Sicko reviewed
By Cliff DuRand
Film
Sicko
Mon, July 30, 1:30pm
Thurs, Aug 2, 3pm
Tues, Aug 7, noon
Teatro Santa Ana
Biblioteca Publica
Insurgentes 25
50 pesos
The acidic new Michael Moore documentary that is the talk of the US media is coming to San Miguel. Sicko will be shown at Teatro Santa Ana on Monday, July 30, Thursday, August 2 and again Tuesday, August 7. It will soon be the talk of this town as well.
Moore holds up for all to see the failings of a health care system that is one of the most expensive in the world and yet has 50 million uninsured citizens, eighteen thousand of whom die each year because they are uninsured. However, the film focuses not on them, but on the inadequacies for the insured whose claims are denied or policies canceled so that private insurance companies can achieve higher profits, and on those who are driven to bankruptcy by high medical bills.
Among Sicko’s villains are lobbyists and politicians who pocket millions from HMOs (Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, once an advocate for universal care, is now among the health care industry's biggest money recipients) and pharmaceutical companies that denounce universal care as little better than a “communist plot.” But the main villain is the insurance industry itself, the frequent target of complaints by doctors and patients alike.
This profit-driven health care system is the source of the problems. The solution? Universal single-payer health coverage. The US is the only industrialized country without it, where the idea is dismissed as “socialized medicine.” Elsewhere it is simply seen as social insurance. As a result, France, Britain, Canada and even poor Cuba have better delivery systems than the US. Moore gives France’s socialized medicine particular attention. There doctors lead comfortable lives, patients receive attentive care and employers grant extended health-related leaves— all reasons the World Health Organization ranked France tops in its 2000 global survey of countries providing the best healthcare. The US ranked 37th.
Cuba’s extensive system of free preventative health care for everyone also comes in for praise.One of the more memorable scenes in the film is when Moore takes them to Guantanamo where the accused terrorists detained there receive the best of medical care for free, while Ground Zero volunteers go untreated in their own country. Moore also could have made his point had he taken them to the US Congress, whose members receive free comprehensive health care while denying it to ordinary citizens.
Audiences familiar with Moore’s confrontational style might have expected such a stunt. But here we do not see him confronting HMOs or pharmaceutical executives. Nevertheless, Moore told the Los Angeles Times “there is a big confrontation in this movie. Because I am confronting the American audience with a question: ‘Who are we, and what has happened to our soul?’ To me, that’s maybe more confrontation than going after the CEO of Aetna or the CEO of Pfizer.”
Moore is confronting us, the American people. We think of ourselves as a kind and gentle people, yet we tolerate a system that sometimes condemns to death those in need of lifesaving care and casts into the streets the sick who cannot pay. “What kind of a people have we become?” he asks. In a moment of sermonizing, Moore tells us we need to realize we are all in the same boat and need to start thinking of “we” instead of just “me.”
With that Moore seeks to galvanize the American public into action for free universal single-payer health care. That was a major issue in the 1992 election when a majority of the public favored such a system. The Clinton administration fumbled the ball on that one, and the system is even more broken 15 years later. Perhaps Moore’s Sicko will put the issue on the political agenda once again in 2008.
Discussions will follow all screenings.
The other side of the Sicko story
By Atención staff
In the ongoing effort to keep our readers informed and entertained, here are a few Sicko reviews from the world press:
From Michael Cannon of The New York Sun: “…Sicko is so breathtaking a specimen of ignorant propaganda that it would make Pravda blush.” Cannon agrees (as does everyone) that greedy insurance companies deny Americans healthcare. “But Moore ignores the fact that power-hungry politicians do the same thing to patients in Canada, Great Britain, France and Cuba. “They just call it rationing by waiting. The wait to see a dentist in Britain’s National Health Service is so long, some Britons resort to pulling their own teeth.” www.nysun.com/article/57922
From The Economist: “Will America solve its health care problems by moving to a government-run health system like the one in Britain? The notion seems absurd given the spectacular failure of efforts by Bill and Hillary Clinton to promote the idea over a decade ago. Even Mrs. Clinton herself no longer advocates Hillarycare.” The article goes on to say, “Mr. Moore, true to form, has orchestrated publicity stunts that would make the circus promoter P.T. Barnum proud.” www.economist.com
From Kyle Smith of the New York Post: “Michael Moore’s latest documentary, Sicko, is an urgent bipartisan plea. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Yankees and Red Sox can surely all agree, says Moore, that our healthcare system ought to be run by Fidel Castro. The silliness of Moore’s oeuvre is so self-evident that being able to spot it is not liberal or conservative either; it’s a basic intelligence test.”
