Michael Moore's seat-of-the-pants travelogue on his forty-seven-city tour to promote his best-selling book (nonfiction), Downsize This! After Roger and Me and his small-screen series TV Nation, there is nothing really new to say for or against his journalistic methods. They remain as unfair and confrontational and cranky as ever. But there are nonetheless some new nits to be picked with his cinematic methods. The man-and-a-microphone sessions in front of appreciative audiences at his various tour stops -- essentially stand-up comedy routines in a Mort Sahl mode -- are scarcely more cinematic than the book itself as a platform for his views. And while the sloppy, thrown-together, handmade quality of the movie may be an honest extension of the man, and certainly is no betrayal of his scrappy underdoggism, the blurred video image is frankly awful to look at. The thin veneer of folksy warmth and fat-man jollity fails, as before, to hide the anger and anguish underneath, but that (also as before) makes him more, rather than less, endearing. And the wear-and-tear of combat in the nine years since Roger and Me has, if anything, made the veneer thinner. But at the same time, he becomes a somewhat less ingratiating figure when he himself is the central subject rather than just the pathfinder into and through it. The villainy of corporations (chief complaint: the replacement of American laborers with cheaper foreign ones in order to turn hefty profits into heftier ones) is now of secondary importance to the heroism of Moore: a point man, a sounding board, a soft shoulder for the nation's disenfranchised. Where he redeems himself, both as a filmmaker and as an on-screen figure, is in his Quixotic assaults on the strongholds of local corporate offenders wherever on the map he finds himself. Difficult, obstinate, irritating, rude he may be. But the hard time he gives to assorted spokespersons and sentinels -- and, for a grand finale, the sportsmanly CEO of Nike, no less -- is a minuscule payback for the pluralized and capitalized Hard Times. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd