Capitalism, Jesus of Nazareth and Michael Moore's Love Story

Last week was a bit of a crazy week, such that I didn't manage to blog a single thing. Apologies to all those who stopped by only to be disappointed. Almost as annoying as not having the time to blog was finding that there was so much to blog. So hopefully the next few days will yield various small tid bits of information, which, with a bit of luck, will pave the way for me to do more of the type of blogging I really like - doing reviews, making observations and so on.

For now, though, I'm going to have to content myself with talking about Michael Moore's latest film Capitalism: A Love Story/.

I only caught onto the film a few weeks ago when I saw that Moore had talked about Jesus being anti-capitalist. I wrote a brief piece on this for rejesus.co.uk a week or two back. I must admit that I'm one of those evil people who is suspicious of capitalism, largely, I guess because, as Moore says, it seems so out of touch with Jesus and the new community he founded.

Nevertheless, my interest peaked last week on discovering a write up in The New Yorker which includes the following excerpt:

He (Moore) uses old films, like Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, for sarcastic fun: Jesus, dubbed, recommends not care for the poor but deregulating the banking industry as the way to salvation.

Given that Moore has been quite open that this film is inspired by his religious views and his appeciation of Jesus's teaching in particular, I'm not sure on what basis this is pigeonholed as "sarcastic fun", but then David Denby has seen the film and I have not (yet). It does sound a little cheesy though. I can't, at all, see how this could be done well. Even so it's interesting that it's this Jesus film that is used instead of one of the others, particularly given that General Motors were originally going to sponsor the film until religious groups pressurised them into changing their minds. Both this film and Moore's earlier Roger and Me cover GM in some detail.