By Mel Yiasemide

In its opening sequences at a packed Directors Guild Theatre last Monday, Michael Moore's Sicko had the crowd laughing with disbelief as a dumbfoundingly boyish President Bush lamented that "too many OB/GYN's aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country."

The laughter, and the tears, continued throughout, as Sicko's overriding point, that the world's wealthiest country must provide free, universal health care to its citizens – with Britain, France and Cuba as chief examples – was delivered with a potent mix of searing truth and comedic revelation.

Post-screening, a black-clad, baseball-capped Michael Moore took to the stage for a Q&A after being introduced by director Ron Howard, the evening's MC.

"We just came back from San Pedro Street in front of the Rescue Mission," Moore explained. He had set up a giant screen at Skid Row and broadcast Sicko to the homeless people there. "Our big L.A. press conference is... tomorrow night. But I wanted to have the first showing at Skid Row. It was really something.

"I've been really bothered by the security camera footage when I first saw it," he continued, referring to a scene in Sicko that shows a disoriented old homeless woman circling L.A.'s Skid Row sidewalk after being
dropped off there from a nearby hospital.

When director Howard opened the floor up to questions, it was clear that most of the audience loved this movie and strongly backed its cause. "What do we do?" asked one man. "Support SB 840," Moore answered quickly, referring to the California Universal Healthcare Act authored by Senator Sheila Kuehl. "And HR 676," its nationwide counterpart.

"We spent two and a half months reading more than 25,000 e-mails," he said of the overwhelming public response to his call for health care horror stories when he was researching this film. That's when Sicko's goal became clear: "Saving ten lives isn't gonna do it. Don't chase one company, but the system. We have to talk about who we are as a people. I can't understand why a society does this, why it allows nine million kids to have no health insurance."

"What's your answer going to be when people bring up the inevitable issue of treating illegal immigrants?" another audience member asked.

Moore's reply was simple: If a person needs medical attention in this country, we can – and should – give it, no questions asked. If America can afford to spend trillions fighting a war in Iraq, and an embargoed, impoverished Cuba can provide citizens and noncitizens alike with some of the most renowned medical care in the world without charge, so can we. "Maybe we should ask ourselves, what would Jesus do?"

He talked about the time he staged a health care Olympics on his NBC show TV Nation: He had dispatched film crews to hospitals in Florida, Canada and Cuba, in a real-time experiment to see which country's medical team could fix a broken bone fastest and cheapest. "Bob Costas and Ahmad Rashad did a play-by-play. Cuba won. She set the bone correctly, charged nothing. Canada almost won, but she charged the guy $15 for crutches. She came in second. We got a call from standards and practices: 'Cuba can't win.' 'They did.' 'Not on NBC. We can't show it.' We actually switched it on the show – Canada won.

"I can't believe I actually took a boat to Cuba," said Moore, about the trip – documented in Sicko – in which he travels to the Communist state with three insured Americans whose own country has let them down in their search for adequate, affordable treatment of ailments they developed after volunteering at Ground Zero. "Now here I am in trouble with the government because I went to Cuba. I'm under some kind of investigation with criminal penalties for violating the embargo act or something."

Moore recalled the time a set worker at the 2003 Academy Awards called him an asshole, just after he'd won an Oscar for Bowling for Columbine, then denounced Bush for declaring war on Iraq, an act of unabashed honesty that got him booed off the stage. Years later, that same man ran into Moore again on a different film set. He approached Moore to tell him he was profusely sorry for what he had done, and for ruining his Oscar moment.

"It's okay, I told him. You believed your president. You should be able to believe your president."

Moore implored Republicans and Democrats to come together to build a universal health care plan that does away with insurance companies and other middlemen: "I really want to reach out to people who don't necessarily share my political views. All Americans should be able to see a doctor and not have to
worry about paying for it."

Sicko will undoubtedly build the kinds of bridges between America and other countries that so many U.S. films and media outlets have failed – or refused – to do.

Says Moore: "Fox News called it brilliant and uplifting last week, and I thought, 'Are they trying to ruin me?' "
Also read Ella Taylor's review of Sicko.

