Now that the the hoopla has passed, this is real­ly fun­ny. At 30,000 feet, the iPhone seems as pop­u­lar as the polio vac­cine; at ground lev­el I think I know one guy who bought one.

• My last — and prob­a­bly best — review is up at Paper Thin Walls. Alan is a gra­cious, fun­ny inter­view. I haven’t lis­tened to Drums and Guns in a bit, but I may revis­it it today. I have to put a mid­point ’07 list togeth­er, and “Hatch­et” will prob­a­bly make the sin­gles list.
• Tonight? Rata­touille! [In case you don’t recall, Brad Bird was asked what he could say about this project on a Simp­sons’ com­men­tary track a few years ago. He replied, “2007.” Bravo!]

• Sure I’m late to this, but check out KYW’s video about May­or Street’s iPhone sna­fu and you’ll find me hold­ing a mic. Here’s the footage we got with the May­or as well as the woman who con­front­ed him with a spe­cial guest appear­ance by Lar­ry West!
• I had an amaz­ing talk with Matthew and Eleanor Fried­berg­er at last Thurs­day’s show. I’ll have a full report of what I saw and jot­ted down at my work blog short­ly. The new stuff sound­ed good, very good [“Restora­tive Beer”] and for the fans out there it won’t be the trop­i­calia record that folks expect­ed. Con­fi­den­tial to the world: this may just be the record where they real­ly reach for the brass ring. I for one can’t wait to hear it.
• Oh yeah, work blog. I’ll be sure to link there once it launch­es. Be gen­tle — we’re just now learn­ing that the inter­net can be used in many ways to reach dif­fer­ent audi­ences. I hope to have an eclec­tic mix of stuff once it’s up and running.

Not only does SiCKO expose the HMO prob­lem effec­tive­ly, it also is like a trav­el guide for a bet­ter qual­i­ty of life. In fact, it intro­duced those who wait­ed for the cred­its to this. In all seri­ous­ness, Moore final­ly man­ages to make a film that lives up to the promise of Roger & Me, the sort of mad­cap humor blend­ed with bonecrush­ing sad­ness that makes for the best polit­i­cal com­men­tary, at least here in the States. His man-on-the-street approach in this one works well, though it leaves open­ings for skep­tics — think of them as the ‘well i have a friend who’s a doc­tor in the U.K. and he’s real­ly unhap­py’ types — to quar­rel with his points.

What Moore’s bank­ing on here is that there are plen­ty of Amer­i­cans with health care who’ve found them­selves awash in debt after rou­tine med­ical pro­ce­dures. And they’re out there, or you know some­one, or they know some­one. So this time Moore turns down the mes­sian­ic impuls­es that per­vade his work, real­iz­ing that cur­rent Dem fron­trun­ner HRC has no chance of intro­duc­ing sin­gle-pay­er, much less uni­ver­sal health care and that we’re a peo­ple adrift in a cri­sis that will only grow worse for not just some so-called “aver­age” Amer­i­can, but for all of us, together.

I’ve crossed over into total film dweeb sta­tus. Not a film geek, mind you; I haven’t paid close atten­tion to what’s new and note­wor­thy since I left the video store, and even less since I left TLA alto­geth­er [it’s been almost a year already: wow] so when I read Ous­mane Sem­bene’s obit­u­ary a week and a half ago, I could­n’t believe I’d nev­er seen any­thing by him, hav­ing hunt­ed and pecked at films and film­mak­ers occu­py­ing more or less the same polit­i­cal and aes­thet­ic orbit he did. Pon­tecor­vo and Cos­ta-Gavras, but not Sem­bene? Now it seems absurd.

So what did I do? Like any obit­u­ary vul­ture, I swooped into my Net­flix queue and jumped his land­mark film Black Girl to the top. Sem­bene tells the sto­ry of a Sene­galese girl turned au pair who trav­els with her employ­ers back to France to care for the chil­dren. Sem­bene uses neo­re­al­ist and New Wave tech­niques to illus­trate the divide between the new­ly inde­pen­dent Sene­galese and expa­tri­ate French who lived and worked there. Dioun­na’s jour­ney “back” to her inher­it­ed Father­land comes at the price of her iden­ti­ty and her dig­ni­ty, nei­ther of which she can live with­out. It’s a crush­ing indict­ment of what is owed by inter­na­tion­al pow­ers to the coun­tries they exploit once they’ve “grant­ed” independence.

Read more at Sens­es of Cin­e­ma.