A documentary about the closure of General Motors' plant at Flint, Michigan, which resulted in the loss of 30,000 jobs. Details the attempts of filmmaker Michael Moore to get an interview with GM CEO Roger Smith.
Roger And Me, Roger et moi, Michael Moore: Roger and Me, Roger und ich, Roger y yo, Roger & Me - Roger e io, Roger e Eu, Roger és én, רוג'ר ואני, Roger och jag, Роджер и я, 로저와 나, 罗杰和我, Roger og Mig
USAR
Germany12
Germany
USA
The scene at the Great Gatsby garden party where wealthy people talk about how great Flint still is while unemployed auto workers play human statues is a level of cinema Moore hasn't achieved since.
The section where various celebrities - Pat Boone, Anita Bryant, Robert Schuller - parade through Flint taking turns telling laid-off residents to buck up and look on the bright side of life is infuriating. The whole "hunt for Roger" strand is the least interesting part of the movie, but it does effectively illustrate the heavy infrastructure that people like Roger Smith build around themselves to avoid having to face the consequences of their actions.
People who try to discredit this movie by pointing out that Moore played fast and loose with the timeline of events are, in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, "wussies and pussies."
MM on the infamous rabbit death scene:
"Two minutes later in the film, a black man was shot. I had no calls, I never saw anyone get out of the theater and leave. It's an image we've learned to accept. I received a lot more sympathy and compassion for the bunny than for that black human being.”
Roger and Me is the first Michael Moore film I’ve seen, and I think it still packs an enormous punch over 30 years later.
In what was only his first outing as a filmmaker, Moore takes on a deeply personal subject—looking at the mass closures of General Motors plants in his hometown and the crippling effect it had on the people that lived there—and applies his own highly distinct and idiosyncratic approach to the account, threading humour in his pursuit of elusive CEO Roger Smith (and all the corporate middle men he has to get through in his attempt to see the boss) with a genuinely heartbreaking account of the community he’s a part of imploding in real time.
Subtle…
Michael Moore delivers his usual excellent job of presenting his focused subject, and here it's the highly destructive effects of General Motors mismanagement by CEO Roger B. Smith and his subsequent reorganisation and labour force outsourcing on his hometown of Flint, Michigan, which resulted in the closing of numerous auto plants.
It's the directorial debut from the filmmaker, and the documentary gives rise to an assortment of different and entirely valid points together with making an overall strong impression. It shows the slow deterioration of a town, and Moore repeatedly undertakes a venture to bring Roger Smith back to the neighbourhood of his ex-workers to exhibit to him the consequences of what his callous outsourcing has done to the regular…
Much like Quentin Tarantino, Michael Moore has a pure passion for his craft and it shows. A subject which could be so boring is instead turned interesting simply because the director himself has an interest in it. That’s how you make a good documentary, not with useless facts or a monotone voice but with heart.
Being from Michigan makes this hit a lot harder, especially when members of my family used to work in the auto industry. Looking at how capitalism and the people in charge of these huge corporations can just tear down an entire city without any consequences is always hard to watch, but it something that always needs to be seen. It’s amazing that Moore can arrange these clips of horrible things to create comedy that is both funny and painful. I’m very excited to watch more of Moore’s work because the level of provocation he brings to a documentary is exactly what I find impactful.
Warner Bros. DVD
1.66:1
Color
16mm
12
"This film cannot be shown within the city of Flint... All the movie theaters have closed"
Moore considers this to be a massive failure because the documentary itself fails to "stimulate any interest in development or investment to the town of Flint" however I think Moore is incorrect about his documentary. Twenty years later and numerous visits back to Flint, it's all the more terrifying and horrifying that Moore showed the chaos and the smoke before the fire, yet nothing has changed. No re-development has occurred and in the reign of the supreme overlord Trump who promised he would make places such as Flint and Detroit prosper once again, it makes Moore’s documentary all the more important, poignant and powerful.
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1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (2010 Edition) #806
I've lived in southeastern Michigan for the past year, which definitely added some weight to my experience with this movie. A widening area around Detroit is still experiencing the economic desolation that Moore chronicles here, as well as the generalized pity and sometimes contempt that accompany it. Decades old though the footage may be, it remains woefully salient. Candid interviews juxtapose laid-off auto workers with Flint's clueless elite, who themselves satirize the wealth gap better than most fiction. Thoroughly, systematically, Moore traces the fallout of the factory closings: from new jobs for the unemployed (Amway, Taco Bell) to the nonstop evictions (in which you can see how heavily Flint's poverty is inflected by racism) to city officials' short-sighted attempts to…
Mundo JODIDO. Sistema JODIDO. Todo está JODIDO. Y Moore te lo va a recalcar cada segundo durante 90 minutos.
Despite some bad-faith and shameless stunting of his more recent career, Michael Moore's ROGER & ME is pretty undeniable as a document of big corporate greed and the unbridled optimistic capitalism of the Reagan era. From his way of catching people sticking their own foot in their mouths as they speak, to his unannounced bum-rushing of the various hideaways of the rich and powerful, you can practically see the wheels in motion that would lead to today's confrontational humorists on THE DAILY SHOW and THE COLBERT REPORT.
So anti-Reagan it would make a great double feature with COCKTAIL.
