June 29.

As Jeffrey Wells has noted, this coming weekend looks to be a good one for moviegoing in the US, at least on the coasts, and particularly for the summer. At the moment, though, there's quite a hubbub clamoring around two films opening the following week, Ratatouille and Sicko. Write your own rats and health insurance companies punchline.

Updated through 6/24.

I've already noted Justin Chang's rave for the first in Variety, and today, David Poland adds: "Ratatouille is not only the best animated film of this year and the best animated film to land in American theaters since Spirited Away, it is the best work of Brad Bird's already legendary career, and the best American film of 2007 to date."

As for Sicko, Kyle Smith blasts Michael Moore in the New York Post ("Even Moore does not believe what he says, and his films don't bring about change"; oh, well then...), Moore blasts the team behind Manufacturing Dissent, saying, yes, he did interview GM chairman Roger Smith, but long before he started working on Roger & Me, and then, of course, there's the matter of the leaks, Sicko in full, floating around the ether. The Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein has the basics; Glenn Kenny, the entertaining commentary.

Update: "Like Stephen Daldry's The Hours, Evening's pseudo-intellectual tone hardly disguises its presumptions about female identity," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "Made by dilettantes, for dilettantes, the film might be considered a gay man's fetish art—another opportunity for the Pulitzer Prize-winning [Michael Cunningham] to flaunt his facile understanding of female torment, grotesque class condescension, superfluous preoccupation with time, and reduction of gay experience."

Earlier: Brandon Harris.

"Hyped in Cuba, unveiled in Cannes, pirated on YouTube, and rallied around last week in Sacramento, Calif, by nurses chanting for the health insurance system's demise, Michael Moore's documentary Sicko is finally ready to meet its American audience - or at least some of it - a week ahead of schedule," reports Michael Cieply in the New York Times. "Executives of the Weinstein Company, which provided backing for the film, a documentary indictment of America's health care system, said Sicko would open Friday on a single screen at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square theater in New York."

Updates, 6/20: For Jason Bogdaneris, writing in the L Magazine, Sicko "is vintage Moore, with all that entails: ironic archival footage, maudlin case studies of 'ordinary Americans' caught up in a corrupted system and his trademark aggresive disingenuousness.... But as with his indictment of the gun lobby or the military industrial complex, his assembled half-truths still constitute an unrefutable larger one."

AJ Schnack details the Sicko storm as it gurgles along on several fronts at once. One that hasn't been mentioned here yet: Sicko, according to some, is supposed to pull docs out of some sort of genre slump - which AJ isn't buying into at all. The slump, that is.

Eric Kohn posts a brief clip from Moore's press conference in New York on Tuesday.

Moore will be on Capital Hill today. Kim Masters reports for NPR.

Sicko "presents a devastating indictment of the US healthcare system by letting victimized patients speak for themselves," writes Robert Weissman.

S James Snyder talks with Moore for Time.

Updates, 6/22: Sicko "is the best film in the Moore canon," blogs David Corn for the Nation. "I say this as one who had a mixed reaction to Fahrenheit 9/11. (See here.) This time around, Moore has crafted a tour de force that his enemies will have a tough time blasting (though they will still try). It's not as tendentious as his earlier works. It posits no conspiracy theories. The film skillfully blends straight comedy, black humor, tragedy, and advocacy. You laugh, you cry - literally. And you get mad."

More from Stuart Klawans: "I don't think he's ever before relied so heavily on so many people. They help him make his argument about the failures of American medicine (or, rather, the successes of American insurance-gouging). But to Moore's great credit, the debating points never seem more important than the individuals who back them up."

"Mr Moore has hardly been shy about sharing his political beliefs, but he has never before made a film that stated his bedrock ideological principles so clearly and accessibly," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "When he plaintively asks, 'Who are we?,' he is not really wondering why our traditions of neighborliness and generosity have not found political expression in an expansive system of social welfare. He is insisting that such a system should exist, and also, rather ingeniously, daring his critics to explain why it shouldn't."

"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," argues Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "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."

"Sicko is creating an awkward situation for the leading Democratic presidential candidates," reports Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in the Los Angeles Times. "Rejecting Moore's prescription on healthcare could alienate liberal activists, who will play a big role in choosing the party's next standard-bearer. However, his proposal - wiping out private health insurance and replacing it with a massive federal program - could be political poison with the larger electorate."

Robert Greenwald: "Michael has used visits to other countries to great effect, making crystal clear that it can be done here, it should be done here, and we have to make sure that it is done here."

