Below is the trailer for Michael Moore’s new film Capitalism: A Love Story, coming to theaters October 2nd. I am curious to see this but agree with people who say that it seems somewhat dated and that perhaps now would be a much better time for Sicko instead. Was Sicko released too early and Capitalism too late?

A while back AJ Schnack asked a bunch of people to guess what Sicko would make at the box office. I had no idea but I guessed it wasn’t going to do the business of Farenheit 9/11 so I went for 25 million and I won! Sicko ended up taking just over 24.5 million so to be fair Jonathan Marlow was bloody close too with 24 million (but I’m holding on to my bragging rights!)

Very few documentaries are crossing the 1 million mark this year. Anthony Kaufman is worried that there may be a doc depression. Certainly, the lower than expected numbers for In The Shadow of the Moon are both surprising and worrying since a well-made doc about American astronauts feels about as close to a sure thing as you can get in this fickle business.

It’s nice to see No End in Sight so high up on the list for 2007 so far but I feel increasingly confused about how this stuff plays out. Do distributors have a better idea or is everyone scrabbling around in the dark? Perhaps this is another example of the “glut of cinema” – too many docs competing for a limited movie-going audience.

I will stop going on about Sicko soon but I like this review from Roger Ebert. Meanwhile John Pierson is causing a ruckus with his open letter to Michael Moore on indieWIRE.

If you want to join me on my high horse you can sign petitions and get involved in the campaign for universal health care here.

Now if I may lurch from one cause to another for a moment. I was feeling a tad guilty about all my flights to film festivals this year. I don’t drive a car but I’m leaving quite a footprint with my air miles so I bought a Terrapass to balance my impact. I realize it is only a small step in the right direction but it’s an easy, lazy way to do something good. You can buy them for your car and household too. You can even have a green wedding! I am trying to be environmentally well-behaved across the board but it’s fun to be able to throw money at my computer and feel good about it.

I saw Sicko last night and got exactly what I expected: bold sweeping statements without much room for nuances and subtle shades of gray. But then again I don’t believe that there is a place for nuances and subtle shades of gray when it comes to America’s healthcare system because it is royally fucked. It doesn’t serve the people without health insurance, that much has always been clear, but it lets down the people with health insurance too and this aspect may be more eye-opening for people who see the film. People in the cinema were gasping when they saw what you get for free in the UK and France and then I realized that I was amazed too even though I lived under that system for years. It’s funny how quickly ones expectations and horizons change. I’ve only been in the US for 2 and a half years and I already take so much of the healthcare situation here as a given, rather than as a corrupt and broken system that needs desperately to change.
It was so wonderful to hear Tony Benn passionately describing and defending the British NHS system. I was moved through much of the film but it was Benn’s segment that got me the most somehow. I guess I’d just forgotten that some politicians can be like that, and still be like that after a life in politics!
I really do urge people to see this film (she says sounding like a schoolteacher!). You might have to swallow hard during some of the more overtly Moore-ish moments but he has made a really important film and I hope that people are outraged when they see it, and that this outrage turns to action. It does everybody a disservice to live in a nation this rich with such a crap healthcare system.

Ok, lecture over. AJ Schnack has taken bets on how well the film will perform, including an incredibly undecided vote from me. I’m not sure how well it will hold up against other Summer blockbusters but I sincerely hope that my vote is wrong and that Sicko soars through the roof. It will be nice when more people can share my outrage rather than muttering words like “socialism” (run for the hills!) under their breath when this issue comes up in conversation, which it does rather often if I’m in the room!

I have a few problems with some of Michael Moore’s filmmaking methods but I have to say that I am cheering him on with Sicko. I haven’t seen the film yet but healthcare is another one of my bugbears so I’m looking forward to it. I don’t get health insurance through work and have really struggled to cover myself since I moved to the US. Considering I have a decent salary and a fairly comfortable life I have no idea what other people who earn less or have more people to support do. My “emergency” insurance is supposed to cover me if I get run over by a bus but even then it only covers the hospital stay, and not the Surgeons and Anesthesiologists. If I survived the accident I’d still be financially screwed. The New York Times has an article about Moore’s campaigning around the film. Will it make a difference? The Director of health policy studies at the free-market Cato Institute is sceptical: “I think it will be like ‘Bowling for Columbine. You remember how we all got together afterwards and decided to ban guns.”

For those who would like to share this particular bugbear with me, I recommend that you read the New York Magazine article on “The Young Invincibles” about how young New Yorkers are scraping by without health insurance and how this serves neither their bodies nor surprisingly the hospitals that treat them. Even on a purely economic level the system is inefficient because many of these young people are forced to declare bankruptcy after a hospital visit which means that the hospital bills don’t get paid. And these are hip freelancers, not poor families who often pay a far greater price. Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article on “The Moral-Hazard Myth” details how high this price can be and is a brilliant debunking of fashionable theories (in the US at least) that argue that if people had free access to healthcare they would take advantage of it and overwhelm available resources. The last paragraph says what I believe in a nutshell so I’m going to copy it here in full:

The issue about what to do with the health-care system is sometimes presented as a technical argument about the merits of one kind of coverage over another or as an ideological argument about socialized versus private medicine. It is, instead, about a few very simple questions. Do you think that this kind of redistribution of risk is a good idea? Do you think that people whose genes predispose them to depression or cancer, or whose poverty complicates asthma or diabetes, or who get hit by a drunk driver, or who have to keep their mouths closed because their teeth are rotting ought to bear a greater share of the costs of their health care than those of us who are lucky enough to escape such misfortunes? In the rest of the industrialized world, it is assumed that the more equally and widely the burdens of illness are shared, the better off the population as a whole is likely to be. The reason the United States has forty-five million people without coverage is that its health-care policy is in the hands of people who disagree, and who regard health insurance not as the solution but as the problem.