Cannes. Sicko.

Michael Moore's Sicko is screening Out of Competition at Cannes - and at the ungodly hour of 8:30 am, too. "I felt the film works completely as entertainiment, and as usual, Moore makes a hard-hitting and topical argument by using comedic elements," blogs Matt Dentler, who lists "quick stand-out moments from today's screening and highlights from the film," among them: "Hillary Clinton is actually called out, for unsuccessfully fighting the healthcare biz while her husband was president, and then later taking major contributions from them once she was a New York Senator."

"Sicko didn't tell me anything radically new about what an absurd health-care system we have, but it spelled out very clearly and, it seemed to me, honestly how much better the health-care systems are in Canada, England and France," writes Jeffrey Wells. "It's not just an eye-opener, in short, but a movie that opens your emotional pores."

"As someone who loved Bowling for Columbine, but found Fahrenheit 911 to be self-indulgent and unsurprising, I went to the movie with few expectations," admits Jared Moshe. "Surprise, surprise I loved the movie."

"Lost in all the publicity over Moore's trip is the reason he went to Cuba in the first place," reports the AP's Jocelyn Noveck, who talks with Moore and some of the 9/11 "first responders" he took there. "He says he hadn't intended to go, but then discovered the U.S. government was boasting of the excellent medical care it provides terror suspects detained at Guantanamo. So Moore decided that the 9/11 workers and a few other patients, all of whom had serious trouble paying for care at home, should have the same chance."

Brendon Connelly comments on an act of charity.

Gregg Kilday talks with Moore for the Hollywood Reporter.

Online viewing tip. John Dickerson at Slate on Fred Thompson vs Michael Moore.

Updates: Elizabeth Guider reports on the press conference for Variety: "Although he expects the Bush Administration to pick apart his film... Moore said he's more concerned with the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry.... He's also taken a master duplicate of Sicko out of America, should he be prevented from screening the Cuban footage. Having to do that, he said, is 'ridiculous' and 'insane.'"

And Variety's Alissa Simon: "Employing his trademark personal narration and David vs Goliath approach, Moore enlivens what is, in essence, a depressing subject by wrapping it in irony and injecting levity wherever possible: a long list of health conditions that spark a reason for a person to be denied insurance coverage sail into deep space accompanied by the Stars Wars theme; a graph showing America's position in global health care as No 38 - just above Slovenia - is followed by film footage of primitive operating conditions." But it's not all laughs, obviously: "Perhaps most emotionally affecting story comes from Julie, a hospital worker whose husband had a potentially terminal illness that medical staff thought could be treated with a bone marrow transplant. Insurance deemed the treatment experimental and refused to cover it. Unable to afford an alternative, the husband died."

"Disagreement may come over the prescription Dr Moore suggests," concedes Kirk Honeycutt in the Hollywood Reporter. "But he makes so much damn sense in his arguments that the discussion could be civilized except for the heat coming from the health care industry, with billions of dollars in profits at stake, and certain politicians whose pockets are lined with industry campaign donations."

IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez listens to Moore at the press conference: "It is my (profound) hope that people will listen this time with this film, because I don't want to wait ten or twenty years before we have universal health coverage in America and I don't want to wait ten or twenty years before we as Americans take a look into our soul so that we can become better citizens in this world."

"Michael Moore's passionate, bullying, gag-laced approach to the 'j'accuse' documentary worked a treat in Bowling for Columbine and Farenheit 9/11 - and it works even better in Sicko," writes Lee Marshall for Screen Daily. "Abroad, especially in Europe, Sicko will shock and comfort in equal measure - if we were being uncharitable, we might view his decision to contrast the US system with the free health care offered in Canada, Britain and especially France as a feel-good gift to audiences and distributors in those territories. But the points Moore makes here are (mostly) well-founded - and managed, as always, with a vein of irony that makes it difficult to dissent."