Smith goes on to consider Moore’s depiction of France, Britain and Canada as health care paradises. He points out that France recently elected a new conservative president because a poll showed that 85 percent of the population said their country was heading in the wrong direction. In August 2003, 15,000 mostly elderly hospital patients died in a heat wave because hospitals lack air conditioning and doctors were on vacation. “The French parliament blamed the health care system. That’s five times 9/11’s toll, all of it preventable, all of it unlamented by Moore.” The Canadian Supreme Court struck down a law forbidding private insurance in 2005, ruling that “access to a waiting list is not access to health care.” As for Cuba: “You can’t film anywhere in Castro’s Alcatraz without government say-so, meaning the whole scene was as phony as what happens when Frank Bruni walks into a four star restaurant, and if there’s a Michael Moore in Cuba, he is in jail right now.” Reporters Without Borders calls Cuba the world
’s “second biggest prison for journalists after China.” www.nypost.com
From Eunice Wong on Truthdig: “Sicko is a powerful and often humorous indictment of our health insurance industry, riddled with corruption and pitiless abuse of the sick by rapacious, profit-mad corporations. But it is pure propaganda. In Sicko, as in all his films, Moore violates the contract between reporter and audience: to tell the truth.”
Wong sees Moore as an entertainer. “He reduces complex issues to a vaudeville act with transparent villains and heroes. His goal is to amuse. Facts are malleable. He employs techniques of advertising and propaganda, the same techniques that have corrupted our news and political campaigns. Truth and fiction blur at both ends of the political spectrum. You can believe what you want and discard what you don’t. This illusion of truth and knowledge is far more dangerous than ignorance.”www.truthdig.com./report
From Dr. Julio Cesar Alfonso, a Miami doctor who practiced medicine in Cuba for four years, in a June 22 article with the Miami Herald: “The treatment Moore and the rescue workers receive in the film was done specifically for them, because they knew it would make great propaganda. The medical centers in Cuba that treat tourists and government officials and VIPs are very different from the ones that treat the general population. If you are a Cuban citizen and need a prescription drug, most doctors either tell you to ask your relatives in the US to ship it to you or recommend alternative herbal remedies. That’s the degree of scarcity on the island.”
www.miamiherald.com
Deciphering the undecipherable
By Atención staff
When the World Health Organization carried out the first-ever analysis of the world’s health systems in 2000, it used five performance indicators to measure 191 member states. France won the top slot, the US came in at 37 (a statistic much emphasized by those in favor of government health care), Cuba was ranked 39, (in spite of its government-run system) and Mexico was number 61.
WHO’s assessment system was based on five indicators: overall level of population health; health inequalities (or disparities) within the population; overall level of health system responsiveness (a combination of patient satisfaction and how well the system acts); distribution of responsiveness within the population (how well people of varying economic status find that they are served by the health system); and the distribution of the health system’s financial burden within the population (who pays the costs).
In designing the framework for health system performance, WHO employed a technique not previously used. It compared each country’s system to what the experts estimate to be the upper limit of what can be done with the level of resources available in that country. As the wealthiest country, the US is expected to have a near perfect system, while in countries such as Italy, which was given second place, standards are lower. Patient satisfaction, a highly subjective criterion, also lowered the US score as Americans have grown accustomed to high quality care. The US ranked highest in responsiveness and preventive care. The WHO in 2002 measured total expenditure on health as a percentage of GDP (gross domestic product) in 186 countries and the US was number one, France was 13, the UK was 48 and Cuba was 53.
