Acephalous has another early review of Sicko, written after the movie's brief appearance last night on Google Video. (Unfortunately, it's since disappeared. If you didn't happen to be online last night like *ahem* some people, you'll have to find your digital bootleg some other place.) Acephalous is generally positive towards the movie, but his distaste for Michael Moore's tendency for self-aggrandizing stunts—a distaste I certainly share—causes him to inevitably turn on the movie:

I don't mind cheap (but effective) showmanship. Anonymously paying the founder of Moore Watch $12,000 so he can pay to keep the site up and his wife insured is both classy and opportunistic. Such is the life of the showman. Bringing victims of 9/11 to Gitmo so that they might retrieve the same quality health-care as the terrorists works. Bringing them to a Havana hospital for treatment? Not so much. It has long been known that foreigners paying in hard currencies receive preferential treatment in Cuban hospitals. Despite the benefits brought about the emphasis on preventative medicine, one of the highest doctor-to-patient ratios in the world, and the availability of cheap generic drugs, Moore neglects to mention that he was taking advantage of the system, that the people with him only received the treatment they did because they weren't Cuban. Just as I was furious when I learned that he had met Roger while filming Roger & Me, I'm pre-incensed at his future revelation that he knew all about Cuba's medical tourism industry. In both films, he overreaches, providing his detractors with ammunition against him. He undermines the valid points he raises about the outsourcing of American jobs and the crisis in American health-care for what can only be seen as narrative goals. He wants the perfect ending, the perfect finish, the perfect irony. He doesn't need it. When I taught literary journalism, I convinced my students, and myself, that the most human story is human by virtue of its imperfections, by the way its mundane realities defy the simplistic narrative conventions of the Hollywood hack. Would that Moore could learn this.

I'd never heard that Roger & Me thing before, and if it's the same incident mentioned in the Wikipedia page I actually think Acephalous's criticism is a little unfounded. However, his larger point certainly holds—time after time, Moore's narcissism gets in the way of his polemic. From all indications Sicko, despite its good points, is no exception.