New Movie coming to Paradise

SiCKO is coming!

Michael Moore's new film opens generally on June 29th but sneak previews are scheduled for this Saturday. Nearest one is in Sarasota for any who can't wait. Might be worth rounding up a posse next week for the opening. Until then here's a review:

Anger is contageous in Moore's new 'Sicko'

By Gene Seymour / Newsday

What's most striking about "Sicko" is how composed, even serene it is compared with Michael Moore's previous acts of cinematic insurgency. The puckish ferocity and combative mischief that marked such previous Moore polemics from 1989's "Roger and Me" to 2004's "Fahrenheit 9/11" is on relatively low boil in this one -- at least until the climax where he takes a bunch of chronically ill Americans on a boat to Cuba for some accessible pharmaceuticals and treatment.

You may have already heard that he's probably in a little hot water for that.

But overall, the net effect of "Sicko's" penetrating and devastating inquiry into the way America takes care of its ill and dying is to transfer the anger to the audience rather than have Moore's own outrage spread all over his film. Which makes this movie, by a considerable distance, the writer-director's most effective provocation yet.

Those who already have their backs up whenever they hear Moore's voice won't want to see or hear what he has to say about insurance companies that deny benefits and even life-saving surgical procedures to their clients. But he pretty much lets those clients and even some former employees of those companies speak for themselves.

And by the time you've heard a doctor working for one of those companies speak with remorse about such denials to seemingly incredulous congressional investigators, you wonder if you'll ever feel secure about the prospect of getting sick in the United States.

Or, as some of Moore's interview subjects attest, you may consider somehow finagling your way to other western countries where universal health care exists, whether in Canada or France -- or Cuba.

Diagnosis: time for a change.