Now why would you release a movie that takes banks to task for their largess with a fete at a place adorned with reminders of bank largess? I’m talking about Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story,” aired last night to a star-studded audience at Lincoln Center (yours truly is thinking her invite must have gotten lost in the mail):

Before the film, the crowd sipped champagne and cocktails in the “Morgan Stanley Lobby” and then headed to their seats in the “Citi Balcony.” Movie tickets were available at the “Bank of New York Box Office” and there’s outdoor seating at the “Credit Suisse Information Grandstand.”… At the end of the film, Moore beckons moviegoers to join him in his struggle to reform America. But first, there was the after party at the SoHo Mews, a luxury condo building that boasts the “only private park in Soho.”

And maybe that is the joke: that Michael Moore can walk into these glass houses, throw some stones and get away with it. But it seems more likely than not that the joke is on us if we think he is going to evoke any actual change in the system. That said, the film does sound like it offers some amusement in the way of revenge fantasies for us little guys:

Moore drives an armored bank truck up to the front doors of American International Group and Goldman Sachs Group offices looking to collect the taxpayers’ money that the firms received from the $700 billion government bail out. He then proceeds to wrap the offices of AIG, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase and the New York Stock Exchange in yellow crime scene tape and attempts to make a citizens’ arrest of various CEOs. Moore is perhaps at his best when he doesn’t say anything at all, as when a former Lehman Brothers executive tries to explain what a derivative is and Moore just looks understandably baffled.

His coverage of the victims of foreclosure does sound touching, if one-sided. (And really, I can’t fault him for this, because had he interviewed someone who blithely stuck their head in the sand while tapping their HELOC for gambling and hookers, it would have come off like an Onion video.) It’s also hard to fault his goal of “true democracy in which the masses vote out government officials who are in the pocket of the powerful and wealthy elite”, though, WSJ states that Moore uses the election of ’08 in the film as an example of this happening – ergo, I doubt Obama and his administration are taken too much to task in the film despite how much they’ve done to bail out Wall St.  Moore produces entertainment products, first and foremost, and as long as you remember that you’ll be fine.

The real dialogues will be started more a’la the “Put that in your bailout pipe and smoke it” diatribe – and whether you empathize with the woman who produced that little video or not, I’m talking about when you start to see a true revolt, not a campy one.