C'est Non Un Blog

You ever wonder what anti-abortionists eat for breakfast?

I’m just sayin’…

If you were like me as a kid and watched each Star Wars and Indiana Jones film oh, about seven billion times, then you probably got a little suspicious about that scream you always heard when some lame faceless badguy bought it like a bitch. You knew he was a bitch because he screamed like a little girl, a scream so distinctive that you couldn’t help notice that every lame badguy had the exact same scream. Well, it was the same scream and here, finally, is some proof:

I watched Sicko last night, was very pleased with it, but then the moment was spoiled after I became disappointed with some of my fellow movie go-ers that I shared the elevator with. One of them mentioned that he liked the film, but didn’t think it accurately portrayed Canada’s healthcare system. It wasn’t, to use a phrase I hate, “fair and balanced”. I wasn’t exactly surprised to hear this, since it is the major criticism of the film that I had read in reviews prior to seeing it. Michael Moore whitewashes a subject to meet his agenda. Which is true, but in some cases that actually serves a higher purpose.

The part that killed me was that Moore points out in his film how viscously the American politicians and media have attacked the Canadian government run universal healthcare system as the most evil thing to face Western civilization since Communism. According to our “those in the know” no American would ever want to need medical attention in Canada. All of this, despite the fact that they have the number one healthcare system in the world and we are number twenty-seven, the lowest in the Western world. Of course the point is that they are raking in money hand over fist, so why would they want us to think there was a better way of doing things that cost us less money and made them more?

Which gets back to Moore’s “fair and balanced” vision of Canada’s, Great Britain’s and France’s healthcare systems. Sure, they might not be perfect, but what system is? And lets face it, even if Canada’s healthcare system is only half as good as Moore makes it out to be (which it probably isn’t) it is still twice as good as our own (which it most definitely is). How much negative information should Moore add to his film to make it “accurate”? I was instantly reminded of a quote I had read early in the week in an interview with Entertainment Weekly from filmmaker Werner Herzog: 

You did have some commercial success recently with the documentary Grizzly Man. But you were snubbed for an Oscar nomination for the movie, perhaps because you’ve alienated yourself from a lot of people in the documentary community for the liberties you take in your nonfiction films, like scripting lines for your subjects.
“That’s okay. We need a new approach to reality. Cinéma vérité is basically the answer of the ’60s and, in my opinion, just the accountant’s truth. We are in a situation now where there is a huge onslaught on our notion of reality, from reality TV, virtual reality, the Internet, digital effects, Photoshop, WrestleMania — all these things pretending to be reality. Since the early ’70s, I’ve been working towards a new form of dealing with reality, going for something that illuminates us, something that is like an ecstatic truth. Whatever departs from facts is wonderful. I’m not so much into facts.” 

I think this sentiment works 100% with Michael Moore’s film. The point of the film is not to paint a one hundred percent accurate portrayal of each healthcare system, warts and all, but to show how we could be doing so much better, if only greed got out of the way. For instance, Moore points out that a lot of services we take for granted have been socialized just like how we fear our healthcare system might be. Can you imagine calling your insurance company before the fire department while your home burns to the ground? How would you like to pay a cop to investigate a robbery? Want to slip the mailman some cash to make sure you can get all of your bills on time? Why then do we have to haggle over prices when our lives our on the line?

Sometimes it is more important to know that our healthcare system sucks so we can try and change it than it is to know that the Canadian healthcare system isn’t perfect, but maybe that’s just me.

I had a dream last night (well, technically this morning) that I was fighting this evil tree beast (don’t ask) on an Australian ranch and to fight it I had to transport to another location (for gawd knows what reason). Not only did I bend space though, I also bent time and landed myself back at Bard College at the beginning of my first semester. Unlike most time travel movies I didn’t meet (or try and avoid) my younger doppleganger. Instead I was my younger doppleganger, but with all of the knowledge I now possess, much like Quantum Leap, but just transported into my own body.

This led to quite a few interesting and baffling questions. When you know everything you now know, but haven’t had the chance to learn it yet, do you keep doing what you did or do you do something different and risk everything changing? Figure, you are trapped doing every boring thing you did before and having to face doing it all over again. Seven years is a long time to go through the motions. So do you try a completely new direction? I mean, I’m sure I could have gotten laid a lot more in college knowing what I know now. I could have sought out my friends quicker, but then how would you even go about doing that? “Hey, I already know you like this, this and this…Want to be friends?” You could have become intimate with the one that got away before they got away, but do you risk ruining their happiness in doing so? Do you take a trip down to Florida in 2000 to help stop an election from getting rigged? Alert the airports that they have terrorists on their planes on September 10, 2001? And if you do, how drastically does the world change? Does it move towards the better? I mean, 9/11 was horrible, Bush is the devil, and Iraq is a pointless war that will surely doom us all, but without all of those things there would be no remake of Battlestar Galatica.

What a responsibility it would be to live in the past with the knowledge of the future. What an incredible burden. Sure it sounds great but would it really be worth it? My mind was so blown by the complexity of the scenarios that my mind had created for me that it took quite some time before I could rouse myself from bed. And as a result I’ve been in a very odd mood all day long, lonely wondering many “What ifs”? If you’ve got a few minutes to yourself one day, take a second to think of what it would be like if the you of today went back to be you of seven years ago. Would things be better or worse? I mean much of what holds us back in life is the fear of the unknown, but if the unknown is known, couldn’t we do more and be more? This question has nagged at me all day long, and honestly I don’t know the answer.

If anyone can tell me ANYTHING about this, I would be very appreciative!

Just FYI for anyone who might care: I saw Transformers tonight and yes, it does kick a whole hell of a lot of ass. I kept swearing at the Mazda 3 the whole way home because it wouldn’t turn into a robot. I hope I didn’t hurt its feelings too much. But anyway, anyone who played with a robot truck as a little kid will have a lot of fun seeing this movie. And be sure to see it in the theater, in the biggest screen near you. Because it is so worth it.