Bowling for Nuremberg

“WikiLeaks confirms: Michael Moore is the Modern-Day Leni Riefenstahl,” Doug Ross writes:

The film-maker Leni Riefenstahl died in 2003 at the age of 101. Her most famous motion picture was Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), which was filmed at the 1934 Nuremberg Congress of the Nazi Party. By many accounts it is considered a masterpiece of political propaganda and it helped solidify a long friendship between the film-maker and the Führer.

In 2007 director Michael Moore released Sicko, a film that ostensibly compared the free market health care system of the United States with the universal approaches employed by countries such as the United Kingdom and Cuba. It depicted those countries with government-run systems as superior in many respects when contrasted with the U.S. approach.

On December 17, 2010, The Guardian reported a WikiLeaks revelation directly linked to Sicko: Cuba’s government had banned the movie.

As Hot Air notes, Moore is furious over this charge. Ed Morrissey quips, “Moore: Hey, Cuba loved my movie!” Who cares about American Siskel & Ebert style-critics when you can have two blood-caked thumbs up from the Castros!

In the Someone Left The Irony On Department for today, Michael Moore erupts in indignation today at Huffington Post over the reporting of a diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks that stated that Cuba had banned his film Sicko for its fantasy portrayal of the Cuban health-care system.  Moore blasts the Guardian and other news agencies for releasing the contents of the message without checking to see whether it was actually true or not.  Moore says that the Cuban government actually broadcast his film nationally four months after the message was apparently written, and had been praising it for months prior to that:

As Ed jokes, “Aw … you mean that journalists shouldn’t just release every piece information fed to them by leakers?  That some diplomatic cables, when released indiscriminately, could result in unwarranted damage to reputations?  That raw, confidential intelligence can sometimes be flat-out wrong?  You don’t say!”

To paraphrase James Lileks, unlike Moore, Leni was a brilliant director; she just had lousy taste in executive producers.

The one upside to the Riefenstahl/Moore comparison? Fortunately, there’s little chance that Jodie Foster will be playing the latter when it’s time to shoot his biopic.

Related: On PJTV’s Poliwood, Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd cast their votes for “The Most Untruthful Movie of the Year” — and it’s not even something by Moore; further proof that he’s slipping.