I see...

I just finished watching the movie and immediately logged in to IMDB to see what rating it had gotten. Right before that I remembered something from my high-school years...:

During my 5th high-school year in Aruba I had this really awful Dutch teacher:
Giovanni Delany. His lessons focussed less on refining our knowledge of grammar and expanding our vocabulary and instead it focused on literature and conversational skills... this on an island where, eventhough the official language is listed as Dutch, most people speak it poorly or not at all. Very many of us students thought he should have done a better job.
One of things he taught us HOWEVER and that stuck in MY mind ever since was efficacy of building up a climax during a story to lock-in the attention of the reader/viewer.

I think Moore's attempt at this simple principle did not fail at all in this film. Whether he wanted it not, the film started as a boring, "self aggrandizing" (as one here on this board put) and almost insufferable piece of story-telling or as another user put it: travelogue. I skipped most of the songs (not a big fan of country music), but I kept watching (probably only because I'm glad a democrat president WAS this time around).
After the first 2/3 of the film, however, I really had no problem keeping up. My attention was fixed. The bits and pieces where he visited his last destinations on his tour schedule were very entertaining and (to a foreigner like me) informative as well. I think the end with Roseanne (which I thought to be a bit brain-dead a few years ago) really kept me watching. I thought: whoah! slow down, these are americans here, they don't always 'follow' sarcasm, but the crowd seemed to get it :P.

Sorry for the patronizing remark, but let's be honest: 8 years of Bush (stolen or not) was due to the generalized lack of intelect of people in the U.S., sorry.

Anyway, I highly disagree with the overall rating of this film in this site: 5.7?
A 7 of 10 would have been more adequate. How does Spinal Tap (to pick a random example of a "travelogue", a ficticious one at that) get an 8.0?

True, Michael Moore has made better films than this one. But does it really deserved to be slid under a pile of mediocre films?

My thoughts...