When did MoveOn.org go into the film marketing business?
A few weeks ago they emailed me to promote The Day After Tomorrow, that silly global-warming disaster movie that elicited too many comparisons to The Poseidon Adventure and some pretty poor reviews (my favorite: "The only truly scary thing about this doomsday popcorn flick is the momumental ineptitude of the acting, writing and directing").
What did MoveOn.org call it? "The movie the White House doesn't want you to see." They even enlisted Al Gore to help out. You've got to be kidding me -- just by loosely tying a weather-disaster grab-bag of floods, hailstorms, hurricanes, and snowstorms around a "global warming" theme, you can get activists to "grab a few friends" and go try to make Dennis Quaid's percentage points worth a little more? I still haven't seen DAT, but I did see the director's past film, Godzilla, a chilling warning about the dangers of nuclear proliferation and the importance of the test-ban treaty. I wonder why the NRDC didn't take advantage of that opportunity?
I'd imagine the White House cares very little about The Day After Tomorrow (though apparently NASA does). But this year there's been a fresh new crop of semi-mass-market lefty political documentaries, encouraged partly by the success of Bowling for Columbine. Rob Walker, in his really-great NYTimes magazine column Consumed (about, err, consumption) calls the commercial success of such films the "alienation market", but I'm a documentary junkie and am still happy to see'em. Off the top of my head, there was Super Size Me (fast food), Control Room (Al-Jazeera, Iraq, the media), The Fog of War (Vietnam, war in general, McNamara), and The Corporation (corporate personhood); still coming up is The Hunting of the President (Clinton impeachment), The Yes Men (the WTO), and of course Michael Moore's new Fahrenheit 9/11.
And now MoveOn is marketing for Michael Moore, using the same system that tracks members' phone calls to Congress to ask us all to take the pledge: "I will help make the opening weekend of 'Fahrenheit 9/11' a success by seeing the film and recruiting my friends to join me." What the hell? Of course F911 is more on-focus than DAT, but I stopped pledging allegiance to the flag in 10th grade, and I'll be damned if I do it for Michael Moore. "And to Lion's Gate Films, for which they stand, two Weinsteins, under God ..." GRR!
They're preaching to the converted, anyway -- sure, I'm going to see Fahrenheit 9/11 (and what MoveOn member isn't planning to?), but it's my $10 and I'll see it when I want. Pledging is something I do for charities, NGO's, and public radio stations, not entertainment companies. MoveOn is doing a great job with online activism, yada yada, but I didn't sign up with them to be peddled products, left-leaning (F911) or not (DAT). These movie-promotion campaigns are clearly "unsolicited commercial email" (UCE), aka spam.
Posted by cce at June 20, 2004 03:45 PM | TrackBack... yeah the whole Bowling thing seemed to really do a disservice to the art of documentary filmmaking if only by claiming that it was one. The frustrating part is that there were some good parts in there, but they were crushed under the weight of a thousand other mixed messages. I felt the same way (although to a somewhat lesser degree) about Supersize Me -- at least that was entertaining.
Now Fog of War... that's another story. Erroll Morris is a true genius. I also just saw Mr. Death for the first time a few weeks ago. Fantastic.
Posted by: Mike at June 22, 2004 12:50 AMyou come and go to movies as you please, chris.
Posted by: poiesz at June 24, 2004 09:04 PMHere's some useful info about the anti-Fahrenheit 9/11 campaign group 'Move America Forward' (MAF). The one that's been pressurising movie theaters not to show the film. Turns out, it's nothing more than a front for a GOP-linked public relations firm, Russo Marsh and Rogers. Yet for some inexplicable reason, the fact that RM+R set up MAF is not mentioned anywhere on the MAF website...
Furthermore, this firm made 2.5 million dollars from GOP politicians in 2001/2002. And nothing from Democrat politicians. What a surprise.
See backgrounder about who is really behind Move America Forward
plus a backgrounder on Russo Marsh and Rogers who are behind the Move America Forward fake campaign
plus the fiasco over Move America Forward's internet address registration info