The deep chasm between the haves and have-nots opens wide in 1989’s Roger & Me, Michael Moore’s hilariously scathing documentary. In this breakthrough film, which put the future Academy Award winner on the map, Moore takes up the case of his hometown, Flint, Michigan, a city sucker-punched by the American Dream. The city has been decimated since the 1980s, after the closing of General Motors plants put tens of thousands out of work.

As the self-appointed representative of the people of Flint, Moore embarks on a quixotic quest to find GM’s then-chairman, Roger Smith, and get to the bottom of things. Moore sketches his case in broad strokes, allowing the corporate fat cats to shoot themselves in the foot either in interviews or in candid footage, meanwhile intercutting a tragic series of local foreclosures and evictions.

All the while, Moore’s camera proves an utterly disarming presence, and even those familiar with the media spotlight — including Flint native Bob Eubanks and former Chevy spokesman Pat Boone — seem caught unawares, looking foolish at best and heartless at worst. In the end, Big Business and the rich appear indifferent and even cruel, while everyone else seems mindless, deluded, or just recently homeless. This makes for an often wickedly funny yet disturbing film that asks tough questions about corporate responsibility while exposing a nightmarish side of… (Barnes & Noble)

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Roger and Me is a loose, smart-alecky documentary directed and narrated by Michael Moore, an everyman host with a devastating wit and a working-class pose. When his hometown is devastated by the plant closure of an American corporate giant (making record profits, one should note), the hell-raising political commentator with a prankster streak tries to turn his camera on General Motors Chairman Roger B. Smith, the elusive Roger of the title, and the film is loosely structured around Moore’s odyssey to track down the corporate giant for an interview.

While Moore ambushes his corporate subjects like a blue-collar Geraldo Rivera, a guerrilla interviewer who treasures his comic rebuffs as much as his interviews, his portraits of the colorful characters he meets along the way can be patronizing. The famous come off as absurdly out of touch (Anita Bryant appears for some can-do cheerleading, and hometown celebrity Bob Eubanks tells some boorish jokes), and the disenfranchised poor (notably an unemployed woman who sells rabbit meat to make ends meet) all too often appear as buffoons or hicks.

But behind his loose play with the facts and snarky attitude is a devastating look at the victims of downsizing in the midst of the 1980s economic boom. This portrait of Reagan’s America and the tarnish on the American dream comes down to a simple question: what is corporate America’s responsibility to the country’s citizens? That’s a question no one at GM wants to… (Amazon)