Monday, July 30, 2007

Sicko (2007)

K: In case you've been living in a box for the past month or so, I'll start by saying that Sicko is the latest Michael Moore movie. I haven't seen ALL of Michael Moore's movies, but I can say that this is the best one that I've seen since Bowling for Columbine.

Most of the criticism of this movie revolves around the typical Michael Moore over-the-top moments (a bit near the end arouses particular ire...I won't describe the scene since everyone should have the joy of seeing it for the first time.)

However, I find simple complaints that it is propaganda pretty unsatisfying. You don't really watch a Michael Moore movie for the fair and balanced perspective, any more than you watch videos produced by big oil to get the real scoop on drilling rights. Propaganda itself isn't necessarily a bad thing--indeed, it can be a helpful tool. The key is that the propaganda has to be supporting something larger--an idea that merits a one-sided view. Fahrenheit 911 wasn't bad simply because it was propaganda...it was bad because it wasn't anything else.

Sicko is different, because while Moore spends a lot of screen time taking digs at the American medical industry, he is ultimately probing at something deeper. It is the same thing that he was getting at in Bowling for Columbine. Namely--why do we, as a people and as a country, care so little about each other? More specifically, why do we care so little about those people who most need care? Because this is propaganda, the question is asked in terms of comparisons--why aren't we more like the British, the French, the Canadians?--but in the end, the comparisons are almost moot. We require a level of self-sufficiency in this country that defies all reason, and that deserves a serious self-examination.

But despite the heavy questions that he's dealing with, and the terrible, life-or-death stories that are being told, the rhetoric in Sicko is lighter--less bitter--than either the 911 movie or (if I recall) Bowling for Columbine. The whole thing comes off as almost...hopeful. Maybe it's just that when compared with problems of government ineptitude, economic change, and epidemic violence, reforming the health care industry doesn't seem like such a difficult problem any more.

R: In a similar vein, I think the point of the movie was to make a bit more concrete the idea of a society where health care just isn't a constant concern. The debate over government health care is often reduced to one of cost, and I think Moore's point is that there's another benefit to centralization, and that's not having to base, well, many of the decisions in your life around insurance. It's a tricky thing to quantify, but I think it's pretty obvious that it matters.

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Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Daywatch (2006)

R: This is a pretty good movie. It's not going to change your life, but it's better than most of the action movies out there. Unfortunately, if you don't speak Russian, you're not going to know this, because our friends at Fox have significantly changed the script. And they've done it all through the magic of subtitles.

The thing that sets this apart from, I dunno, Blade, is that the tone is a bit more philosophical. Again, it's not Bergman, but it's quite thoughtful, if not brilliant. The problem that Daywatch (and Nightwatch before it) have is that they're complicated. Major plot points might be revealed in an aside, and those plot points can be pretty weird. My guess is that Russian audiences are willing to work a little harder to follow these things, though I can't be sure. Fox has Americanized the movie by converting all of those musings on light and dark into clunky plot exposition. Working from memory, there are a lot of changes like:

"Zavulon: Yegor, we've chosen the Dark because it lets us hide our
inadequacies -- you can hide them with hate, or lust, or whatever you
please. There's nothing more human than these inadequacies."

becomes

"Zavulon: Yegor, don't forget, you're a Great Dark Other. If you meet the
Great Light Other, it will be the apocalypse!"

If I find a fansub somewhere that's more accurate, I'll mention it here.

Once (2007)

R: I think that what I like most about this movie is that it's content to leave much of its story untold. It would have been easy, in focusing on the two principal characters, to either push all of the other characters out of the movie entirely or give them quaint side stories. Instead, I think they revealed just enough of the various folks who drift through to suggest that they had lives off-screen, even if they didn't happen to be the lives that we're interested in. It gives the whole thing a sense of groundedness, which, uh, I'll just say that musicals tend to lack. IMHO.

Of course, I have to talk about the thing I like most because, in case you haven't heard, it's fantastic. It's still at the State! Go see it!

A quick side note -- I'm related to a large number of people who more or less look like Glen Hansard. He could have showed up at my Great Aunt's jubilee and passed as one of my dad's cousins.


K: Just a quick note:
First of all, Ross stole the man's nose. Seriously.
More importantly, this is a beautiful, unexpected movie with lovely music. So see it already!

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