considering some of the boners you've been pointing at the list lately, you oughta know!
let's see, against bullshit attacks on moore i pointed out that he may just be wearing the clothes he's comfortable in. comfortable here is always a cultural construct. given that i know plenty of overweight men, i'm guessing that, as a big man in a society that sneers at him and in a society that associates being overweight with being a slob and sloppy, i pointed out that people are often ill at ease and uncomfortable having been mocked and picked on all their lives. they are often taught to wear clothes that cover up that weight--jeans and a blue jacket. nice dark colors and affordable. these may well be preferable even when you can afford something else because, as a friend of mine says, "those clothes scream fatboy try to hide the fact that i'm a fat boy."
i was annoyed at what was said about what he looks like. however, but i didn't want to antagonize and point out, once again, that the stereotypes were pretty nasty. the haughtiness about people's looks is obnoxious.
as for the lack of structural analysis in the film, i find moore's representation of people in the film to be slightly patronizing primarily because, if you show it to a bunch of wealthy young white students, as well as people of color, it confirms for them all their stereotypes. i've shown that film to about 500 well-to-do, upper middle class students now and i get uniformly similar response papers.
i was quite shocked the first time i read those responses. it was because i filled in the analysis to explain why individuals behaved the way they do in the film. the black man who ends up evicting people, the "rabbit lady", and the "color lady" all look like fools from the camera's eyes. they look like immoral individuals making bad choices in a bad situation. for a lot of people, then, the answer is for individuals to improve themselves and make better choices. or, the answer is to infuse them with enough money so they don't have to make those choices. similarly, by focusing on "roger", moore's film tends to place the blame on the actions of a bad individual, rather than on a shite system. you and i know that he doesn't really think this, but this alternative analysis is either absent or too subtle in the film--probably because moore made it for a certain audience, an audience that would, as i did, fill in the structural analysis on my own.
the film could use a more explicit C. Wright Mills approach. another approach might be to engage in a classic class analysis where the pathologies of the working poor are juxtaposed to the pathologies of other strata--relativize it.
none of this is to say that i don't love the film--especially considering the alternatives one often has to work with when teaching.