YMMV / Roger & Me

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• Award Snub: Despite being one of the most original documentaries at the time and being a box office success, it wasn't even nominated for an Academy Award.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Rhonda Britton, the lady selling rabbits as "Pets or Meat". She even became of the focus of a PBS documentary in 1992.
• Genre Turning Point: Before Roger and Me, documentaries (of a non-musical nature at least) had been mostly confined to TV and film festivals. Roger and Me demonstrated that one could make a documentary that the masses would want to see, allowing other documentaries, including Moore's later films, to achieve widespread financial and critical success.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The situation in Flint has just gotten worse in the thirty years since the film's release, as the water crisis they suffered in The New '10s showcased.
  • In a broader sense, the movie is (sadly) even more relevant today than 1989, as we've seen numerous situations like Flint's play out across the country, thanks to the Great Recession of 2007-2008 and, more recently, the COVID pandemic causing mass unemployment and closed businesses.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Looks like Roger Smith really is a louse.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: Despite it's negative depiction of General Motors, many GM employees and executives actually liked the movie due to their disillusionment with Roger Smith's leadership. By the time the film was released in Christmas 1989 GM was badly losing money and marketshare while fielding a lineup of "cookie cutter" cars that were struggling on the marketplace. Smith would actually retire less than a year after the film was released — and hardly anybody was sad to see him go.
• Nightmare Fuel: The scenes with Rhonda Britton, who is quite happy about the fact that she makes a living by killing animals. The early scenes where she discusses her job and how she does it are off-putting enough, but then we actually get to see her slaughter and skin a rabbit, and it's not glorified in any way.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The rabbit killing scene has become a bone of contention, with some schools and teachers refusing to show this movie to students, despite it covering an important aspect of modern history, simply because of this one scene. Michael Moore is bewildered by this because the movie also shows a man being killed by police, but that scene never raised as much controversy. Though to be fair, the man killed by police was filmed at a distance, whereas the rabbit killing, skinning and gutting is up close and doesn't cut away after a few seconds.
• Tearjerker: To the point it might as well be called Tearjerker: The Movie.
• Values Resonance: Downsizing and outsourcing have only accelerated since the 1980s, as Moore noted in his later film Capitalism: A Love Story.

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