Slacker Uprising. On DVD now. On the internet, for free, for a long time. (*******7/10)
Thursday, November 20th, 2008Slacker Uprising is a remarkable movie, for many reasons. First of all, it’s the first major movie from a well-known film director to be released for free on the internet, rather than to theatres or direct-to-DVD. As Michael Moore says in the film about his brilliant movie Fahrenheit 9/11 - it’s too bad that the news media doesn’t report the stuff contained in that movie, because it means that people have to spend 8 or 9 dollars of their own money, and go to the theatre, in order to learn the truth about American foreign policy and the war in Iraq. Well, Moore got around that this time. He released the movie, for free, straight to the internet right here:
Now, once the current American election was over, there was no reason not to release Slacker Uprising on DVD as well. And it did indeed come out on DVD on November 4th. It’s still available for a free download, but you can get the DVD as well, if you feel like it. I would never suggest that Slacker Uprising created the kind of youth voter turnout that the States saw in electing Barack Obama. But it certainly helped. What Michael Moore did in the election of 2004 was to get the ball rolling. Of course it didn’t really work in 2004, but the momentum had begun, and by the time Obama swept into power in the U.S., the young voters and University students were a massive force to be reckoned with.
Slacker Uprising is a documentary that follows Michael Moore around on the 62-city tour of the same name in the leadup to the 2004 Kerry-Bush presidential election. The idea behind the tour of 20 swing states was simple. Get George Bush out of office. A we all know now, it didn’t achieve it’s ultimate goal, that being to give Bush the boot. But as the film suggests at the very beginning, the tour was in part an attempt to save the Democrats from themselves. John Kerry waited so long to respond to the slanderous swift boat ads, which were so full of lies that they would have been easily repudiated. But Kerry hoped he could take the high ground and ignore them. It cost him.
So Moore, although he doesn’t specifically support the Democratic party (he campaigned for Ralph Nader in 2000), did everything he could to get the young people out to vote, the people who were heavily interested in removing George Bush. He toured university campuses in each of these swing states, handing out clean underwear and ramen noodles to “slackers” who didn’t vote in 2000, but who pledged to vote in 2004. He was then sued by the Republican party for “bribing” people into voting with these “gifts”. Which is of course ridiculous. But not nearly as ridiculous as some of the other stuff that went on during the tour.
The most amazing (and yet obvious) moments in this movie come from the protesters who show up to lambaste Moore at the various tour stops. In interviews, they go on for a while, usually fairly incoherently, about how Michael Moore is the anti-christ, and how he spreads propaganda and lies everywhere he goes, and how his films are full of falsehoods and his facts are totally twisted. Then they all, to a person, admit they have never seen one of his movies. This is something that I have seen first-hand, many many times. Anyone who talks to me about Michael Moore, and complains that he is a biased, lie-spreading communist and deception-monger, invariably says they have never seen one of his movies. “I wouldn’t give that lying fat bastard my money.” Well, sure. But then how do you know? Because Bill O’Reilly told you he was a liar? This is a phenomenon that is still staggering to me.
Just as amazing are the “local businessmen” in these communities who offer 25, 50, even in one case $100,000 to the student governments at these schools to cancel Moore’s speaking engagements. Then there is the massive Republican pressue brought to bear on the organizers of these events. It makes me wonder what right-wing speaker could have provoked this kind of brutal and venomous backlash. Ann Coulter? Maybe? There is a big difference here. The most poignant moment, for me, was a scene in a university auditorium where a bunch of right-wing Christian kids attempt to disrupt the proceedings by praying together as loudly as possible in an attempt to drown Moore out.
This is one of the moments that I think is most indicative of the way Bush and Rove ran that 2004 campaign. They managed to create such an atmosphere of hate, directing that hatred toward the Democrats, that even Christian groups turned venomous and spewed bile. The idea that Michael Moore, or anyone else, is evil and godless because he doesn’t want George Bush in the White House is, of course, preposterous. But this is the logical conclusion of the culture of fear created by Bush and Rove. The culture of fear turns into a culture of hate, and that hatred is spread out everywhere. It manifests itself along racial lines, cultural lines, economic lines, and more than anything else religious lines.
Of course, 2004 was the last time the American people made that mistake. And over the course of the next four years, the consequences of that mistake became obvious to just about everyone. In 2004, even guest stars like Viggo Mortensen, Roseanne Barr, Eddie Vedder and Joan Baez couldn’t help Moore bring out enough young people to knock Bush out of office. In 2008, nothing could keep those same young people away from the polls. As George Bush once said, fool me once, shame on me…you…fool me, um, twice…uh, fool in the rain…uh, can’t get fooled again.
The DVD of Slacker Uprising features some solid bonus features, most of which are extra clips of Moore speaking on this tour at various locations. There is a great clip where he reads from Bill O’Reilly’s book, The O’Reilly Factor For Kids, from the chapter where he discusses sex with our children. There is another hilarious clip where he talks about Pfizer. Of course, this was filmed before Moore made the film Sicko, but apparently the giant pharmaceutical companies caught wind of the fact that Moore was making the film, and Pfizer issued a company-wide alert. Moore got a copy of the memo, which outlined the proper evasive manouevers to take should Moore arrive at their company office. It even had a hotline number that employees were supposed to call should Moore burst in on them. And he puts the number up on the screen for people to call. I called it. It’s about four years later now, but it still goes straight to Pfizer’s head office.
In the end, though, Slacker Uprising is more of a snapshot, a historical document that sheds some light on a major event in American history, one the Americans ended up getting so very wrong. It isn’t nearly as insightful, informative, or even as funny as Moore’s other movies. It’s still worth watching, as is everything Moore does, but it certainly doesn’t rank with Bowling For Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, Roger And Me, or Sicko in terms of earth-shattering revelations or exposing deep hidden truths about the way we treat each other. It’s just an entertaining, interesting look at the election of 2004, one that has now been rectified, but four years too late.