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Friday, June 22, 2007

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek has seen Sicko and has just about the same review as everyone else:

"Sicko" is a blunt, effective picture, and there's no doubt that Moore feels passionately about this subject, even discounting his own considerably bloated need to be the center of attention. A sentence like that is almost always followed by a "but," and here it comes: It's perfectly valid to agree with Moore's thesis and still have problems with his filmmaking, his choices of what to put where, his way of eliding certain realities lest they weaken his (already considerably strong) case. And while "Sicko" is, in my view, the most persuasive and least aggravating of all of Moore's movies, it still bears many of the frustrating Moore earmarks -- most notably, a deliberately simplistic desire to render everything in black-and-white terms, as if he didn't trust his audience enough to follow him into some of the far more complex gray areas.

...Unfortunately, he reserves Samuel Barber's overused weeper for another scene, featuring footage from 1996 government hearings into managed healthcare standards in which a doctor formerly employed by Humana testified that (among other horrors) physicians in the system were actually given bonuses for denying healthcare. The sequence would have been powerful enough by itself, but Moore just can't resist cranking up the poignant music. Nor can he resist tucking in, here and there, his trademark found film footage, often run at high speeds -- you know, comic clips of doctors sawing off limbs and the like -- accompanied by silly cartoon music: If only Moore could recognize that his showboating doesn't enhance his message; it only gets in the way. Toward the end of "Sicko," Moore tells us that the fellow who runs the most successful anti-Michael Moore Web site nearly lost everything when his wife became seriously ill and he found himself overwhelmed by medical bills. Anonymously, Moore sent him a check for $12,000. Good for Moore (and for that couple who needed it). But by choosing to include the story, Moore slyly gets to be both the anonymous good Samaritan and tell us about his -- you should pardon the expression -- largesse.