Boo-hoo, poor Michael Moore! Disney won’t release his new film! Come on, no one’s really falling for this horseshit, right? This was a set-up from the beginning. Miramax always knew Disney would never release Moore’s Bush-critical Fahrenheit 911, and they’ve admitted as much – Disney told them over a year ago, before they’d even bought the movie, that they wouldn’t release it. This is Controversy-as-PR-Stunt by two masters of the form, Harvey Weinstein and Michael Moore.

It’s win-win for both of them. The movie’s gotten 100 times more attention than it otherwise would have, so now Harvey can sell it to another distributor at an inflated price. His name will probably still be on it in some capacity and best of all, he gets to make embattled Disney chairman Michael Eisner look like a fool. (Anyone who’s read Peter Biskind’s interminable Down and Dirty Pictures knows there’s no love lost between these two.) Moore now takes his movie to Cannes, where the predictable outrage will probably net him an award or two, thus boosting the movie’s profile further for its upcoming release. Don’t weep for him – he’s crying all the way to the bank.