SpoutBlog on spout.com

Under discussion:

Sicko  (2007)

Everyone's talking this morning about this crazy segment on CNN last night. Wolf Blitzer ran a pre-recorded segment, produced by their medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, questioning some of the facts about international health care in Sicko. Michael Moore then went on a ten-minute rant, accusing CNN of treating him unfairly, producing biased reporting to please their sponsors, and lying to the American people.

Gupta isn't exactly saying that Sicko is a ball of lies; he's mostly focused on the facts the film fails to reveal. The basic crux of his argument is this: "It's true, the United States is the only country in the Western world without free, universal access to health care. But, you won't find medical utopia elsewhere." Gupta even closes his segment with something resembling an olive branch: "No matter how much Moore fudged the facts--and he did fudge some facts--there's one everyone agrees on: the system here should be far better."

This just seems like common sense to me--as in, anyone with a brain who watches Sicko understands that there is a give-and-take in other countries, a not-so-swell side of universal health care that Moore declines to show in order to bolster his argument.

But Moore, apparently on a mission to become a parody of himself, is no longer willing to accept even a shred of criticism. When in doubt, he always pulls the "poor little Mike versus the big bad mainstream media companies" card. He criticizes CNN for running pharmaceutical ads, but as Blitzer points out, you don't see him demanding that Harvey Weinstein pull all Sicko ads from CNN.

The clip embedded above closes with Lou Dobbs laughing off Moore as "more of a left-wing promoter than Hugo Chavez", but oddly, Moore actually spends the majority of his CNN screen time deflecting attention away from his film. I guess he figures there's more long-term value in turning the appearance into a stunt, demanding that Blitzer and CNN "apologize to the American people" for their failure to ask the proper questions about the war in Iraq, and even slamming Gupta in particular for embedding with the troops and not coming back with a scathing report (according to Blitzer, Gupta was too busy performing neurosurgery on injured soldiers to do much negative reporting).

Moore has a point-by-point rebuttal of Gupta's piece posted on his own site. It's not exactly a gleeful "smackdown"--the general tone is, "Gupta's truth is sort of true, but it's not the whole truth." Nonetheless, he's still demanding an apology from CNN, and, according to BoingBoing, asking that his fans do the same.

UPDATE: According to FishbowlNY, Michael Moore will be back on CNN tonight, "debating" Sanjay Gupta face-to-face. Fishbowl also confirms that I'm not crazy, and that Moore did seem to put a very strange spin on his enunciation of Gupta's last name--they refer to it as "the Kwik-E-Mart pronunciation."

Under discussion:

Ghostbusters  (1984)

Mary Poppins  (1964)

Summer Stock  (1950)

An excellent blogathon began over the weekend, sparked by this post at All About Movies (incidentally, this is a testament to the great democratizing power of the blogosphere: the post was written by Emma, a British high school student who admits in her Blogger profile that her site "sometimes shifts into fashion-blog, or even worse, hormonal teenage girl-blog.") The theme? Performances That Changed My Life.

My favorite contribution so far is Self-Styled Siren's entry on Ginger Roger's turn as an acid-tongued chorine in 42nd Street. The Siren offers eight lessons that she learned from Annie. Lesson #2 involves the crucial relationship between self-confidence and risky fashion: "When Anytime Annie enters, she is wearing tweeds and a monocle. And, in the modern parlance, she rocks them." Other very-good entries include Peter Nellhaus on Sean Connery in From Russia With Love; and Nathaniel R's take on the great ghost-singer Marti Nixon's work in West Side Story.

Since it's Tuesday, and thus time for another entry of The Micro Five, I thought I'd just offer a handful of performances that impacted me in some great way. Except this week there are only three, because I couldn't think of five performances that qualified as "life-changing", and I didn't want to have to qualify the list with a "this one didn't exactly *change* my life, but but but..." If you want to produce a response list, send it over to Emma so she add it to the ever-growing tally.

1. Bill Murray, Ghostbusters

The afternoon that I watched Ghostbusters for the first time (on VHS, aged six) is my earliest memory of feeling sexual attraction to another human being. Bill Murray was hardly an adonis in 1984 (or ever), and even at six, I think I knew that, but I was drawn to this strange, pock-marked man nonetheless. I even remember the exact moment of the film that did it for me: Ray and Peter have just been kicked out of the University, and they're standing on the steps to the library, passing back and forth a bottle of booze. Ray is afraid of getting a real job; Peter, rocking back and forth on his heels, tells his partner that they were destined to lose their jobs so that they could start their own paranormal investigation agency. To this day, I'm still attracted to wild-eyed drunks with crackpot schemes, but now I try to pick specimens with better skin.

2. Judy Garland, Summer Stock

A Star is Born features my *favorite* Garland performance (maybe my favorite performance by any actress in any film ever), but her work in this minor Gene Kelly star vehicle had a far greater impact on my life. Summer was Judy's last film at MGM; she was dropped from her contract shortly after filming completed, due to mood swings, lateness, wild weight fluctuations, and general drug-fueled erratic behavior. When I first watched the film, I knew nothing about Garland or her legendary troubles, but it was nonetheless apparent that there were two Judys on screen: the plump, scared-looking Judy who slogs through the bulk of the film as a farmer who reluctantly gives up her barn to her sister's theater company; and the svelte, besuited spark plug who Fosses her way through the next-to-last number, "Get Happy." The incredible discrepancy between the two Judys sent me on a search to dig up all the information I could find, first about the production of the film, and then about Judy's embattled career. It was the first event that led me to transition from making films (badly) to writing about them.

3. Glynis Johns, Mary Poppins (above)

Who wants to hang at a fantasy carnival with a practically perfect flying nanny when mom's trying to radicalize the kitchen help? Johns, as the singing suffragette who hires the title character to look after her brood while she's out rallying, puts gentle, cherubic face on militant feminism. Set against the shrill, mannish Julie Andrews, Johns looks all the more appealing. Put it this way: I never wanted a spoon full of sugar as much as I longed to grow up to be a a soldier in a petticoat, marching through the streets of London, casting off the shackles of yesterday.

Earlier installments of The Micro Five:

Improbable Werner Herzog Anecdotes
Unplanned Movie Pregnancies

Under discussion:

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford  (2007)

The Nanny Diaries  (2007)

No Country for Old Men  (2007)

3:10 to Yuma  (2007)

Rare is the year that a studio moves up a release date, in order to ensure that their film is "the first Western in the marketplace." But such is the case this fall, as Lionsgate has decided to open James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma a month ahead of schedule, in order to get a jump on the competition (ie: The Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men, and The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt). But while Lionsgate might have dodged their genre competition, September's an increibly crowded month for "prestige" releases; still, 3:10's biggest competition on that particular weekend will be hardly-fearsome The Nanny Diaries.

Spike Lee held another press conference in Italy yesterday, in which he wowed the local journalists with his usual "don't call me mainstream, I'm just here to scout locations for my $45 million film" bon mots. Amongst other revelations, Lee intimated that recent success has hardly made his life in Hollywood any easier. "My last feature film, Inside Man, was my most successful so far, and I was naive enough to think that that meant I could go from there and make any film I wanted to make. But I was very, very wrong about that."

Apparently attempting to replicate the, um, success of Bewitched, Nicole Kidman will produce and star in a wacky romantic comedy called Monte Carlo.