gloverethan This movie had nothing to say about capitalism. Instead it was a bunch of petty whining about Democrats vs. Republicans. The arguments are crap, there are no real sources for anything. This movie is a sales pitch for liberalism, pure and simple. Moore couldn't even bother to look up capitalism in the dictionary. He talked about government programs and called them private throughout the entire movie. This movie is god awful.I made 4 pages of notes on this movie before giving up. It never talks about the 2008 crisis being due to the government creating a no risk zone for banks (removing capitalism from their businesses). It didn't mention that cooperatives are capitalistic (and it even said that them making profit is good, while other companies making profits is bad). It's literally that childish. This movie is pure trash.

R-P-McMurphy I love Michael Moore documentaries, he makes them in the way that they come out being equally entertaining as they are informative. This is no exception for that rule, but it isn't as good as previous works of his (Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11).Like in his other works, Michael Moore attacks the system as he looks for social justice, having been in a catholic school, I can understand that feeling of helping people in need. Here he attacks capitalism in general and has fun with ideas like "whether or not Jesus would be a capitalist".Michael Moore uses art as a device to change the way people think, thats what I love about him. He knows how important art can be in people's lives and therefore makes movies that are important not only for the world in general, but for himself as he tends to mention his home town in his movies giving us a feeling of comfort, like we're talking to a friend and not just some journalist.I wonder if Michael Moore has endangered his career with his socialist views, like Jean Seberg and Luis Buñuel have before him. I hope he does keep making movies, because every now and then in the middle of all these mind-numbing blockbusters coming out, I need to watch something thoughtful like "Bowling for Columbine".I'd recommend it to anyone who liked "Inside Job", "Sicko", "Fight Club", and/or "American Psycho".