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Wednesday at 8, if you can make it. Sounds intriguing.

Straight from Austin, Texas, A German and A Mexican Tour showcases work from filmmakers Katja Straub and Miguel Alvarez. Both love, tell, and collect stories - narrative or documentary - always with an emphasis on visual exploration. Their rather non-traditional shorts range from personal documentary to narrative film, from experimental to cinema verité. Drawing upon their unique cultural roots, Katja and Miguel offer up stories of Bavarian weather candles, inherited music toys in the forest of Latin America, imprisoned African magic in Berlin, and the like. FILMMAKERS IN ATTENDANCE!

 Read about at Chicken Corner. 

More details to be had at the Echo Park Film Center website.

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O.C. Weekly's Luke Y. Thompson has made the trek up the 5 to watch a bunch of movies, and blog from the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Chasing Ghosts and Iranians – June 25

Cool Cats and Bad Kitties – June 24

Dancin' to the Jailhouse Doc – June 23

Lost Girls and Mighty Black Men – June 23

Or read them all at OC Weeky's Navelgazing blog.

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St. Eligius Hospital turns out to be an autistic child's fanciful daydream; a suicidal J.R. Ewing fires a revolver, possibly at himself, possibly at the beady-eyed demon in the bedroom mirror; the Seinfeld gang gets put on trial for their supposed lack of humanity. Television history is rife with final episodes of landmark, long-running series that have left loyal fans feeling dazed, confused and royally pissed-off. Judging by the published reports, it would seem that Sunday night's series finale of The Sopranos has now joined those infamous ranks. But it doesn't deserve to, and I would argue that all those out there in TV land who have spent the last 48 hours cursing the name of series creator David Chase never really understood or appreciated what made The Sopranos so great in the first place.

In Las Vegas, where I spent the weekend leading up to and including the Sopranos finale, even those individuals who didn't have money riding on the outcome could scarcely keep themselves from speculating about it. Would Tony graduate to that great pork store in the sky, the way his loyal lieutenant (and brother-in-law) Bobby Baccalieri had just the week prior? Would he live, only to lose another loved one — this time maybe a blood relative — to the family business? One friend of mine, the legendary movie producer and sales agent Jeff Dowd (in town for the annual Cinevegas film festival), said he was sure that Carmela Soprano, finally having had her fill of Tony's shenanigans, would herself take up arms. But then again, Dowd added, he had it on good authority that Chase had filmed multiple endings to the episode just to throw potential spoilers off the scent. So, really, anything could happen.

Anything, I suppose, except for nothing at all. Indeed, even the best Vegas odds makers hadn't given a moment's thought to the possibility that, after eight years and 86 hours of ground-breaking television, The Sopranos might sign off forever with one of the greatest fragmentary non-endings since Franz Kafka's The Castle trailed off in mid-sentence. In that moment, in the Palms hotel suite where I was watching the episode with Dowd and a dozen or so other industry types, the disappointment was pea-soup thick, and by the next morning the newspapers were filled with acid-tongued anecdotes about Sopranos viewing parties from coast to coast at which those in attendance, puzzled by Chase's abrupt cut to black in the middle of the episode's final scene, held their collective breath at what they felt certain was a momentary interruption in their cable service.

The Los Angeles Times reported that at one high-ticket gathering in Hollywood, Florida, where fans had paid hundreds of dollars to watch the finale in the company of select cast and crew members, a woman stood up and shouted "What the hell was that anyway?" — a scene doubtless repeated in living rooms across America. Meanwhile, even some professional critics were busy holding Chase's feet to the fire, accusing him at best of having copped out or, at worst, of having played some sadistic joke on his legions of worshipful viewers. In another Los Angeles Times article, this one headlined "Sopranos: What was that all about?", the critic Mary McNamara opined that "Ending a series with the social weight of The Sopranos is not an enviable task, but end it must, and not with the sophomoric gesture of a blank screen."

