Click here to listen to Michael Moore interviewed for BOWLING FOR COUMBINE.
My favorite moment in Michael Moore’s SICKO is one that had nothing to do with Moore directly. He merely recounts the story. A man unhappy with having his claim rejected by his insurance provider informed said provider that Moore’s new documentary project was an exposé of the health insurance industry and that he, the disgruntled insuree, would be sending all the facts of his case to Moore. The insurance company approved the man’s original claim and the world was a better place for it. What is so great about that, aside from one man’s small victory against a system geared towards profits not health care, is that Michael Moore knew nothing about it until it was a done deal. It is an apt demonstration of both the power of his name and of his guerilla brand of filmmaking that has become his trademark. Such is his ability to get attention and then galvanizing everyone whose attention has been gotten, whether they agree with him or not. Especially not, and it’s those folks who take even more of a beating in the DVD release of SICKO.
There’s over 80 minutes of new material included. The most pointed being the featurette in which Moore his critics, the ones who said that the state-supported health care in England and France depicted in the film was unrealistic, Moore transports us to a place that, in Moore’s words, blows those countries out of the water. It’s a place where the oil revenues are managed by a philosopher, and the prison system’s mission is to actually reform prisoners. And where the quality of life is the highest in the world. No, not America, and that’s all I’ll reveal about the location.
The other features includes a premiere of the film on Los Angles’ Skid Row, scene of the notorious dumping of indigent patients depicted in the film, that is a classic Moore stunt, working on both the publicity level, and the human one. There are also extended interviews from the film. These include experts in healthcare of all stripes from Che Guevera’s doctor daughter preaching respect for human life, to Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren, who with the giddiness of disbelief at the absurdity of the system, explains not just the percentages of bankruptcies over catastrophic illness, but how the economics of same came to be, to Dr. Marcia Angell, who contrasts Jonas Salk’s refusal to patent his discovery of the polio vaccine to current attitudes towards medical patents. Retired Labor MP Tony Benn is, perhaps, the worthiest among worthies, though. Chatting informally with Moore, he paints Jesus as a socialist, and democracy as the most radical of political experiments, and disrupts paradigms with deft re-definitions of such commonplace words as “customer”. That last is the spirit of Moore’s approach. Redefine the argument by taking look that defies the complacency of the status quo.
The DVD release of SICKO adds more fuel to the fires of righteous indignation with new stories of injustice perpetrated against the poor and ill-insured. But while stirring up anger, it also inspires with a vision that isn’t utopian, but better, and, most importantly, achievable. And, that done, it challenges its audience to get up and do something, specifically, to support H.R. 676, the House bill sponsored by John Conyers that mandates universal healthcare. More generally, and far more subversively, it challenges its viewers to see the world at large in a new light, from a different angle, and with that most dangerous pair of words in the English language: ”Why not?”
Click here for the full review of SICKO.
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