"SiCKO" POTENT

          Michael Moore's healthcare industry documentary graphically illustrates the stark division between the United States and the rest of the Western world.
          In 2007, when the film was released, 250 million Americans had healthcare, and 50 million Americans had no healthcare coverage at all. But even the insured generally had a hard time getting the healthcare they required.
          In almost any other country, healthcare works. But not in America. And the reason for that is healthcare insurance companies. What the film makes clear: Healthcare is not a privilege, it's a right.
          The film shows a guy whose granddaughter was going to get an implant in one ear only, because he was told that's all his healthcare would cover...until he wrote his insurance company a letter apprising them of Michael Moore's new documentary. Whereupon he soon got a phone call from the health insurance company which did an about-face and now said, yes, no problem, the granddaughter would be covered for implants in both ears, after all.
          Elsewhere the film focuses on cases of uninsured sick people taken away from the hospital by cab and abandoned in the street. "Who are we?" Moore asks. "Is this what we've become? A nation that dumps its own citizens like so much garbage on the side of the curb because they can't pay their hospital bills?"
          Based on a wide variety of cases explored, one finishes the film feeling that the healthcare system has less of an interest in helping sick people become well, and more of an interest in making profit.
          "Looking back," says the guy whose job used to be trying to deny people the healthcare they paid for, "did I do harm to people's lives? Yeah, hell yeah."
          The film throws light on a "plan hatched between Nixon and Edgar Kaiser" wherein "patients were given less and less care."
          Healthcare industry contributions to the US Congress purchased a bill that lets drug companies charge whatever they want. No matter how exorbitant. For his complicity in the Prescription Drug Act of 2003, Bush was given almost $900,000.
          You don't have to bring your checkbook to the hospital for healthcare anywhere else in the Western world. Socialized systems in the US include police, firefighters, teachers, and postal workers. But nothing for the quality healthcare that everyone else gets.
          In United Kingdom, for example, healthcare is considered national insurance. There is no bill to pay. Giving birth? Zero charge. Heart attack? Zero charge. But everything would change in the UK if the healthcare system was purchased by lobbyists like we have here.
          Fact: the man behind the web's biggest anti-Michael Moore website had to shut it down because he couldn't afford to keep it going due to his wife's healthcare costs. So Michael Moore wrote him an anonymous check for $12,000 to cover his wife's healthcare costs. And because of Michael Moore's money, the Michael Moore-hater's wife got better.
          The fascinating film freely available online.


Stewart Kirby writes for 
THE INDEPENDENT
and
TWO RIVERS TRIBUNE

"METAL" RESOUNDS

          The 1981 film inspired by the adult sci-fi, horror, and fantasy magazine Heavy Metal, featuring a string of animated stories shown to a girl in a barn by a glowing green orb calling itself the Loknar.
          Bolstered by great songs from Cheap Trick, Sammy Hagar, Journey, and others, the cult classic reflects the magazine's futuristic-soft porn ethos. It's not an American invention, actually. Heavy Metal, first published in 1977, was the US version of a French magazine first published in 1973 called Metal Hurlant.
          Like the French animated masterpiece Fantastic Planet (1973), the strong suit of Heavy Metal is sheer imagination, with the additional benefit of humor thoroughly marbled, plus varying degrees of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll.
          One story, "Den", has a geeky kid named Dan earnestly attesting that when a weird glowing green meteor landed on his lawn, he was transported to another world where he became a muscular bald dude named Den. As voiced by John Candy, the affirmation, "I wasn't about to go around with my dork hanging out," greatly entertains and typifies much of the film's irreverent stoner tone.
          The hand-drawn animation appears flat compared to many computer-generated images, yet it's a cinematic breath of fresh air to see the variety and unique style that current Disney re-makes so woefully lack. Indeed, CG effects defeat the purpose of animation. That purpose is not to replicate reality, but rather to improve upon it with a vision which we call artistic. Bugs Bunny, for example, doesn't look like a real rabbit. Intentionally so. And that intention would be lost in a CG product of a regular old rabbit hopping around.
          Furthermore, Disney's decision to shove decades of differently animated movies into one ill-advised uniform CG shellac negates art. Because Disney bought ABC, Marvel, and Star Wars, everything they do is automatically and undeservedly too big to fail, but none of it's any good.
          Better off watching Heavy Metal, even though it has ten different directors and ten different writers. For additional animated kicks, check out the sword and sorcery action of Fire and Ice (1983), featuring the art of the great Frank Frazetta.


HEAVY METAL
Starring (the voices of)
John Candy,
Harold Ramis,
Eugene Levy,
John Vernon,
Douglas Kenney
Runtime 86 minutes


Stewart Kirby writes for
THE INDEPENDENT
and
TWO RIVERS TRIBUNE

"SHANE" STAKES WESTERN CLAIM

          A simple yet effective sun god myth set in the Old West.
          Alan Ladd stars as the title character, a lone stranger with a mysterious past who decides to help hard-working homesteader Joe Starett (Heflin), a man who wants to protect his wife and young son from a greedy land-grabber trying to terrorize the family into abandoning their home.
          With the Grand Tetons as a spectacular backdrop, Shane (1953) benefits from fantastic photography of wide and windy open spaces. It's a story about courage, family, and friendship from the man who would later direct James Dean's final picture, Giant (1956) and several other movie classics. It's a story about honor, keeping one's word, and doing the right thing in a hard and unjust world.
          Quoth glistening Heflin to glistening Ladd whilst shoving in conjoined might against a stubborn stump: "Sometimes there ain't nothin' will do but your own sweat and muscle." Oh gosh, yeah!
          Soaring music, gigantic sky, an uncomplicated story thoroughly worked, girded by themes of love and freedom. Kinda gets ya right here.
          Partly what makes the film work so well is Ladd's cinematic radiance of clean decency. Not seeming a tough guy but rather a "golden angel of the gun" who puts up more of a fight than the terrorizers bargained for helps the movie enormously.
          The bad guys wind up getting a dark angel of their own--Jack Palance, in a career-defining role--who threatens to pull Shane back into the gunfighting he deplores.
          Clint Eastwood stars in the Shane re-make he directed, 1985's Pale Rider. That film has some good scenes, but it's not as memorable as the source material, even with Eastwood, because the original clearly defines the lead characters. Wah-hahh.
          As a subplot, we also see a certain attraction between Joe's wife Marion (Arthur) and Shane. (In this respect, Shane does double-duty, bearing aspects comparable with both Lancelot the Supposedly Chaste and Arthur the Secret Sun God.) Also, we see the hero-worship of Joe and Marion's little towhead boy, Joey, for quick-on-the-draw Shane.
          Featuring Elisha Cook Jr. as the diminutive yet determined fellow homesteader who stands up to the doers of evil as best he can.
          The fights are great--except for the times we see stunt doubles, of course. But, what the hey.
          The Western classic freely available online.


SHANE
Starring Alan Ladd,
Van Heflin,
Jean Arthur,
Jack Palance,
Elisha Cook Jr.
Brandon De Wilde
Directed by George Stevens
Written by A.B. Guthrie Jr, Jack Sher
Based on the novel by Jack Schaefer
Runtime 118 minutes

Stewart Kirby writes for
THE INDEPENDENT
and
TWO RIVERS TRIBUNE