There are a handful of reasons, only one of which is Moore’s film making. That’s now part of the problem, but let’s be up front about what the more prevalent issues are:
The Internet has fractured how we get our information. When Moore made “Bowling for Columbine,” in 2002, he put forth essential arguments about the gun debate, and the historical culture of American violence, that people still reference. The movie itself felt like a loaded weapon. (A number of viewers hated his ambush of Charlton Heston, but in that moment I felt that Moore revealed the hypocrisy of gun advocates.) The film grossed $21 million, but even that solid sum barely measured how much it became part of the conversation. Today, by contrast, the conversation about guns is more or less everywhere, rippling through comment boards and news shows and cell phones and, yes, documentaries, some of which have been superb (like 2016’s incisive portrait of the NRA, “Under the Gun”) even as they’ve remained mostly off the radar. It’s much harder for one movie to break through and become a giant billboard of issues the way that “Bowling for Columbine” did.
Moore’s audience has aged out. A generation of liberal viewers grew up with Michael Moore, but it may well be that they no longer go out to the movies. At least, not in the way they once did. He’s like an aging rock star putting out albums that simply don’t mean as much to those who were, and are, his core fans. But what about the next generation? If anything, they’re even more of Moore’s ilk: ardent, progressive, dogmatic in their passion. There’s just one problem: The under-40 generation, raised by technology, has demonstrated that it feels almost no desire to act out its progressive impulses by going to the movies. That’s what their parents did. Remember “Citizenfour,” the Laura Poitras documentary about Edward Snowden? It became a mythical media touchstone. And guess what? Hardly anyone saw it.
In the Trump era, people are addicted to the news, but they’re also sick of it. They don’t want to go out to a movie and rehash the Trump presidency they’re already living on a nightly basis on MSNBC. Simple as that. I mean, seriously, who hasn’t felt the burnout? Then, of course, there’s a highly related phenomenon, known as…
The let’s-just-tune-it-all-out factor. Everyone talks about activism, but when it comes down to it many of us would rather just sit around and binge-watch “The Walking Dead.”
In 30 years, Michael Moore has made 10 feature-length documentaries, and for a while every one of them was a sensation: “Roger & Me,” “Bowling for Columbine,” “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Then, after “Fahrenheit 9/11,” his all-time zeitgeist hit, Moore directed what may be his single most vital film, one that tapped into a topic every sane person in America agrees is of transcendent importance: health care. “Sicko,” released in 2007, was a seismic and disturbing exposé, built entirely around people who have health insurance. It was about the gaping chasms in the system — about the way that even our “coverage,” chipped away at by greed, was starting to rot from within. The movie did well; it grossed $24 million. Yet it was Moore’s last moment of heightened relevance.
In 2009, Moore made “Capitalism: A Love Story,” and it was a seriously problematic movie: a riff on what had gone wrong in America in the last 50 years that wound up fingering capitalism itself as the culprit. But it’s as if Moore, in all his acumen, had forgotten the old saw about capitalism: that it’s the worst system except for all the others. The movie was a free-form harangue, hectoring yet fuzzy, all sealed with the let’s get socialist! boosterism that has become Moore’s signature parting gift. (For a guy who was so hard-headed about the ascendance of Donald Trump, he’s awfully soft-headed about the appeal of Bernie Sanders.)
Ever since then, Moore’s films haven’t been compellingly focused documentary essays, like “Bowling for Columbine” or “Sicko,” so much as free-form didactic rambles. “Fahrenheit 11/9” is a good example. I remain one of its admirers, yet even in my mostly positive review I had to acknowledge that the film was all over the place: thumbing its nose at Trump, detouring into a dead-serious exposé of the Flint poison-water scandal, then building to a revelation of how the Trump administration is threatening to trash democracy even more than many liberals think. If you stay with the movie, it all adds up, but for long stretches you have to indulge its stream-of-opinionizing form. That makes it feel like something less than a bull’s-eye. And the point of this weekend’s box-office numbers is that people can’t stay with something they aren’t even bothering to see.
