If the Republicans really want us to hate Europe, I’m amazed they’ve overlooked the most powerful persuader ever: DVDs of classic soul concerts.

The DVD format has meant that all sorts of archival stuff has become more available than ever. And that includes some old concerts. Unfortunately, some of the DVDs of classic R&B acts touring Europe make me wish we would invade more countries, just to piss off those morons.

You’ll see some classic soul/funk act boogie-ing its collective heart out. And then the camera will pan around, and you’ll see a group of stocky men named Hans or Jean-Claude standing with their arms folded and a blank look on their faces. I mean, WTF? Just today, I watched James Brown Live at Montreux 1981, and the crowd reaction shots made me want to cry. About ten minutes from the end of the show, the camera guys finally locate the three people in the audience who have cool hair and are dancing. But for the first 50 minutes, we’re stuck looking at people who need more fiber in their diet, sitting in little hotel chairs cross-legged and watching James Brown as if he’s the opening act.

But the worst of all has to be Kool And The Gang Live, which is a recording of a performance on a German television show from around 1981 or 1982. It’s trendy to hate Kool & the Gang’s eighties material, and only listen to their 70s heavy funk. But this is a slamming show, and the performance of “Get Down On It,” in particular, tears the roof off. At one point, James “JT” Taylor and another man link arms, back to back, and flip over each other, while someone else is punishing the hell out of a synth guitar. It’s one of the funkiest performances I’ve ever seen.

And yes, the German studio audience looks as if they’re just standing around waiting for Falco.* You have the apathetic looks, the non-dancing bodies, all of it. But worst of all, the camera occasionally pans around to show that somebody has hung A MASSIVE CONFEDERATE FLAG on the studio wall. True, it’s hanging sideways, but still. What were they thinking? I would love to have been in the room when they tried to explain the brilliant Teutonic logic behind this one. Somehow Kool & The Gang see that crowd and that flag, and still pump it up to give a high-energy, happy performance. It’s pretty amazing.

So there you go, Republicans. A freebie. Just don’t wear it out.

* Yes, I know Falco was more mid-80s. Whatever.

It’s probably not saying much that “Christmas Is 4 Ever” by Bootsy Collins is the greatest Christmas album ever. What’s the competition? I can’t even think of anything, except maybe some compilations. But this is also one of the greatest party albums of all time, and you can just tell that everybody involved was having the time of their lives. Whether they’re reinventing “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” as “Boot-Off The Funky Reindeer” (”Won’t you fly the mothership tonight?”) or inventing their own funky Christmas anthems, Bootsy and friends are just having the time of their lives. Pretty much every song on the album makes you want to get up and dance, and barely notice all the liberties Bootsy takes with his source material. At one point, they sing the tune of “Deck The Halls,” except with the words, “This is how we funk on Christmas, Fa la la la la la la Funk Funk Funk,” and then Bootsy commands us to “Get up on the table and resume the position,” so he can take the keys and fire up our intuition. You don’t really want to argue with Bootsy, aka Booty-Claus. There are tinges of Nu-soul and hip hop, and Snoop Dogg turns in a fun relaxed performance on one track. There’s also some country-western fiddling in the mix. In a lot of ways, this is the album we always hoped we’d see from Bootsy, who has just been getting better and better over the past decade. I remember when he seemed to be in a permanent slump with “What’s Bootsy Doing” and “Blasters Of The Universe.” But this is his third album in a row that just makes you want to jump up and down. I’ve actually started preferring his newer material to his 70s classics. “Christmas 4 Ever” isn’t perfect — it does have little kids singing once or twice and the last song isn’t that great — but it’s pretty much a non-stop celebration.

I’ve never seen a Michael Moore documentary before, but I wanted to see Sicko, because I’m obsessed with health policy issues. As others have pointed out, the film has a super powerful first hour and a somewhat less successful second hour. The first hour deals with the problems of Americans who have health insurance, but still can’t get the care they need due to red tape. It’s pretty unforgettable stuff, and Moore makes a very strong case that his anecdotal evidence is actually symptomatic of endemic problems. Some of the stories and faces of health-insurance victims are going to haunt me. One of the biggest fears with government-run health care is that we’ll have a faceless bureaucracy managing our care. And it’s becoming increasingly obvious that those of us lucky enough to have health coverage already deal with a faceless bureaucracy, just in the private sector.

