I'm alarmed by the state of the "Globe and Mail." One of the more recent articles they had contained the wanton blathering of faux-documentarian Michael Moore. (Other things aside, the distinct lack of polish made the
piece next to impossible to decipher.)
Unfortunately, I was able to decipher the interview in the end, which is about the time I almost was injured by my own laughter:
Meanwhile, Moore's "man of the people" persona has become so ingrained in our psyches that we forget he is the brand name behind hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales. As much as he fights it on screen, with his baseball caps, down-home patter and Wal-Mart attire, Michael Moore is very big business.
With radical left-wingers, he may seem like a regular man of the people. Outside of that exalted bunch, though, that description seem a little contrived.
The comedy continues with lines from Moore himself (I inserted the source tags because the original had NONE, which is terribly sloppy, so they could be wrong.):
[G&M] I'm man enough to admit that parts of Sicko made me cry.
[Moore] It's okay, it's okay to cry. I cried for a whole year making this film. I cried when we were editing it. When we filmed the section with the woman whose daughter died going from hospital to hospital because her insurer wouldn't cover emergency care, I cried for a week.
[G&M] Is your fame becoming a liability in your films - does it, paradoxically, make it difficult for your subjects to speak with candour?
[Moore] I've been slowly trying to take myself out of my films, but what happens when I try to do that is people look for me. I've realized that people appreciate my presence. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be cheered on by the crowds. But I made a decision with Sicko that the people in the film would make the film with me, that it would be a kind of group effort, because we're all in some way a part of the problem. There's something systemically wrong with the way we treat each other in the United States.
Shirley Douglas, the daughter of Tommy Douglas, was at the screening in London, your London, and she said she felt an immense sadness coming from the film, the sadness of someone, me, who realizes that his country has lost his way. But I still think it's possible to get the American soul back.
[G&M] And you don't want to mess with Kiefer Sutherland's mother.
[Moore] I know, I know! And did you know that Christopher Guest's grandfather helped create the British health-care system?
[G&M] It's all become clear to me now - to fix the U.S. health-care system, we just need to ask Lindsay Lohan's grandfather!
It's tough making millions off the suffering of others as a socialist propagandist, but thank goodness someone's willing to do it.
michael moore
