Capitalism: A Christian Love Story

At Deadline Hollywood, Nikki Finke says that Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story "looks like its domestic total will fail to crack $20M and end up his worst performing film since his Oscar-winner Bowling For Columbine in 2002." This might seem like the opening weekend of a box office flop—Capitalism finished in seventh place—but are these bad numbers for a documentary that calls for the abolition of the free market?

For all of his kvetching about the corporate media, it's perhaps worth noting that, in the past week, Moore has appeared on CNN shows hosted by Anderson Cooper, Larry King, and Wolf Blitzer to promote his incoherent excoriation of capitalism (the market should be replaced by "democracy," he says).

One of the problems with his shtick (beyond being painfully unfunny) is that rather than the aw-schucks working man character he cultivated for Roger and Me, Moore sounds increasingly like a man running for office, desperate to disguise his radical politics while trying to coax people into the theater. During his sit down with Blitzer, Moore mentioned repeatedly that he was "a Christian" and that viewers will "walk out of this film saying, Michael Moore loves this country. Michael Moore is a true patriot. He loves democracy. Michael Moore is following through on the values that his parents and the nuns and the priests gave him as a child."

In case those Red Staters missed it, this film is merely "following through on the religious principles that I was raised with"; allowing the rich to get richer is "not part of our Judeo-Christian ethic"; Obama is approaching the health care debate "with those same Christian values" that Moore was raised with. During an appearance in San Francisco last week, Moore compared Obama to an "amateur basketball player" who was "faking right and going left." He appears to be doing the same.

Moore recently told a reporter that "evil" capitalism "has done nothing for me." It was, apparently, some other economic system that made him fabulously wealthy and bought his Upper West Side penthouse. Go figure. So let's do our part and help Moore strike a blow against the mustache-twisting movie executives by liberating his intellectual property from capitalism (i.e. downloading his movie at PirateBay).

If any Hit & Runners actually paid to see the film this weekend, feel free to post your review in the comments section.