Spiked! spike-online.com Michael Moore has a pretty good knack for making documentaries that capture the spirit of their times. Bowling for Columbine (2002), for instance, tapped into the feverish gun control debate in America; Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) was released in the aftermath of the disastrous Iraq War of 2003; Sicko (2007) prefigured the recent US debate on state- run healthcare. In the midst of a serious economic crisis, Capitalism: A Love Story appears to be a timely investigation into bank bailouts, bankruptcies and the return of mass unemployment. So why do all of Moore's stunts, dashed-off analysis and gloomy conclusions in this film feel so tired and out of date?To begin with, Moore makes an apposite, albeit superficial, comparison between the dying days of Rome and contemporary America. He introduces some clips from what appears to be an old educational reel titled Life in Ancient Rome, which he then juxtaposes with more recent totems of American power, including the Metropolitan Opera House at New York's Lincoln Center draped in the Stars and Stripes. He makes the point that America's long-standing support for the free market has gone the same way as countless failed businesses: from unqualified confidence to directionless decadence. He proceeds to flesh out the scale of corruption in modern American society, using human-interest stories to elicit viewers' anger.Indeed, his well-worn directorial devices in this latest film reveal his limitations. As in his previous films, Moore inhabits the role of the burly, conscientious documentary-maker on a mission, who nevertheless lets people's stories speak for themselves. He intercuts these testimonials with a morass of kitschy stock footage and B-movie warnings that what we're about to see is 'truly one of the most unusual movies ever made' (except it isn't). The scenes where Moore battles it out with stern-faced corporate security guards and tries to access the high-seats of capitalism through silly stunts have a groaning over-familiarity to them.As in his previous films, Moore reveals an absolute aversion to the notion of personal responsibility. For example, he blames Ronald Reagan's policy of expanding the availability of credit for a lot of the current economic mess. The film offers the rather lame notion that no individual could possibly have been expected to understand the terms and conditions of the loans they signed their names to and that they were coerced into doing it. But in taking this approach Moore in fact reduces autonomous individuals to hapless victims. As a result, the burden of private debt is all the fault of rapacious financial institutions, riding roughshod over ignorant, ordinary Americans. He then borrows some divine authority from the Catholic Church by simply labelling capitalism as fundamentally 'evil'. Now that's telling 'em.This is where Capitalism: A Love Story really falls flat. Far from analysing the subprime meltdown, the credit crunch or the slump in productivity in the West, Moore avoids any coherent argument about how and why the crisis happened or why the consequences were so grave. Instead, he blurs and improvises one ill-conceived idea after another, becoming the Miles Davis of moralistic anti-capitalism.Moore is on firmer ground when he isn't strong-arming security guards or jabbering incoherent theories. The more effective scenes are the straightforward interviews with people who have lost out to unscrupulous employers. In one scene, he visits a widower whose wife was unknowingly insured by her company — a dubious practice called 'dead peasant insurance' — which earned the company quite a substantial amount of money when the woman died. Like many of the stories Moore explores, dead peasant insurance might not be massively revelatory, but it is effective in generating outrage and empathy amongst viewers.In many ways, it is precisely this kind of posturing that makes Moore's films such hits with liberals on both sides of the pond. In Moore's universe you can appear outraged, concerned and engaged with the world without having to fight for or justify a better alternative. Moore's conclusion, for all the leftist rhetoric in the film's title, suggests that the politics of TINA - There Is No Alternative - is very much alive and well in the US.Capitalism features strikingly retrograde ideas dressed up as faux radicalism. It's all very well to bemoan 'selfishness' and 'greed' in modern society, but when Moore conflates rational self-interest with anti-social behaviour and disregard for others, he is justifying clampdowns on basic freedoms and rights. By equating individual freedom only with degradation and amorality, he is going some way to legitimising the culture of unfreedom prevalent in both the US and the UK.Even more disgracefully, he borrows a quote from Roosevelt to suggest that people who are unemployed 'are the stuff of which dictatorships are made'. Raising the spectre of the masses voting for demagogues has long been the conceit of political elites. Moore is foolhardy for repeating it here, especially when the idea of limiting mass democracy looks set to define the new decade.After two decades of filmmaking, Moore's methods and arguments are essentially the same, but the impact of his films has grown ever weaker. Indeed, Capitalism repeats many of the same tricks and devices used in Moore's 1989 film Roger & Me, about the effect of General Motors downsizing in Flint, Michigan. But whereas that film appeared fresh and amusing 20 years ago, the same shtick – harassing security guards, staging publicity stunts outside corporate offices - is now wearisome, irritating and rather contrived.The main weakness of Capitalism, though, is that Moore doesn't quite know what to say. In his better films, like Bowling For Columbine and Sicko, his persona as affable, single-minded ordinary bloke was effective, but here the subject matter - capitalism - seems too big and complex for him.When one Wall Street employee asks Moore 'Why don't you stop making films?', it was one of the few sentiments in the film I could sympathise with.

Michael_Elliott Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) *** (out of 4) Michael Moore's documentary taking a look at the financial issues striking terror in America as more and more people are forced out of their homes, losing their jobs and finding any hope for their futures taken away while the richest of the rich just keep getting stronger and stronger. I'd be lying if I said I was a fan of Michael Moore but I can always be open when viewing any film. Even though I'm not a fan there's simply no way to deny that the man has a talent in creating these documentaries even when he takes liberties with the truth. Several of his earlier films are items that I really wouldn't call documentaries but CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY is one of his better films because, like ROGER & ME, he's fighting for the poor and not just simply going after headlines. This film offers up testimony from those most effected by greed, those who have lost their homes and of course those who benefited are the ones refuses to go on camera. Moore uses all of these stories and mixes them in with news clips showing how this downfall could have been prevented but instead of doing something to help the poor it seemed like more and more was done to make sure the rich could get more dimes from those with no money. The film, I'm sure, takes some liberties with facts but I think the end story is something obvious to see. There's no question that Moore knows how to tell a story and that he knows how to take information, milk it for everything it's worth and then add it to the fire and create more smoke. Moore does a very good job here at showing exactly what happened, who benefited from the bad stuff and why nothing was done. Of course, in the end, nothing really is shown to be working and there's really no answers in regards to the future. We're shown the one "hope" but viewing this film three years after its release has shown that this hasn't worked either.