Saturday, August 11, 2007

Movie Review: Roger & Me

I don't know how this unwatchable bore ever got as much press as it did. I never saw Roger & Me when it first came out for whatever reason, but I remember reviewers falling all over themselves to say great things about it. Franny found it on the $2 rental shelf at Blockbuster the other day and grabbed it for whatever reason, but we both found it to be too boring to bother finishing. Not watching it and doing nothing important seemed like less of a waste of time.

The problem is that the movie's general premise, "Corporations and the rich guys who run them are more worried about the almighty dollar than they are about their workers or the communities they affect," is not really news to anyone, even to the corporations and the rich guys who run them. I'm pretty sure this was true even in 1989, so who was Michael Moore trying to convince of anything?

Moore's other semi-journalistic one-sided documentaries/editorials (such as Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11) at least touched on controversial subjects (in those cases, gun control and the big bad Bush administration, respectively) where, given the right evidence or examples, someone might actually have a change of heart. Granted, even with those movies, you have to watch what Moore puts out with a huge grain of salt and know that you're only getting half the story. However, if you do so, you still have something substantive to think about and those films got a lot of people talking about things that might otherwise have stayed under the rug where they had been swept.

Roger & Me didn't do that. I wouldn't say that it was a horrible movie, just deadly boring and not worth the time. Sorry Michael, even us Portland liberal hippie freaks have limits.

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