https://variety.com/2018/film/colum...lost-his-audience-fahrenheit-11-9-1202953813/
The Internet has fractured how we get our information. When Moore made “Bowling for Columbine,” in 2002, he put forth essential arguments about the gun debate, and the historical culture of American violence, that people still reference. The movie itself felt like a loaded weapon. (A number of viewers hated his ambush of Charlton Heston, but in that moment I felt that Moore revealed the hypocrisy of gun advocates.) The film grossed $21 million, but even that solid sum barely measured how much it became part of the conversation. Today, by contrast, the conversation about guns is more or less everywhere, rippling through comment boards and news shows and cell phones and, yes, documentaries, some of which have been superb (like 2016’s incisive portrait of the NRA, “Under the Gun”) even as they’ve remained mostly off the radar. It’s much harder for one movie to break through and become a giant billboard of issues the way that “Bowling for Columbine” did.
Moore’s audience has aged out. A generation of liberal viewers grew up with Michael Moore, but it may well be that they no longer go out to the movies. At least, not in the way they once did. He’s like an aging rock star putting out albums that simply don’t mean as much to those who were, and are, his core fans. But what about the next generation? If anything, they’re even more of Moore’s ilk: ardent, progressive, dogmatic in their passion. There’s just one problem: The under-40 generation, raised by technology, has demonstrated that it feels almost no desire to act out its progressive impulses by going to the movies. That’s what their parents did. Remember “Citizenfour,” the Laura Poitras documentary about Edward Snowden? It became a mythical media touchstone. And guess what? Hardly anyone saw it.
In the Trump era, people are addicted to the news, but they’re also sick of it. They don’t want to go out to a movie and rehash the Trump presidency they’re already living on a nightly basis on MSNBC. Simple as that. I mean, seriously, who hasn’t felt the burnout? Then, of course, there’s a highly related phenomenon, known as…
The let’s-just-tune-it-all-out factor. Everyone talks about activism, but when it comes down to it many of us would rather just sit around and binge-watch “The Walking Dead.”
In 30 years, Michael Moore has made 10 feature-length documentaries, and for a while every one of them was a sensation: “Roger & Me,” “Bowling for Columbine,” “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Then, after “Fahrenheit 9/11,” his all-time zeitgeist hit, Moore directed what may be his single most vital film, one that tapped into a topic every sane person in America agrees is of transcendent importance: health care. “Sicko,” released in 2007, was a seismic and disturbing exposé, built entirely around people who have health insurance. It was about the gaping chasms in the system — about the way that even our “coverage,” chipped away at by greed, was starting to rot from within. The movie did well; it grossed $24 million. Yet it was Moore’s last moment of heightened relevance.
In 2009, Moore made “Capitalism: A Love Story,” and it was a seriously problematic movie: a riff on what had gone wrong in America in the last 50 years that wound up fingering capitalism itself as the culprit. But it’s as if Moore, in all his acumen, had forgotten the old saw about capitalism: that it’s the worst system except for all the others. The movie was a free-form harangue, hectoring yet fuzzy, all sealed with the let’s get socialist! boosterism that has become Moore’s signature parting gift. (For a guy who was so hard-headed about the ascendance of Donald Trump, he’s awfully soft-headed about the appeal of Bernie Sanders.)
Ever since then, Moore’s films haven’t been compellingly focused documentary essays, like “Bowling for Columbine” or “Sicko,” so much as free-form didactic rambles. “Fahrenheit 11/9” is a good example. I remain one of its admirers, yet even in my mostly positive review I had to acknowledge that the film was all over the place: thumbing its nose at Trump, detouring into a dead-serious exposé of the Flint poison-water scandal, then building to a revelation of how the Trump administration is threatening to trash democracy even more than many liberals think. If you stay with the movie, it all adds up, but for long stretches you have to indulge its stream-of-opinionizing form. That makes it feel like something less than a bull’s-eye. And the point of this weekend’s box-office numbers is that people can’t stay with something they aren’t even bothering to see.
https://variety.com/2018/film/colum...lost-his-audience-fahrenheit-11-9-1202953813/
