On DVD: Three to End the Year

One of the nice things about the holidays is that I usually get a few extra days off from work, and with raiding in World of Warcraft mostly suspended due to people's schedules, I have more time to put my Netflix subscription to good use and watch more movies than usual. I watched three movies this weekend, in the following order:

• Eastern Promises reteams the excellent and gifted David Cronenberg with Viggo Mortensen for a look inside the Russian mafia in London. It's a forceful, direct look at loyalty and people caught between themselves and what's expected of them. Naomi Watts offers us a way in as a midwife determined to find the family of a pregnant girl who died during childbirth and is led to the Russian underworld by way of the diary the girl left behind. Mortensen is excellent, as always, and Cronenberg is a master of violence when he needs to be. The film isn't quite the knockout that "A History of Violence" was for me (and there are those who have argued that this film is a retread of the other — and they're wrong), but it's still very good viewing.
• Sicko is incendiary, reductive, illuminating and heartbreaking. It's Michael Moore so that means ridiculous stunts like taking boatloads of people to Guantanamo Bay to get medical treatment, but it's also Michael Moore so it means an impassioned plea for equality and justice in this country. As someone who's worked at a School of Public Health for more than a decade, it's pretty easy to see that our healthcare system is ridiculously broken, and a joke compared to the rest of the developed world, and Moore's film drives that point home. "But universal healthcare means higher taxes for everyone!," cry the fear mongerers. Well guess what? If you're already paying for health insurance, what's the difference if that gets turned in to taxes that result in equal healthcare for all and a country where people are terrified of losing or being denied health insurance?
  
  

  Moore's last few films have really pointed to, without his usual bludgeoning, how fearful our country is of, well, pretty much everything. There's a former British MP who is interviewed in the film who talks about how a true democracy cannot happen when the people live in fear. When you live in fear, you are hesitant, if not scared, to foment change, even if that change is crucial to your survival. So, instead, we wallow in fear of losing our health insurance, of going deep in to debt, of what few precious rights we have being further taken away by a corrupt congress made corrupt by the very powerful business interests who have everything to gain and everything to lose by keeping the people afraid.
  
  

  I've long said that there will be no real change in this country — no true universal healthcare or social services that make sense — until there is radical campaign finance reform. Until our elected officials don't have to take bribes from individuals or corporations and don't have to work 85% of their year fundraising for their campaigns will we see any kind of real change, any real representation of the people's needs and hopes. Real campaign finance won't happen because those in power, those currently elected officials, have nothing to gain by changing the system.
  
  

  I will now step off my soapbox.

• Once is a slim, yet sometimes beautiful, little musical about two people who meet and fall in love and make music together. With music by the Frames, it's a musical in the sense that people sing the songs they write and perform and record. It's not really a musical in the classic sense in that the songs don't do much to advance the story. They're there for atmosphere and feeling, but they almost never tell the story. Still, the songs are often quite lovely, and the simple style of the movie and the performances is quite charming. Refreshing in it's anti-Hollywood approach to couples falling in love, it's a worthwhile way to spend 90 minutes.
  
  

  I really, really wanted to download a couple of the songs from the movie, so I went to the iTunes Store. You can only buy the album, and not individual songs. <.> C'mon folks, you aren't Radiohead! There's no need for the album-only attitude! Give us the songs we want!