Not saying that everything he says is true either, but I'm fairly certain many of the earlier criticisms are "gotcha"s that weren't checked thoroughly enough.