Michael Moore to Speak in Denver Sunday

Filmmaker Michael Moore will speak about his new movie, “Sicko,” Sunday at a 6 p.m. in Governor’s Park. The Mayan Theater is showing a sneak peak of the movie Saturday night, but tickets must be purchased in advance. The film, which deals with the sad state of health care in America, opens at theaters in Colorado Friday, June 29.

“Sicko” follows Moore’s 2004 film “Fahrenheit 9/11” about the lead-up to the war in Iraq and his 2002 film “Bowling for Columbine,” which took on the subject of gun violence in America.

continued… “Sicko” has generally received favorable reviews such as this on from A.O. Scott of the New York Times:

If you listen to what the leaders of both political parties are saying, it seems unlikely that the diagnosis offered by “Sicko” will be contested. I haven’t heard many speeches lately boasting about how well our health care system works. In this sense “Sicko” is the least controversial and most broadly appealing of Mr. Moore’s movies. (It is also, perhaps improbably, the funniest and the most tightly edited.) The argument it inspires will mainly be about the nature of the cure, and it is here that Mr. Moore’s contribution will be most provocative and also, therefore, most useful.

But, as always, Moore draws criticism from detractors on the right, such as Kyle Smith of the New York Post:

The silliness of Moore’s oeuvre is so self-evident that being able to spot it is not liberal or conservative, either; it’s a basic intelligence test, like the ability to match square peg with square hole. His documentaries are political slapstick that could have been made by a third Farrelly brother or a fourth Stooge. I will pay him the honor of treating him with his own meds. (How else to deal with a film that calls Hillary Clinton “sexy”?)

There’s a lot of buzz surrounding “Sicko,” partly because of it’s hot subject and partly because Moore’s last film, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” grossed $220 million, smashing previous box office records for documentaries.