Movies You Should See is a new weekly series of essays covering movies that aren’t current but everyone should see if they are serious about seeing great films. Some of these films you likely heard of, some may have been before your time but can easily be found on physical media or streaming and some are more obscure than they deserve to be. Either way, these are films I feel you very much should see if you are serious about being a viewer of film as both an artform and an important medium. That doesn’t mean there won’t be films on here that aim to be nothing more than entertainment, but these films in this series aim to be great entertainment, and not just a time killer on a screen. With the COVID situation, my ability to go to the theaters cut short, I will start this series.
Michael Moore, in his first feature, throws everything against the wall, to tell the story of how GM, the biggest corporation in the world at that time, pulled their manufacturing plant from his hometown of Flint Michigan and the aftermath of that decision. In doing so, he makes a film that is both entertaining and depressing, and even funny at times, with light moments despite the subject matter. Moore’s film is also enhanced by his narration, which is full of personal asides, quirky observations about his hometown and his dry humor.
The title of the film refers to Roger Smith, at the time, the CEO and president of General Motors, who made the decision to pull the factory out of Flint and move it to Mexico for cheaper labor. There are scenes in this film that are hard to watch, like a man killing himself in a street, a woman skinning a rabbit to sell as meat, and the indifference of rich people who hired the people of Flint to be human statues at their parties as jokes. The scene where Moore drives through a street with a car, filming a tracking shot of abandoned houses in Flint, with “Wouldn’t Be It Nice”, playing over it is one of the most famous and affecting scenes in documentary history. However, there’s also a ton of funny scenes, Bob Eubanks being a celebrity grand marshal at a local parade and making an anti-Semitic joke on camera, Michael Moore bringing a fruit basket to GM headquarters and being thrown out, and Moore getting a perm to help a women who signed up for Amway.
One of the voters of the poll of great documentaries, and the host of the special which aired on the defunt arts cable channel Trio at the time, Morgan Spurlock, himself a documentary maker in the Moore mold, admitted even though “Roger and Me” wasn’t number one, it is the most iconic film on the list and arguably in documentary history. What makes “Roger and Me” a great film too, is it’s revision of the narrative we receive about Ronald Reagan’s America, going so far to show a scene of Reagan literally standing in a pizzeria, campaigning on the idea that if they re-elect him, he’ll bring back the jobs. He never did. Moore’s films following this, follow what “Roger and Me” started, which is the flip side of the American dream, and no living filmmaker has done a better job documenting that.
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