Michael Moore: America’s documentary king turns 70

Michael Moore
America’s documentary king is 70 years old

No question, Michael Moore (70) is a pain in the ass. However, a pain in the ass that America urgently needs. In his long career as a journalist, filmmaker and author, the short, round man with the iconic, worn baseball cap and ill-fitting jacket always went purposefully to where it hurt most in the United States, where his nation’s civilizing processes were particularly blatantly out of control walked. Even at the age of 70, the son of a Catholic worker family, born on April 23, 1954 in Flint, Michigan, has his hands full.

Worker’s son with preacher qualities

Looking back, the fact that Moore attended the Catholic Seminary in his hometown at the age of 14 to pursue a priesthood fits the picture perfectly. However, after graduating from high school, he decided to use his missionary zeal and his strong preaching skills, especially in the political and journalistic areas.

At the age of 22, he started his journalistic career by founding his own alternative magazine “The Flint Voice”, of which he was editor-in-chief for ten years. After completing a journalism degree at the University of Michigan-Flint, he moved to San Francisco to work for Mother Jones magazine, a publication known for investigative political journalism. There he apparently offended his colleagues so much with his manner that he was fired from his position as editor after just a few months.

Angry start to the film business

Gritting his teeth, the committed young journalist returned home to first focus on the grievances right on his doorstep. Between 1987 and 1989 he shot his first film “Roger & Me” (1989) there with modest financial resources, which promptly gave him a breakthrough in the film business. The film portrays the impoverishment of his hometown of Flint after the closure of the General Motors plant there, where Moore’s entire family had worked. In “Roger & Me” Moore also documented his unsuccessful effort over several years to get an interview with Roger Smith (1925-2007), the then CEO of the automobile company, whom he held responsible for the reckless closure of the GM factories.

In his debut work, which was showered with awards, the angry young man from the provinces already used all the characteristic stylistic devices with which he would soon achieve world fame in his further career: from a bluntly subjective perspective, he tells documentaries with a satirical character in which he speaks with biting Humor mercilessly and polemically exaggerates issues and not only appeals to the common sense of his audience, but also deliberately attacks their emotions.

Television adventures and feature film experiments

After making his debut with “Roger & Me,” the newly minted filmmaker produced a satirical news program called “TV Nation” for NBC and Fox between 1994 and 1995. He then ventured into a feature film project as a director with “Our Enemy Neighbors” (1995). The film is about a fictional American president who, after the end of the Cold War, looks for a new arch-enemy and ends up starting a war with neighboring Canada for flimsy reasons.

World bestseller “Stupid White Men”

During this time, Moore also began to pursue his socially critical agenda in written form, initially in 1996 with the book “Downsize This”, in which he examined the dysfunctional party system and the unscrupulousness of American corporations. He achieved his greatest literary success in 2001 with the work “Stupid White Men”, which coincidentally left the printers exactly one day before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. In the international bestseller, he took aim at the circumstances surrounding the election of George W. Bush (77) as President of the USA in his usual caustic form and took a critical look at the USA’s global power position.

Oscar for “Bowling for Columbine”

In 2003, Moore finally reached the peak of his career when he won the Oscar for best documentary film with “Bowling for Columbine” (2002). Based on the school massacre in Littleton in 1999, in which two students at Columbine High School there shot twelve classmates, a teacher and themselves, he sheds light on the absurd excesses of American gun law and the gun industry.

The very next year he triumphed again with the film “Fahrenheit 9/11” (2004), which illuminates the political developments in the USA after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and won a Palme d’Or at Cannes.

In the following two decades, the acclaimed filmmaker did not give up and continued to work on the political and cultural oddities of his nation along his anti-capitalism agenda. In “Sicko” (2007) he examined the American health care system and in “Capitalism: A Love Story” he devoted himself to the consequences of the financial crisis of 2007.

“Trump is smarter than us”

With the emergence of Donald Trump (77) on the political stage before the 2016 presidential election, Michael Moore once again found a major topic that he had previously explored in the films “Michael Moore in TrumpLand” (2016) and “Fahrenheit 11/9” (2018). processed. Before the upcoming election in November, the filmmaker last appeared in his Podcast “Rumble with Michael Moore” extremely pessimistic. “We don’t want to say it out loud, but I will,” Moore said, “and the reason we have to be concerned is that Trump is smarter than we are.”

SpotOnNews