New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Question: Interesting. What about his appearance? Is it appropriate to bring up the fact that Michael Moore is fat and ugly?

Answer: Unfortunately, no. While the physical appearance of most personalities in the public eye is consistently judged and ridiculed. Comments on Moore's obesity and general unappealing outward semblance are once again open to being misconstrued. One could interpret a remark which included words like "fatass," or other popular variations often (apparently) searched on Google, "Michael Moore fat pig" or "Michael Moore fat slob," as a declaration of one's political position. This is a situation you will want to avoid.

Question: Come on. Does it really make a difference whether or not people think Moore is good looking?

Answer: Dude, think about it. It makes a world of difference. One of the things that's so fascinating and confounding about him is that he's unattractive and yet people want to watch him. It is totally in contradiction with the normal habits of the movie-going public.

Imagine if he were good looking. You think his films are successful now? What if Michael Moore looked like George Clooney? Everything's the same except Moore looks and sounds like Clooney. Bush would not have been re-elected. We'd have socialized health care and guns would be outlawed. Moore is a master manipulator, but Clooney wouldn't have to manipulate. I would watch Clooney do anything. Scramble eggs. Hammer up drywall. Do squat thrusts. I never want to see Michael Moore do squat thrusts. Drywall would be bad too. Actually I don't really like seeing Michael Moore do anything. The sight of him is repulsive. But he's such a damned good provocateur with such a razor sharp wit. It's all so confusing!

Question: What is happening?

Answer: I don't know.

Question: Um, okay. This is all really intense and weird. Maybe it's best to avoid Moore in film conversations altogether.

Answer: No! Michael Moore is a pivotal figure in modern cinema. He single-handedly showed that documentaries could be entertaining. Before him, documentaries were condemned to PBS and middle school classrooms. But films like Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 demonstrated their box office potential to be much more lucrative than previously thought. This led the charge for breakout successes like as the $77 million earner March of the Penguins and gave way to an exponential increase in documentary releases. In the year 2000 three documentaries were released compared to 64 in 2007!

Question: Yeah, but even though the number of documentaries produced and released has increased, the average quality of the documentary has steadily gone down. Mainly because they all adhere to the simplistic one-sided approach that Moore always uses. This newer type of documentary, one could argue, is degrading the genre and reducing it to a cinematic version of reality TV.

Answer: Um, that's not really a question. That was a statement. I'm the one making statements, you just ask questions. If we both make statements then it's just a conversation.

Question: I thought that was the point. To have a civil conversation about Michael Moore.

Answer: No, that's not how this works. You ask a question and I tell you the answer.

Continued:       1       2       3