Cinematical's James Rocchi: "Sicko, Michael Moore's new film, is ostensibly about health care in America; it's not, any more than Moby Dick is about a fishing trip. Like Moore's other documentaries... Sicko's central theme is American democracy - how it works, where it doesn't - and the culture of capital." He finds it's the "tone - of selfless self-celebration, of public altruism, of snide sensitivity - that undercuts a lot of Moore's work, and it undermines Sicko. I don't expect a film to solve the American health care crisis, but even as a call to arms, Sicko's more muddled and muted and scattered than it should be."

The Guardian's Charlotte Higgins is amused by a sequence filmed back home: "There's a particularly comic sequence in which Moore marches round Hammersmith hospital in London searching for the payments section. Eventually he finds the cashier's office: much mock incredulity ensues when he discovers its purpose is not to receive money from patients, but to pay out cash to those of them who cannot afford their travel expenses."

Moore has "indicated that he wasn't looking forward to any possible confrontations [with the US government], but he also acknowledged that Harvey Weinstein, who heads the Weinstein company that's distributing the movie, wouldn't shy from such controversy and would be ready to go on attack," reports Charles Ealy at the Austin Movie Blog. "Weinstein, who was standing on the sidelines during a press conference, smiled broadly."

"Sicko does not display Moore at his most cinematically inventive or imaginative," notes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Still, there is no mistaking the passion and political intelligence at work in Sicko. It's both a more finely calibrated film and one with more far-reaching consequences than any he's made before." Further:

When Moore interviews Tony Benn, a leading figure on the British left, his larger concerns come into focus. Benn argues that for-profit healthcare and the other instruments of the corporate state, like student loans and bottomless credit-card debt, perform a crucial function for that state. They undermine democracy by creating a docile and hardworking population that is addicted to constant debt and an essentially unsustainable lifestyle, that literally cannot afford to quit jobs or take time off, that is more interested in maintaining high incomes than in social or political change. Moore seizes on this insight and makes it a kind of central theme; both in the film and aloud, at the press conference, he wondered whether some essential and unrecognized change has occurred in the American character.

"Moore isn't the first to say that the health care system is sick — that it's riddled with inequities and iniquities," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "He's never the first to address a gut issue, whether it's corporate greed (Roger & Me), American violence (Bowling for Columbine), the politics of terror (Fahrenheit 9/11). But he's the one who does it the noisiest, with the highest entertainment value, mixing muckraking with showmanship, Ida Tarbell with PT Barnum. His new movie - which has its world premiere tonight in Cannes, and opens in North America June 29th - fits honorably in that tradition. As both harangue and movie tragicomedy, Sicko is socko."

Updates, 5/20: Anne Thompson is brought to tears. "Tough stuff. It will play like gangbusters all over the world. But will it be enough to bail out the Weinsteins?"

"As agitator and provocative filmmaker, Moore seems to have calmed down (a function of middle-age? cushier life as a result of success? An eye toward the marketplace), bringing a lighter touch and using a more diffuse approach to his subject matter, one more in the vein of Roger and Me," writes Emanuel Levy. "Sicko is more of a folkloristic comedy, in which Moore functions as a contempo Mark Twain or Will Rogers, a good-natured, wide-eyed American abroad, a voyeuristic tourist who goes from country to country, seeking comparisons and possible solutions to the critical conditions of the US health system - and way of life."

"Lacking context or a shred of counterargument, the movie is predictably populist and one-dimensional," writes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. "But in its litany of health-care horror stories, one after another after another, Sicko packs an emotional wallop that's hard to resist with dead children and fallen husbands all casualties of the American healthcare system."

Updates, 5/21: "Mr Moore has always been a canny rhetorician: He's a master of the obvious observation and the pseudo-naïve question," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "These can be effective ploys, but they sometimes come across as maddeningly condescending. Early in Sicko he says, 'I always thought that the health insurance companies were here to help us,' a statement that the very existence of this film proves preposterous. It's as if Mr Moore's didn't want his Everyman persona to look or sound too smart, a tactic that results only in dumber movies."

