Say what you will about Michael Moore, there's little debate that the guy knows how to make a documentary. Being a filmmaker myself (though I have only worked with narrative projects, not documentaries), I can only imagine the amount of pre-production effort he must go through to eventually pull-off his theater of involuntary candor. Talk around his soon-to-be-released new documentary Sicko, which focuses on the ills of the health care system in the U.S., has already turned, well, Michael Moore-ish; to the point where threats from the U.S. Government have been made for violations of the trade embargo with Cuba.

Um....What? My response was just that after taking a cursory look at an article on Yahoo. But, upon further examination, I found that Moore flew 10 workers, all of whom had worked in the post-9/11 cleanup effort, to Cuba to receive medical treatment. Evidently, the point of doing so was to demonstrate the benefits of a socialized health care system, and how these workers have been neglected by HMO systems here in the U.S. The new documentary, Sicko, was born out of Moore's earlier presentation of a mock funeral he staged in front of a health maintenance organization for his TV show "Awful Truth." In this mock funeral, he took the HMO to task for declining to perform a pancreas transplantation for a man with diabetes.

Moore has been assailed by critics from both sides of the political spectrum, mostly for his alleged penchant for distorting facts in favor of entertainment and shock value. Whether or not this will be the case with Sicko remains to be seen. Be that all is it may, though, I am a firm believer that where there is smoke there is fire,; and in the case of the health care system, there's a blazing inferno -- something that Michael Moore couldn't have possibly started or exacerbated by himself, despite what his critics might claim.