SummarySicko, filmmaker Michael Moore's new documentary, sets out to investigate the American healthcare system. Sticking to his tried-and true one-man approach, Moore sheds lights on the complicated medical affairs of individuals and local communities. (The Weinstein Company)
SummarySicko, filmmaker Michael Moore's new documentary, sets out to investigate the American healthcare system. Sticking to his tried-and true one-man approach, Moore sheds lights on the complicated medical affairs of individuals and local communities. (The Weinstein Company)
I have only one complaint, and it is this: Every American should be as fortunate as I have been. As Moore makes clear in his film, some 50 million Americans have no insurance and no way to get it.
Michael Moore. You either hate or love him, and the works I've seen from him ("Fahrenheit 9/11", "Bowling for Columbine", and this film) make me love him! Out of the films I just mentioned, I'm happy to say that "Sicko' is my favorite. It gives the viewer a funny, yet tragic look at the horribly flawed health industry in America. People share horrific stories of their experiences with health care, and Moore also travels into 4 different countries, and shows the superiority of their own health care systems. One of the best docs out there!
Barring a middle-class revolt, it's extremely unlikely that, whatever its virtues, universal healthcare could ever take hold in America. Still, I'm glad Moore made his film.
As a documentary, this movie has the same problems as all of those in Moore's oeuvre; as a polemic or a visual op-ed piece, it's an effective piece of filmmaking.
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, like the ability to match square peg with square hole. His documentaries are political slapstick that could have been made by a third Farrelly brother or a fourth Stooge.
Just so you know, everyone that ranked this movie 0 points never watched the movie, they're just brainwashed Republicans that hate America. That being said, this move is eye-opening and was the reason people started talking about Healthcare, something American needs badly. Watch it and learn. Buy it and support M. Moore because that man has done so much for so many.
Sicko is a rather difficult film to critically analyse and rate. On the one hand it is simply amazing and utterly necessary for American (and world) society. Moore beautifully portrays the problems and issues behind the situation in the U.S. health care system. The U.S. is fundamentally inhumane when it comes to health care, and whether most Americans are willing to admit that, Moore plows that point across with fierce dedication.
On the other hand, to prove his point, he glosses over the problems that people in his case study countries - Cuba, Canada, UK, France - actually experience. With an obvious bias, Moore does not even try to show us the negative sides of the health care in the other countries. His "typical middle class French family" is not quite as typical as he might want us to believe. Or that British doctor is not necessarily a 100% representative of all British or European doctors, who most certainly do not live in $1 million houses & apartments. However, Moore does manage to bring a human aspect to the film, and give it a soul that many documentaries fail at. For that reason, and for the fact that he is addressing an issue that is in urgent need of addressing, this film does deserve quite a high rating. And, when it comes to his bias - well, documentaries are always biased. They never claim to represent the "truth" for they are always made with an intent, that cannot be fully objective. And Moore quite certainly recognises that, and just as he did with "Bowling for Columbine" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," he unrelentingly pursues his point across. Excellent documentary!
(Mauro Lanari)
Net of Moore's well-known flaws, in this case there is the surprise of both a greater political balance (the frontal attack on the false liberal Hillary Clinton), and an incredible lack of foresight: 14 years later, it is not that the Yankees have rethought the socioeconomic model of the infamous Chicago school, but it is the rest of the (only?) West that has been infected by it. The result is now under the eyes of the whole world: Covid-19 has infected over 350 thousand people and killed over16 thousand of them, but among the dead there are no VIPs, who benefit from forms of (even preventive) healthcare that are inaccessible to any ordinary citizen. On March 17, 2020, Gordon Lichfield, director of the "MIT Technology Review", published this analysis: "As usual, the true cost [of the pandemic] will be borne by the poorest and weakest. People with less access to health care, or who live in more disease-prone areas, will now also be more frequently shut out of places and opportunities open to everyone else ... as with all change, there will be some who lose more than most, and they will be the ones who have lost far too much already. The best we can hope for is that the depth of this crisis will finally force countries—the US, in particular—to fix the yawning social inequities that make large swaths of their populations so intensely vulnerable". There is no justice even in the face of death.
Just like many of his work, Michael takes a very real issue and uses exageration and a pretty childish approach that only hurts the people trying to push for these changes.