In the Guardian, Agnès Poirier breaks the film down into its four acts and then writes, "[W]hile Moore's main objective is to reach his fellow Americans, his film should also make Europeans ponder on the system they too often take for granted. George Orwell would hate it. But forget about him for a minute. There may sometimes be such a thing as good propaganda."

"[E]xhilarating and hilarious," adds Peter Bradshaw.

"Sicko isn't a bad film, exactly, but anyone who's seen even one of Michael Moore's previous screed-cum-documentaries could probably give a fairly accurate summary of its content, sight unseen," suggests Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab. He wishes "the left had found a less Coulteresque demagogue."

Variety tells of Moore recalling that Harvey Weinstein wasn't overjoyed that he would criticize Hillary Clinton in Sicko, but "he respects me enough as a filmmaker to leave it in."

Jeffrey Kluger interviews Moore for Time.

Time Out's Dave Calhoun finds it "a powerful film and one that's also unexpectedly moving.... Most pleasing is how Moore roots these different national approaches to healthcare in broader ideas about how lives should be lived and how governments should govern. His examination of healthcare essentially becomes an argument for more socialist ideals."

Cinematical's James Rocchi has more notes from the press conference.

Updates, 5/22: The health insurance industry's keeping an eye on the film and measuring its potential impact, report Milt Freudenheim and Liza Klaussmann in the NYT.

"In the end, it's agitprop in the best sense, with disarming humor that helps mute the anger, while still convincing the viewer that something in the health care industry is fundamentally and dangerously out of whack," writes Patrick Z McGavin for Stop Smiling.

John Horn talks with Moore for the Los Angeles Times.

More press conference notes from Erica Abeel at Filmmaker: "'I said 3 years ago in Cannes that I was doing the health care system, and the pharmaceutical companies went on red alert. They actually trained employees to get me off the subject by asking me about sports and complimenting me on my weight loss.' So this time round, Moore will stay mum about his next project."

"Considering what's at stake, you can't help feeling this should have been a less reductive, more scrupulous film," writes admits Dennis Lim for IFC News.

Updates, 5/23: "Thankfully, [Moore] leaves behind his proclivity for personal attacks and confrontation to instead craft a completely engaging and tragic-comic story of a terrible situation," writes Hannah Eaves for PopMatters.

Michael Moore writes an open letter from Cannes. He's also hosted a chat at Daily Kos.

Online listening tip. Milos Stehlik on WBEZ, Chicago Public Radio.

Update, 5/24: One thing "that makes Sicko Moore's strongest film in years - if not ever - is its steadfast refusal to turn health care into a polarizing political issue, except to say that pretty much all American politicians, regardless of rank or affiliation, have left us to fend for ourselves," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "Say what you will about Moore: He can be didactic, reductive and repetitive, and I'm still not convinced that his plainspoken Will Rogers routine is anything more than an extremely well-polished act. But Sicko is the first time in years that I've believed Moore genuinely cares... about something other than his own ego."

James Israel has the trailer - and reposts a comment from the AMC TV blog, which begins, "As a future physician, my hope is that we are able to have socialized medicine in the US."

Update, 5/27: For the New York Times, Anthony DePalma looks a little deeper into Moore's juxtaposition of the health care systems in the US and Cuba.

Updates, 5/28: "It's no exaggeration: people are being killed by the giant insurance and hospital-industrial complex, as Sicko piercingly and movingly conveys," writes Anthony Kaufman at the Huffington Post. "Tapping into the raw emotion of this injustice, the movie has the power to unite all of us who have played the maddening game with insurance companies, wondering whether this or that medical procedure will be covered, and for how much.... Say what you will about Michael Moore, and many have, but with Sicko he's tapped into a source of pain and frustration that transcends political beliefs."

Online viewing tip. Bill Maher interviews Moore; it's Moore's first live television interview in well over two years.

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Cannes @ 60. Index.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 19, 2007 5:43 AM