The fact that anyone takes Canadian-born filmmaker Michael Moore seriously in any way makes me worry about today’s society.
In an interview with Vice.com, Moore discussed his recent controversial tweets about the movie “American Sniper,” his reasoning behind posting the tweets, as well as his experience on the night he went out to watch the movie.
Moore said he went to see the movie on the second night of its release in the “politically liberal” or gay neighborhood of Greenwich Village in New York City, and was taken back with the kind of crowd that made came out to see the movie.
I went there on the second night of the opening. It was only in four theaters in the country. I like Clint Eastwood, and I wanted to see this movie. Frankly it had the best trailer and best TV ads of any movie of the year… But when I got there, from the popcorn line to inside the theater, I said, “Oh my God. Look around, we’re in the Village and no one from the Village is here.”
What he meant by his “no one from the village is here” comment was that, no flamboyant or openly gay-looking or sounding people were in attendance.
“I was so happy sitting with this audience because they were very affected by it,” he said. “There were tears. People were having a reaction to it.”
And then Moore made another asinine remark:
It just felt like a real “Passion of the Christ” crowd. People who would normally wait for it to go on video or see it on TV but wanted that collective feeling of sitting there with others.
“Passion of the Christ” audience? What he means by this is, the only people he thinks would go out to see a movie like this are Bible-thumpers and military types.
Moore then went on to discuss his tweets.
I purposely didn’t say anything about “American Sniper” in my original tweets. I certainly wrote what I wrote because that weekend there was a lot of talk about snipers because of the movie, but also because it was Martin Luther King weekend and I just found it uncomfortable that something called ‘American Sniper,’ a film about a sniper, would be released on the weekend where we’re honoring a great American who was killed by a sniper.
Then as real cowards like Moore typically tend to do, Moore tried to place blame for his actions elsewhere.
“I think that the reason we’re having this conversation too—and I’ve shared this with nobody else, I’ve turned down all requests for TV shows—is that the problem with Twitter and why you do need to, we’ll use the word ‘clarify,’ is because 140 characters can’t really convey things that have enormous depth to them,” he said.