The day physical media is dead will be a sad one, but a happy day for people like me who hate the space it takes up. I mean let's face it, the serious movie collector only has so much space before we start to look like obsessed maniacs. Film prints, VHS, Laser Discs, DVD's, Blu-Rays. It's all crazy space taking stuff. I love the DVR (aka Tivo) I have the one in my living room cram packed with my favorite movies in HD. Whenever i want something, its a click away. No getting up grabbing the disc waiting 10 minutes for my already ancient blu-ray player to load up. So I am a huge proponent of getting rid of physical media as soon as possible. In fact my brother in law has a nice PC media center. When HD catches up to downloads, it's over Johnny...
So with that in mind, I was excited that Michael Moore's new feature length documentary, "Slacker Uprising" would be released as a digital download and for free no less. Plus it was on Blip.tv which I used for one of my own films. Blip and Vimeo are really blowing YouTube away in terms of quality HD streaming video. Streaming digital distribution is catching up. Anyway I watched the film in HD streaming and had a few hickups but after a while it was pretty seamless. Unfortunatly the film itself is no so good. This is why it's free. The documentary is not like Moore's others. (i have not seen Sicko yet) Moore usually has some sort of point. It may be very left wingish but he tries to make a point and check the system. In Slacker, its pretty much just him going to colleges in 04 trying to lure huge stadiums of kids to vote for Kerry. Michael Moore has become very much about Michael Moore recetnly and that's sad. The man has a gift for documentary filmmaking, but this film is really boring and serves no purpose. Its filled out with performances by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, REM, Eddie Veder, etc. all telling kids how they have to vote to get the evil Bush devil out of office. Now it would have been cool had that worked, but it didn't! So not only is the end a known thing from minute one, but it's even more depressing right now. And maybe that was the point, but I found this one to be very self serving to Moore. Moore is very predictable now, the edge is gone.
However I am excited that Moore decided to use this method to release his film, and I hope other filmmakers do the same. You can watch SLACKER UPRISING by clicking HERE.
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