It’s already been in the news that high quality copies of Sicko have leaked
out onto the internet early. In response to that, and the good buzz the film has
been getting, The Weinstein Company decided to release it a week earlier on June
22nd instead of June 29th 2007. Till now, Michael Moore has been too busy
fighting the US government to comment much on the state of his movie and piracy,
but yesterday at a press junket Coming Soon caught him answering the piracy
question.
After blaming the US government for leaking the film (get real dude) Moore says,
“I'm glad that people were able to see my movie.” He then adds, “I'm not a
big believer in our copyright laws. I think they're way too restrictive.” I’m
right there with you man. Copyright laws were a good idea when they were
invented, but they’ve been stretched way beyond their original intention and
these days seem to exist only to protect big, all-powerful corporations.
To Moore’s credit, he puts his money where his mouth is. Not only is he none
too happy with the current overbearing, unreasonable restrictiveness of
copyright law, he was willing to come out and give the okay to people illegally
downloading his movie. He says, “I've never supported this concept of going
after Napster. I think the rock bands who fought this were wrong. I think
filmmakers are wrong about this. I think sharing's a good thing. I remember the
first time I received a cassette tape of a band called The Clash. I became an
instant fan of the Clash and then bought their albums after that and went to
their concerts and gave them my money… but I first got it for free. C'mon.
Everyone in here's either young or were young, and that's how it happens, right?”
Finally, someone who gets it. Anyone else smell a ripe topic for Michael Moore’s
next movie?
That’s not to say watching it on your computer is the way he’d prefer
everyone to see his film. He continues, “I made this film to be seen on a
40-foot screen. I don't even like DVDs. Honest to God, in my lifetime, I might
have rented a dozen DVDs, literally gone into a video store and rented a dozen
DVDs in my lifetime, because I don't like to see movies that way. I like to see
them on the big screen. That's how the filmmaker intended them to be seen, and I
really hope people go see this movie on the big screen and sit there on opening
weekend with 300 of your fellow Americans, yelling, jeering, cheering,
screaming, laughing, crying and leaving the theatre like, 'Woah. Let's have a
drink and talk about this.' That's the communal experience and that's why movies
never die. They said television would kill the movies, it didn't. They said VCRs
would kill the movies, it didn't. Now they're saying this is going to kill the
movies. It won't. People want to get out of the house and go to the movies!
Nothing's ever going to kill that, and I really hope people will do that on
opening weekend.”
Goddamn man. Between this and the brilliance of Sicko, I’m on the verge of
forgetting what a ridiculous piece of propaganda F-9/11 was and hopping back on
the Michael Moore bandwagon. Maybe that genius social satirist from ‘TV Nation’
isn’t dead after all. Of course he then goes right back to his wacko
conspiracy theories about the government and I’m reminded who it is that’s
talking. If you want to read the rest of the interview in which Moore starts
blaming the United States government for leaking his movie, visit CS here. Even
when you agree with him, Michael Moore is tough to take.
Michael Moore is Sicko but pays an adversary’s medical bills
Friday, Jun 22nd - 6:05am By Arlen
Parsa Filed: Saturday June 09th 2007, 3:08 PM found at thedailybackground.com
One of Michael Moore’s harshest critics on the internet, Jim Kenefick
(pictured above, right), who runs the website MooreWatch.com,
found himself in a strange situation recently.
Kenefick, who has been vocally critical of Moore’s filmmaking
techniques which he labels deceptive, was having trouble keeping up with
the costs of running his anti-Moore website and also paying several
thousand dollars in health insurance premiums for his wife, who suffers
from a neurological disorder. He posted appeals on the website, asking
for donations to help keep the site afloat or to help with his wife’s
mounting medical bills.
To his surprise, an anonymous donor sent him a $12,000 check- the
amount that he said would tide him over for the rest of the year. That
“guardian angel” later revealed himself in an answering machine
message. It turned out to be Moore himself, and Kenefick found his story
briefly featured in Moore’s upcoming film “SiCKO,” due to hit
theaters nationally on June 29th.
“I felt like, Oh fuck. I can’t believe he would do this,”
Kenefick told Newsweek.
Now Kenefick’s anti-Moore rhetoric may have softened. “Look, I don’t
oppose Moore as a human being, or even on all of his positions, and I don’t
know where I stand on health-care reform,” he says. “Nor do I presume
to be so intelligent as to know how to solve this monumental issue.”
Kenefick says he can “handle the heat generated by being used in the
movie as some kind of ‘gotcha’ moment, and in the end, that $12,000
made our lives a little easier.”
“In the end,” he said, “it reduced the stress on my wife, and
taking away even one of her worries—in this case it made it possible
for us to pay off everything faster than we’d planned—is worth a lot.”
“I’ve said this about nine times on my Web site: ‘Thank you
Michael Moore.’ Your gift took a huge burden off my shoulders. But I
still don’t like your style.”
MovieShame.
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