The Small-Scale Intimate Scenes Of Sicko Are Great. The Michael Moore-Centric Material? Less So.

Fahrenheit 9/11 had catapulted Michael Moore to a level of fame unheard of for the vast majority of not just documentary filmmakers in America, but filmmakers in any genre in America. The dude became a part of the Bush-era zeitgeist with his 2004 box office phenomenon and while I had heavily mixed feelings on that movie, there's no denying it struck a nerve with people and it set expectations high for whatever his follow-up project would end up being. Turns out, his next feature film would be Sicko, an extensive look at the American health care system, a hot-button topic in American politics as the rampant attempts to revoke the Affordable Healthcare Act under the newest presidential administration have demonstrated.

Taxi To The Dark Side Is Incredibly Haunting And Informative Documentary Fare

At the dawn of the 21st century, America was forever altered by the September 11th attacks that took countless lives and is still reverberating through our society today. Specifically, 9/11 was the impetus behind our Middle East military conflict that has been ongoing for over a decade, making it one of the longest wars fought by American forces. In the first few years of said conflict, controversy emerged over how our military forces were treating detained individuals from whom we were hoping to extract information about the whereabouts Al-Queda Intel and weaponry. How were they getting this information? Through gruesome torture techniques that violated international law.

It's Hard Not To Get Heated Up Over Environmental Dangers Thanks To An Inconvenient Truth

It's always fascinating to go back and watch movies made in a specific political climate and see if they both hold up as movies and examine them as artifacts of the era in which they were made. When I watched Sidney Lumet's Network for the first time last month, that was the exact experience I went through as the film very much served as an encapsulation of 1970's politics while also resonating on its own timeless merits. In the first decade of the 21st century, plenty of pieces of pop culture emerged critical of the George W. Bush administration, one of which was Al Gore's 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a film that does make reference to real world political events occurring in the W. Bush era, but is mostly concentrated on the timeless horrors of global warming.