"Moore is no shit smear like Ann Coulter, but it's easy to see why people on the right regard him with such contempt," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "His films, like the reportage that tries to pass for legitimate journalism on FOX News, lack for balance. This is not to say that Moore is a liar or isn't critical of his kind (he praises Hillary Clinton's efforts to overhaul health care during her husband's stint as President, then calls attention to how she accepted money from the health care industry while trying to build her political clout as a senator), but he is prone to showing us only one side of any given coin."

Howard Feinstein interviews Moore for Filmmaker.

Moore is "the PT Barnum of human misery who, going back to Roger & Me, has never been one to let details interfere with a good story," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "And yet, as Moore builds his case that health insurance in America is essentially a profit-making enterprise based on bilking the afflicted, the cumulative effect of this material is devastating."

"At first, Sicko comes off as the ultimate distillation of the Michael Moore formula," blogs Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "ut then something interesting happens: the movie ends before Moore can directly confront his boogeyman. There seems to have been a conscious decision on the part of the filmmaker to avoid conflict."

"The high point of yesterday's hearing—the part that most resembled a scene in a Michael Moore movie—occurred when Rep John Conyers (D-Mich), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, spotted Rep Darryl Issa (R-Calif) standing quietly in the back of the room," reports Brian Beutler for Mother Jones. "Conyers thanked Issa 'for making this a bipartisan issue,' and invited him to stand in front of the crowd. Issa gestured in protest, making a cut-throat gesture at his neck, but to no avail. He was cowed into standing with Moore and the Democrats anyhow.... After the hearing, Moore headed out to a theater in Washington's Union Station to hold yet another free screening - food and drink provided - for anybody in the city who has a career lobbying on behalf of private health care companies. No word yet on how many people attended."

Meanwhile: "Brad Bird has done it again," announces Matt Dentler. "And, if the screening we attended means anything, the kids are gonna love it even more than the grown-ups.... Ratatouille is unlike any other Pixar feature before it, yet embodies the distinct tone and spirit that has made them an animation powerhouse."

Updates, 23: Online viewing tips. David Poland lunches with Ratatouille composer Michael Giacchino, plus an accompanying behind-the-scenes featurette.

Jonathan Cohn, author of Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis - And the People Who Pay the Price (site), writes in the New Republic: "[B]eyond all the grandstanding and political theater, the movie actually made a compelling, argument about what's wrong with US health care and how to fix it. Sicko got a lot of the little things wrong. But it got most of the big things right."

"The subject matter is so inherently powerful and frustrating, and the horror stories Sicko relates are so relatable to American audiences, that one almost wishes that Moore had simply allowed his participants to just speak: to let the running camera record these everyday people's woes, to create a nonstop ethnographic view of contemporary American life from the point of view of those who've been let down by its bureaucracies and greed," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Yet asking Moore to unyoke himself from his identity as an entertainer is like imploring Michael Bay to try his hand at EM Forster: it's not gonna happen, and, regardless of our own aesthetic criteria, do we really want it to?"

"As Hillary Clinton found out the hard way, health care isn't a particularly sexy topic, but with his usual populist's touch, Moore has crafted a film that's intellectually and emotionally gripping from start to finish," writes Jürgen Fauth.

Moore "embodies the dumb American abroad in Europe, but his mock astonishment at other health care systems is hugely entertaining. Even the trip to Cuba which has received all the right-wing criticism is much funnier than you would expect," writes J Robert Parks. "And the movie flows beautifully from scene to scene, while never forgetting that the audience isn't a bunch of policy wonks but regular Americans wondering what needs to happen. What needs to happen is that people need to see Sicko. It's a gloriously unbalanced piece of agitprop and required viewing."

Update, 6/24: "As he moved from Sacramento to New York and on to Washington this week, Mr Moore has not just set out to sell tickets to Sicko, his cinematic indictment of the American health care system," reports Kevin Sack for the NYT. "He has also pushed his prescription for reform: a single-payer system, with the government as insurer, that would guarantee access to health care for all Americans and put the private insurance industry out of business. Whether embracing Mr Moore's remedy or disdaining it, elected officials and policy experts agreed last week that the film was likely to have broad political impact, perhaps along the lines of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's jeremiad on global warming. It will, they predicted, crystallize the frustration that is a pre-existing condition for so many health care consumers."

Posted by dwhudson at June 19, 2007 7:48 AM