Saturday, July 14, 2007

Sicko

After Mark Kermode saw this at Cannes, he came back with the view that Michael Moore is utterly convincing...until he starts talking about something you actually know something about...like the NHS.

OK, we know that there are problems with the NHS (not least perhaps its recently-detected policy of recruiting foreign fanatics that have been rejected down under), but these are nothing compared to say having to pick which of your severed digits to have surgically reattached.

Yet Moore does appear to move rather too effortlessly from his America is crap argument to his alarm bells should start ringing France is paradise contrast.

There are parts, especially in the first and last quarters of an hour that are very moving, but the pathos is nicely balanced with Moore's good natured humour, especially when he is acting up the American ingenu abroad.

Although ostensibly about the horrors of the healthcare system in the states, Moore's real target would appear to be the US political system − what is it about his nation's democracy that stifles the incipient 'we first' culture he detects in the lives of many ordinary Americans?

It ends with a flurry of the kind of striking gestures that Moore specialises in. You can but admire his hutspa: having discovered that free, state-provided healthcare is in fact available somewhere on American soil − at Camp X-Ray in Guatanamo Bay − he sets off with a small flotilla of boats from Miami and thus announces their arrival at Gitmo with a megaphone: "I'm here with some 9-11 rescue workers. They just want some medical attention...the same kind that Al Qaeda is getting."

Following a recent "dust up" with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Moore has dedicated the rest of the past week to attempting to squeeze an apology out of the news station.


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