Capitalism: A Love Story

Release Date: Oct. 2It’s not capitalism Moore has beef with, per se, but the Reagan-inspired culture of greed, and the financial deregulation that followed. And in that sense, he’s made a documentary on which both sides of the political aisle will find a lot of common ground. American capitalism, he posits, has been subverted by a system of corporate socialism that was responsible for a massive vertical transfer of wealth. A reasonable theory, especially in the wake of the near-total collapse of the American financial system we’ve witnessed over the last year.

And Moore gathers plenty of anecdotal evidence to back it up, which is both the film’s greatest weakness and strength. Capitalism’s whole story is largely anecdotal. Some of these fits and starts do support his bold thesis that “capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil.” Moore leans heavily on interviews (peppered with his now-tiresome stock footage gags) to demonstrate what's wrong with a blind devotion to profit. Teens in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. were given outrageous jail sentences because a corrupt judge was getting kickbacks from a local private prison. Wal-Mart took out an insurance policy on an employee and netted a tidy $1.5 million from her death, without informing her husband.