Infinite Monkeys

'Sicko' isn't well

Predicting that Michael Moore's latest documentary would be about as accurate as a North Korean news service dispatch is as easy as ... well, predicting that it would be the toast of Cannes. Yet it's still cool to read even moderate, temperate, normally sympathetic columnists like The Sacramento Bee's Daniel Weintraub take it down.

But it's even more fun to read an autopsy of Moore's crockumentary from The New York Post. Expanding on his one-star review in the paper, Kyle Smith says:

Even Moore does not believe what he says, and his films don’t bring about change-—union membership did not skyrocket nor corporate downsizing trickle off after "Roger and Me," there was no movement towards banning guns after "Bowling for Columbine," and John Kerry did not have to fill out any change of address forms in 2004. Moore's documentaries are mere political slapstick that could have been made by a third Farrelly brother or an eighth Stooge. I will pay him the honor of treating him with his own meds. How else can I deal with a film that calls Hillary Clinton "sexy"?

Not bad. But we'll have to wait for Mark Steyn to get to "Sicko" to enjoy a really top-shelf evisceration.

Moore is the master of the half-truth — or as he might put it himself, the "fictitious" war fact. For instance, Roger & Me made it seem like he couldn't get in to see GM CEO Roger Smith. No less an authority than Team Ralph Nader popped that balloon (Moore quizzed him for 90 minutes ... yet the movie shows him interviewing an empty chair). And there's ... well, that's enough. Pick nearly any scene in any movie and you'll see a lie.

This excerpt from Smith's "Sicko" take-down is a great example of how "Inconvenient Truth" seems to always wreck his movies:

In a poll, 85 percent of the French recently said their country is heading in the wrong direction. Right direction? Nine percent. In France in 2003, 15,000 mostly elderly hospital patients died in an August 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.

Yes. But the French government will send bureaucrats over to do the laundry of women who just gave birth. Priorities are everything in a socialist medical system.

Posted by Dr. Zaius at June 19, 2007 07:53 PM