According to statistics from the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), also from the year 2000, the US is ranked number 3 in public per capita spending on health care, after Iceland and Germany (France is number 4, the United Kingdom is number 16 and Cuba didn’t make the top 25). That same study showed that out of 15 developed countries, the US ranked number 2 in average number of doctor consultations per person per year, after Japan. France and the UK came in at numbers 4 and 12.
In the words of author Gregg Easterbrook: “Torture numbers and they’ll confess to anything.”
Rankings make terrific sound bytes and can even be helpful in highlighting weak spots within a system, but relying on them for long-term solutions to highly complex problems is dangerously naïve.
Global health is rife with crises on a monumental scale; there are legions of people dying of totally preventable diseases every day and although there is always room for improvement in developed countries, isn’t it myopic for an American filmmaker to focus on the more fortunate and ignore the truly catastrophic problems faced by the majority of the world’s population?
Optimistic about oil
| Films The Next Industrial Revolution How to Win the Oil Game Tues, July 31, 3–4:30pm Teatro Santa Ana Biblioteca Pública Reloj 50A 50 pesos |
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The oil crisis is here and looming larger every day. What are the answers to the problems caused by manufacturing and transportation? |
There are practical and imaginative solutions out there and two Bioneers speakers are already putting their solutions into action. Come see some of the most exciting solutions that are already here.
On Tuesday, July 31, TIME magazine’s Hero for the Planet, William McDonough, is featured in the film The Next Industrial Revolution. McDonough, winner of three Presidential Awards, including the 2003 Green Chemistry Challenge Award, is an architect and visionary thinker. He sees not a doomsday scenario, but an exciting and hopeful future where humanity takes nature itself as a guide, reinventing technology to be safe and ever-renewing. Beautiful and energy-renewable small college centers and medium-sized manufacturing plants exist in the US and Europe. Energy savings and productivity gains often pay back the cost of the building after the first year of operation.
Large corporations can do it, too. McDonough designed a complex for Nike that is light, beautiful and puts more energy back into the environment than it uses. He has recently been commissioned to direct the transformation of Ford Motor Company’s Detroit plant into a sustaining facility and a restored ecosystem that duplicates the original ecosystem of some 100 years ago when the first Model T’s rolled off the line. Narrated by Susan Sarandon, this is an exciting and engaging film.
In the second film, How to Win the Oil Game, brilliant physicist Amory Lovins, CEO of Rocky Mountain Institute in Aspen, Colorado, delivers an outline of how to achieve a prosperous post-petroleum economy where there is something for everybody, in other words, a politically viable plan. The consumer, the automobile manufacturer, the alternative fuel producers, the oil producers, local communities and even the government get something from this plan. This soft-spoken genius shows how cutting-edge design innovations, radically enhanced resource efficiency and judicious use of biofuels and hydrogen can transition us into a post-petroleum economy. Lovins’ book on Hypercars has been published in 28 countries. His work has gained him recognition by the Right Livelihood Awards, (often called the Alternative Nobel Prize, though it is not in anyway related), eight honorary doctorates, a MacArthur fellowship and more.
In a recent New Yorker article, Lovins’ plan was portrayed as brilliant and doable. For a highly entertaining exchange between author James Howard Kunstler, doomsayer of the oil age, and Amory Lovins, go to “Sparks fly” at www.salon.com
Come see these movies so you can pass on the knowledge that there are solutions on the horizon. The films are followed by an optional Conversation Café.
Ten movies shot in Mexico
By Kennedy Poyser
Celaya entered movie-making early, with Charros Mexicanos in 1898, but no one has made a movie there since. The directors must have moved to Guanajuato, which has hosted 116 films, many in the late sixties. San Miguel has been the setting for 21 films over the last half century.
