Call it good timing, but Michael Moore's latest guerilla documentary Capitalism: A Love Story really seems to have struck a nerve. Early reviews have been surprisingly good. It's currently polling 82% at Rotten Tomatoes and a number of critics largely predisposed against Moore are finding at least something to like about the movie. Even the self-described "resident Republican and lifelong capitalist" over at AICN, angered by the bi-partisan shenanigans that precipitated the global financial crisis, is calling it an important work and urging everyone to see it.
Like all of Moore's movies though, it's a complex beast and has some radically different parts that may have turned out better than the whole. That at least is the assessment of a reviewer at the Los Angeles Times who has provided a useful guide to some of the highlights. These include segments dealing with:
* The scandal surrounding a for-profit juvenile detention center in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in which two judges got millions of dollars in kickbacks from the owners for sending more than a thousand juveniles to the establishment.
* The little-noticed portion of the congressional testimony of Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, the US Airways pilot who miraculously landed his plane on New York's Hudson River, who told legislators that his pay has been cut 40% in recent years and his pension terminated.
* The strategy of major firms to take out life insurance policies on their employees — known in the trade as "dead peasant insurance" — that pays off to the companies, not to the employees' survivors.
In addition, of course, there is the recovered footage of Franklin Roosevelt delivering a call for "a second bill of rights" that everyone is talking about. And for a more graphic preview, the studio has released a a (mostly) new batch of clips to help you judge for yourself.