By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--August 11, 2017
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"you don’t have to disagree with Mr. Moore’s politics to find that his shtick has become disagreeable with age. “The Terms of My Surrender,” which opened on Thursday at the Belasco, is a bit like being stuck at Thanksgiving dinner with a garrulous, self-regarding, time-sucking uncle. Gotta love him — but maybe let’s turn on the television. “I’m not coming to this stage every night to conduct a political rally,” Mr. Moore told The New York Times in July. “This is not a kumbaya piece of theater.” That’s true: “The Terms of My Surrender” is not organized well enough to be either of those things. Certainly it falls short of offering seriously useful ideas about how individuals can make a difference — as Mr. Moore, drawing on his own biography, insists they can. Details are scant. Run for school board, he recommends. Be Rosa Parks. Download 5calls.org, an app that promises to “turn your passive participation into active resistance.” ...I actively resisted plenty of material that might otherwise be amenable to me politically. Some of it took the form of hokey set pieces that fizzled, such as a demonstration of what the T.S.A. now prohibits passengers from taking onboard a plane: hedge clippers, dynamite, Muslims. Particularly feeble (and sour) was a game show involving audience members selected to prove Mr. Moore’s thesis that the “dumbest Canadian” is more knowledgeable about the world than the “smartest American.” Almost any savvy talk show host does this kind of material much better.
The show consists of a series of anecdotes in which an everyday person abused by the system overcomes extraordinary odds to make a difference. Funny enough, the hero of each of these episodes turns out to be Moore himself. ...Every story ends in the glorification of Michael Moore. The lesson he wants us to take home is a noble one: Innocent idealism can only prevail if it holds to what is true and doesn’t succumb to despair. But these plucky narratives, largely recycled from his writings and talks, have the monotonous ring of an infomercial for his brand. ...I have no political beef with Moore. I have long admired the way he has fought on behalf of working people. But I found myself cringing at the self-congratulatory applause that would break out when he would utter one of his pieties. And I lost patience with the way he seemed to want both sympathy for being a victim of the right and adulation for being the champion of all mankind.
There is a mock game-show, in which Moore challenges “the smartest American in the room” in a quiz against “the dumbest Canadian.” This is meant to prove that the dumbest Canadian is more intelligent than the smartest American—the quiz follows a rundown of how intellectually lacking Americans are—but the night I saw it the American won. The winner was a student from Sarah Lawrence College, who also tried to be funny, and the Canadian was a lawyer who tried to as well, and the whole thing was excruciating.
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