The Internet Movie Database lists an astonishing 15,255 films set in Mexico, subdivided by state and city. That’s the good news. Regardless of where you visit, you can get a cinema preview, because somebody, sometime, probably made a movie there. The bad news is that you can find only a handful at video rental stores.
The Blockbuster on Ancha de San Antonio has at least ten titles that are worth a look. Some are popular features you may have seen already, some are set in familiar towns and others are titles you might overlook. All are subtitled in English.
Once Upon a Time in Mexico nearly led to a second insurrection in San Miguel five years ago because film crews invaded the town for weeks. Some merchants were isolated by all-day shoots, residents were detoured for blocks and tourists herded away from the Jardín. However, films add a new layer to reality, so La Fragua on Cuna de Allende is now more than a restaurant; it’s associated with a Johnny Depp scene. He is a CIA agent trying to prevent the Barillo drug cartel from overthrowing the Mexican government. Antonio Banderas, as El Mariachi, assists many bad guys toward their just desserts. This third “chapter” in a Robert Rodriguez story cycle expands on Desperado and El Mariachi, a Sundance winner and legend of independent filmmaking.
Serenade was shot in San Miguel 50 years ago, so it might be hard to find. It adapts James M. Cain’s bestseller about the life of Mario Lanza, a farm hand who won fame as a singer but almost lost his soul.
Frida is Salma Hayek’s project, ably directed by Julie Taymor. Alfred Molia plays Diego Rivera; Antonio Banderas appears as fellow muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. The perfect movie to watch as preparation for a trip to Guanajuato or Querétaro. The Special Features are as long as the movie and provide a great introduction to the lives and works of the two artists. You could also pick up Frida Kahlo while in the video store, an hour-long TV documentary/biography made in 1982.
The Mexican is actually an antique pistol which Jerry Wellbach (Brad Pitt) has to haul back to his mob boss. Girlfriend Samantha (Julia Roberts) is held hostage by a gay hit man to ensure the safe return of the pistol. A delight, with comedy, tension and romance backed by solid performances. Plot twists and improbable situations seem, in context, all too believable.
Apocalypto is a 139-minute epic by writer/director Mel Gibson, filmed around Vera Cruz and Oaxaca. A Mayan man’s idyllic life in a jungle setting is disrupted by an invading force. He must escape and run a gauntlet of perils to save his wife and child. His journey is tense and bloody, with many villains suffering appropriately. The Mayan civilization is fully realized, even to the language, but Gibson may have taken some liberties with history and overlaid Aztec motives on a people who managed to avoid the Spanish for some years.
Like Water for Chocolate is based on Laura Esquivel’s book Como agua para chocolate.
In a more traditional Mexico, Pedro and Tito are forbidden to marry by Mamá Elena, who wants her youngest daughter as a caretaker for life. As a ploy to stay close to Tito, Pedro marries the older daughter, and now Mamá has a chaperone’s nightmare. This 1992 release sparked new interest in Mexican movies around the world.
Y tu mamá tambien (the insult Yo mama! is better than a literal translation) received an Oscar nomination as well as 33 awards in festivals. In this funny, intelligent 2001 roadtrip movie, teenagers Tenoch and Julio tell the older, attractive Luisa they are going to a secret beach. The three head out of Mexico City toward the fictional Boca del Cielo and, along the way, learn about friendship, life and seduction against the contrasting background of the harsh reality of poverty.
La Ley de Herodes (Herod´s Law) was delayed until 1999 because the government didn’t like their depiction. Filmmakers went to the press and the administration relented to avoid rumors of political censorship. In 1949, janitor Juan Vargas becomes mayor of a desert town in central Mexico (the peasants killed the former mayor). He soon discovers the best response to corruption (yield to it) and becomes the worst mayor in the backwater town’s history. “If you can imagine a tasty, spicy satire pie baked up with treachery, a wry wit and superb performances, then by all means take a big bite of this delicious treat” (cjclarksti@stinet.com).
