Roger & Me
- Michael Moore
- Roger B. Smith
Roger & Me is a manipulative documentary by Michael Moore from the year 1989.
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In the film, Michael Moore documented his three -year effort to get an interview with Roger Smith, the former CEO of General Motors (GM), which he for the closure of several GM factories in his hometown of Flint ( Michigan) and the consequent loss blames of 30,000 jobs. In addition, Moore documented impressively the desperate and ultimately unsuccessful struggle of Flint against the decline of the city after the largest employer closed its doors on site.
The film shows the basis of various individual fates, as it has been going after a wave of plant closures in Flint. Among others, Michael Moore is a fact that a lot of former auto workers have found jobs as prison guards and former colleagues here who abbüßten because of drug-related crime in prison, met again. Even an unsuccessful attempt to establish a tourism industry in Flint, is documented by Michael Moore.
Michael Moore accompanied the sheriff of the town, which has to perform a lot of evictions. Even on Christmas Eve can not take a break the sheriff due to the high time pressure. The film ends with Michael Moore shows evictions at Christmas and to einspielt the Christmas speech by Roger Smith.
Cinematic Addendum: Pets or Meat
In 1992, Michael Moore released a 23- minute short film titled Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint ( about: Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint ). In it some of the threads from Roger & Me are included, people again visited, the situation in the city of Flint after three years shown. It is clear that even after years of irreparable damage was done by the plant closures, but it also gives hope to many, not least by Moore's Roger & Me: The successful film had pushed the city and the problem at the core public interest. Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint was shown nationwide in the American television network PBS.
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- Best Film, 1989, Vancouver Film Festival
- Best Documentary, 1989, New York Film Critics Circle Award
- Best Documentary, 1989, National Society of Film Critics
- Best Film, 1989, Toronto International Film Festival
- Best Film, 1989, Chicago Film Festival
- Best Documentary, 1989, Los Angeles Film Critics Association
- Silver Dove, 1989 32nd International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Festival
- Best Documentary, 1989 National Board of Review
- Audience Award, 1990, Berlin
Criticism
Three years after the publication of Roger & Me Premiere Magazine revealed that the running joke or a background story of the documentary, Moore's futile effort to arrange an interview with the General Motors chairman Roger Smith, on a blatant misrepresentation is based. Moore led in May 1987, a long interview with Roger Smith, however, decided not to use the interview in the film. This is also one of the topics of the Canadian documentary Manufacturing Dissent ( 2007), which is about Michael Moore and his working methods. There are even reports of a second interview with Moore Smith, in January 1988 in New York ..