For the moment, I'll reserve comment on the sophomoric gestures of some published arts criticism and just say that what I personally find most surprising isn't how The Sopranos ended, but that anyone — least of all the show's supposed die-hard fans — would have expected anything different. Here is a series that, since its inception, has always taken the road less traveled, that managed to invoke a lifetime of mob-movie clichés while simultaneously transcending them. It was a meta-mob-movie in which the characters learned how to be gangsters from watching White Heat and GoodFellas and the Godfather trilogy, and in which family matters were forever intruding upon Family matters. Within the seemingly restrictive boundaries of an exhausted dramatic genre (Was it even possible to care about the petty tribulations of old-fashioned gangsters in the midst of the Enron era?), Chase managed to weave a great American epic about the burden of power, the indignity of old age, the terror of children that they will grow up to become their parents, and, of course, the inability of modern medicine to cure all that ails us (especially existential crises). And yet, people expected Chase to end things...how exactly? With the funeral of Tony Soprano? With Carmela and the kids joining the Federal Witness Protection program? With Artie Bucco deciding to sell the Vesuvio and the whole cast gathering together to sing "Auld Lang Syne"?

No matter what Chase did, of course, it was never going to be to everyone's liking. What he did do, however, strikes me as one of the boldest strokes in a series that was never short on radical gestures. Contrary to the abrupt plug-pulling that some have accused it of being, the final scene of the final Sopranos was in fact a carefully plotted and ingeniously executed distillation of Chase's three greatest themes: work, death and blood ties. Nothing hasty or unplanned about it. We are, as at the end of so many episodes, gathered for a Sopranos family dinner — not at home or at the Vusivio, but this time at Holsten's, a real ice-cream parlor and diner located in the Brookdale section of North Jersey. Tony, the first to arrive, sits down in a booth and, after contemplating several selections (including "I Gotta Be Me" and "In a Lonely Place") punches up some classic Journey on the jukebox. One by one, Carmela, AJ and Meadow arrive, while Chase reminds us, with each nervous ring of the door chime and each menacing cutaway to the mysterious stranger eyeing Tony from the counter that, for this family, the specters of execution or imprisonment forever loom like the sword of Damocles. Then, just as Steve Perry prepares to once more tell us to not stop believing, Chase does exactly that — he stops, effectively leaving it up to each individual viewer to decide whether the lives of some of the most memorable characters in the history of American fiction end over a plate of onion rings or go on and on and on and on.

You can call that a cop-out if you so desire, but to my mind the failing of the final Sopranos isn't Chase's — it's the audience's. Reading those Monday-morning reports of disgruntled viewers assailing cable operators with reports of service outages, I was reminded of something the director David Lynch said to me last fall when we were discussing his most recent (and most widely misunderstood) film, Inland Empire. "Some people really like to know what everything is," he said of viewers ruffled by his own penchant for loose ends and elliptical narratives. "I don't know how they go through life, because life has so many things that are abstract, but they do, and they just like to know — they've got that kind of mind, or being." The comparison is apt, I think, because outside of Lynch, Chase is one of the few contemporary American filmmakers to have actively embraced surrealism and abstract expressionism as part of his aesthetic, and the 21-episode farewell season of The Sopranos could well be considered his Inland Empire, from Tony's comatose Kevin Finity dream to those final seconds of silence and black.

What the reaction to The Sopranos finale rather dishearteningly proves is that many in the show's audience really were watching every week to see who might get whacked next instead of, you know, how David Chase would further push the aesthetic envelope of dramatic television storytelling. It also says something larger (and even more disheartening) about a culture that has been conditioned — perhaps in schools that fail to meet the minimum standards we should demand for our children's education, perhaps by the small-mindedness and lack of ambition in most movies, novels, plays, etc. — to believe that proper stories have distinct beginnings, middles and ends and that anything which departs from this formula is, for lack of a better word, wrong. It says something about an audience that prefers a passive form of spectatorship to an active one, that wishes to sit back and be told exactly how to think and feel at every given moment — an attitude, I would argue, too often carried forth from the cinema or the TV room into the voting booth. And it says something about people who long for closure in things — like human relationships — that are by their very nature forever in flux. As David Chase applied the final strokes to his masterful canvas, it became clear that he had created a Jackson Pollack in a world that prefers Norman Rockwells.

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