The little rodent chef will have to wait. It’s the giant socialist weasel’s day!

This was the weekend where it was put up or shut up time in terms of seeing two different movies, for two different reasons. Since I had pretty much demanded that all three of my regular readers ensure that the forces of good triumph over the forces of envy at Disney by seeing Ratatouille the day before yesterday, I kind of had to see it myself ASAP.

As a good liberal, I also felt the need to send a message about the urgency of the health care crisis by doing my part to improve the opening weekend grosses for Sicko — not out of any strong loyalty to Michael Moore, but because the health care debate demands to be opened up beyond the bounds approved of by the various gatekeepers of U.S. public opinion. One thing about Moore, he breaks through walls and gets attention that few other lefties can.

I was going to write about both movies, but Sicko has taken over this post. But that’s no slight on Ratatouille — it’s great and I’ll try to discuss it more later on, if only in passing. Right now, I seem to have controversy on the brain.

And what a mixed bag we get with Michael Moore. As David Edelstein writes “Michael Moore is a polarizing figure, by which I mean he polarizes me.”

Over the last fews years I’ve gone from being a more or less unrepentant admirer of Moore to a somewhat wary bystander as I’ve been persuaded that, even as cinematic op-ed pieces, Moore too often uses his editing bay in misleading ways that can’t be ignored. The allegation mentioned in the recent open letter from indie-film impresario John Pierson to Moore is just another chain in a line of unacceptable liberties with the strict truth which, it now appears, go as far back as Roger and Me.

On the other hand, Moore’s aim is as true as I wish his films were. On the big picture in his films, and especially with Sicko, he’s done just what a muckraker is supposed to do: comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

And, just as important, he’s usually a terrific entertainer, but he pushes too much. Do we really need, again, to see people crying as often as we do in both Sicko? Do we really need Samuel Barber’s famous adagio, a cinematic musical cliche if ever there was, underneath an executive’s confession of homicide-by-insurance? And, I’ve got to agree with almost every review I’ve read that the trip to Cuba is ill-advised and probably does more harm than good to his overall argument.

Nevertheless, there’s no denying Moore’s strength as a crudely powerful movie preacher. I walked out of the film ready to go forth into the mall and evangalize for the film, and it was only late last night and this morning as I looked at the reviews that small doubts and criticisms grew into formed opinions that, once again, Moore had pushed too far, avoiding uncomfortable realities that messed up his sometimes too tidy conclusions.

Still, if Moore tends to loose his moorings, he causes some of his critics to become shipwrecked. Among the usual rightwing online suspects, Libertas’s Dirty Harry actually manages to keep the blatant falsehoods to a minimum and he has proper respect for the seriousness of the problem, even if most of his conclusions are utterly wrong and obtuse. (Of course, Harry, the film is anecdotal — you liked it when Ronald Reagan told little stories, didn’t you? These all appear to be true, which might be a nice change of pace for you. And no, we liberals still don’t like terrorists any more than you do. And Moore was being ironic with the trip to Gitmo, not tacitly endorsing it’s treatment of prisoners. Sheesh.)

But it’s Box Office Mojo’s resident film critic, Scott Holleran who wins the prize for matching Moore’s past implied falsehoods with outright stupidity:

Moore covers health care like Fox News covers religion and the war in Iraq, without providing essential facts. He starts with the claim that 18,000 people die each year from a lack of health insurance, an idiotic assertion. People die. They die of cancer, heart disease and other causes. Individuals have a right to choose not to buy insurance…and that means they choose to live without securing a means of paying for catastrophic illness.

Although I appreciate the rhetorical cover he takes in his glancing slap at Fox News, I suppose in Holleran’s world if thousands die because, say, the government does nothing to protect water from being contaminated, then it’s idiotic to say that government inaction killed anyone. And wasn’t the choice not to drink bottled water really up to the individual? (That “idiotic” 18,000 figure, which sounds low to me, comes from this wacky hippy outfit. How many more people would survive each year if everyone had access to decent preventive medical care?)

Getting back to Holleran, here’s another gem on Sicko’s widely disliked (even by overtly liberal film critics) Cuban segment:

How many enslaved Cubans died so that his pre-selected participants could get cheaper drugs and a new set of teeth? This is a country where kids are stripped of their milk ration at the age of six.

I don’t know, Scott, how many? Got any of those “essential facts” that Moore and Fox News fail to provide to enlighten us? Oh, and what’s the daily Federal milk ration for a six year old in the U.S.? Oh yeah, we don’t have one for kids of any age.

Why? Holy Godwin’s law, Batman! Here’s why:

We’ve seen that type of political system, dictatorship, in countries like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, where medicine was controlled by the state, everyone supposedly had health care — and no one had rights.

No doubt, the Castro government did see an opportunity here to place a sharp stick in the eye of the U.S. by providing first-rate health care for Moore’s band of medical refugees on film. You can criticize Moore for giving them that opportunity, but can you ignore the fact that getting 9/11 heroes to allow themselves to be used in this way by a declared enemy of the U.S. must have required some pretty strong duress. If they were the Dixie Chicks, they’d probably all be deported by now.

So, what do you think Moore might have had on them to get them to behave in such a way? Oh yeah, the chance to get decent medical care without bankrupting themselves and their families. Wonder why they can’t get that here? Was it Moore who gave Castro that stick, or was it our pathetic excuse for a health care system?

Sicko is messy and engaging and, as per Ella Taylor, it sure seems to go way over the top in portraying France as heaven on earth and England’s NHS as near perfection. But none of this is that important. What’s important is that the health care crisis is real, threatens all of us, and there is no reason at the moment to think the ruling elite of this country wants it any other way.

It’s English MP Tony Benn, whom the New York Post’s Kyle Smith calls a “pet commie” but who here comes across like a more charismatic English Paul Wellstone and very much the “voice of sanity” that so befuddles the neocon likes of Smith, who puts it all into perspective. He talks about how people who are deeply in debt and miserable and overworked and overstressed beyond all reason don’t vote. He talks about how the right seems to thrive in an atmosphere of hopelessness and cynicism. (Just stop by my office, where I’m the only liberal to be found. I’m also the only person there who is does not to believe that every single politician is completely corrupt.)

And then Benn gets the film’s only big applause line by daring to state the obvious when talking about the respective budgets for defense and health care: “If you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people.”