Cuentos de hadas para dormir cocodrilos (Bedtime fairy tales for crocodiles) was filmed in Qaxaca and released in Mexico in 2003. Arcángel travels back to his home village in search of salvation from a family curse. The fable mixes the personal lives of his ancestors with historical moments such as the Reform War and the Mexican Revolution.
Los Indolentes (Indolent) was filmed partly in Querétaro and released in 1977. After losing their ranch in 1934 through the agrarian reforms of Lázaro Cárdenas, three generations of women in the Alday family face a poverty they are unable to change. None can understand how to regain their old prosperity.
Kennedy Poyser idled away far too many years earning degrees at various universities.
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“Cinemateca Programación para la semana
del 30 de Julio al 5 de Agosto 2006” |
José Luis Pick’n’tip:
The Picks:
Amargosa (2006)
Marta didn’t wait for anyone to tell her how to give her life meaning. She just did what her heart told her. I think I admire this woman about as much as anyone I’ve ever heard of. This was a beautiful and inspiring film! Any artist or dancer should definitely watch this film. It is amazing to see how the spirit expresses itself when it has the space to do so. This movie moved me to tears.
The Tip:
Important:
In order to provide the best viewing experience, the show times for some movies may be adjusted to accommodate their length. Be sure to check the schedule carefully. I also want to remind you of our new ticket price; 50 pesos and discount cards 12 shows for 450 pesos.
Starting Monday, after noon, buy your tickets in advance for any movie or show of the week. If you have a discount card, collect your pass to assure you get a seat; don’t take the risk of being locked out…. Nos vemos en el Cine….
You want to receive this info by email? Write to José Luis at alephamour@hotmail.com.
Thank you.
The Movies:
Sicko (2007)
Monday, July 30 at 1:30pm
Thursday, August 2 at 3pm.
Political Documentaries, English, 120 minutes
Director: Michael Moore
Michael Moore sets his sights on the plight of the uninsured in this eye-opening documentary. In the world's richest country, 45 million people have no health insurance, while HMOs grow in size and wealth. Moore also explores the widespread use of antidepressants and their possible link to violent behavior. With his trademark humor and confrontational style, Moore asks the difficult questions to get to the truth behind today's health care.
The Business of Being Born (2007)
Monday, July 30 at 4pm
Tuesday, July 31 at noon
Friday, August 3 at 2pm
Director: Abby Epstein
Life & Health Documentary, English, 90 minutes
Birth: it’s a miracle. A rite of passage. A natural part of life. But more than anything, birth is a business. Compelled to find answers after a disappointing birth experience with her first child, actress Ricki Lake recruits filmmaker Abby Epstein to explore the maternity care system in America. Focusing on New York City, the film reveals that there is much to distrust behind hospital doors and follows several couples who decide to give birth on their own terms. There is an unexpected turn when director Epstein not only discovers she is pregnant, but finds the life of her child on the line. Should most births be viewed as a natural life process, or should every delivery be treated as a potential medical emergency? The Business of Being Born is a must-see for moms, dads and anyone even thinking about having a baby.
Amargosa (2006)
Wednesday, August 1 at 5:30pm
Thursday, August 2 at 5:30pm
Biographical Documentaries, English 93 minutes
Director: Todd Robinson
Cast: Mary McDonnell, Ray Bradbury, Marta Becket, Tom Willett, Paul Lyday.
Soon after a psychic tells her she will give up her dancing career and move to a remote town that starts with the letter A, Marta Becket is stranded in Death Valley Junction, Calif. But when she finds out the town used to be named Amargosa, she knows she’s found her destiny. This documentary from director Todd Robinson follows Marta’s lonely existence dancing in an abandoned theater with only the company of an audience hand-painted on the walls.
Kids Movies: Vintage Cartoons
Saturday August 4 at noon
Free entrance.
Musical Saturdays:
Will resume in winter