But then the film veers off to look at countries that already have universal health coverage, and Moore’s sledgehammer approach becomes a bit of a liability. He never quite asks the tough questions, about scarcity of high-tech care, wait times for specialists and taxes. These are all questions with decent answers, but he doesn’t even bother to answer them.

On my way back from watching the movie, I was pondering: what would we have to do to get universal health care in America? The easiest answer: build a time machine, go back in time 60 years and start a universal program after World War II. The harder answer: expand Medicare to cover everybody today. But since Medicare already has skyrocketing expenses, this would only solve half the problem. Our health care is so expensive because:

• we have too many specialists and not enough primary care docs,
• we don’t provide enough preventive care, and then we spend jillions on heroic measures once conditions get out of hand,
• there’s a surplus of high-tech equipment, especially MRIs and other imaging scanners, which tend to be used a lot just to amortize the cost, and
• if you read through the Dartmouth Health Atlas, you get the sense that certain parts of the country have a ridiculously high rate of particular surgeries, just because there’s one surgeon who likes doing that procedure, and finds reasons to do it a lot.

In a nutshell, you couldn’t get true universal health coverage in the U.S. without basically putting the health insurers out of business AND drastically curtailing doctors’ incomes. Oh, and you’d probably have to make major changes to the Medicare drug plan to make it even remotely affordable. Taking on one entrenched interest would be bad enough, but this would basically be impossible. So, really, I think it’s probably best to get started on that time machine.

I really meant to post this review last Monday, when I saw a preview screening of Danny Boyle’s new film Sunshine. But life got in the way. Here, then, is the executive summary of what I was going to say right after seeing the film.

Sunshine single-handedly redeems two whole genres of film. The first is the trippy-whoah-space-LSD genre that includes 2001, Solaris and The Fountain. The second is the desperate space mission, motley-team-trying-to-save-the-Earth-from -certain-doom action movie. Sunshine includes elements of both genres, but fuses them incredibly well and uses them to tell a story. It’s embarrassing how grateful I am to see genre tropes and big spectacle actually used in the service of storytelling. It’s that rare. There was a point, about five or ten minutes into Sunshine, when I thought we were in trouble. I was seriously concerned we were vanishing into acid-trip land, never to return. I was shocked and amazed to realize that the acid-trip stuff was actually going somewhere interesting, both in developing the characters and in propelling the story. And the deeper you get into the movie, the more you find the occasional trippy moment actually conveying useful information and building suspense. Meanwhile, in terms of the action movie stuff, there were a few moments when I felt pretty sure I knew where the movie was going next. And then I turned out to be totally wrong. Which was awesome. Also, it feels economical: at only 107 minutes, it doesn’t spend a lot of time being self-indulgent. It feels like a taut thriller and a metaphysical exploration rolled into one.

I notice I’m one of the few people who’ve flat-out loved this movie so far. The SF Chronicle gave it an empty chair. Other critics have been positive but not blown away. So I felt it was important to speak up and plug the shit out of this movie.

One final thought: in its relentless focus on the logistics of the mission, and the gritty, hands-on work of making things function on a spaceship, Sunshine reminded me of Space Island One, the 1990s television series. Space Island One gets a bad rap for its dialogue-heavy and sometimes slow stories. But at its best (in about nine or 10 of its 26 episodes) Space Island One was a brilliant exploration of the dynamics between half a dozen three-dimensional characters trapped on a space station together. And ridiculously few TV series — or movies — have attempted to be that rigorously scientific or convey an actual feeling of the danger and drudgery of being in space. When will we get Space Island One on DVD???

Transgender women who commit even petty offenses are liable to be sentenced to a year or two in hell. Just look at Alexis Giraldo. She stole a few things from a store and violated a previous parole, and the state sentenced her to Folsom Prison, a men’s prison. Giraldo takes female hormones and lives as a woman, but because she hasn’t had genital surgery the state has the option to put her among violent male criminals. (The other option is a psychiatric ward.) San Francisco and a few other counties maintain a special unit for transgender prisoners.

Giraldo had consensual sex with her cellmate, Jorge Villavacencio, but stopped after he became violent and possessive. But because she had consented to sex with Villavagencio at one point, corrections officials assumed that she had given her consent until the end of time. When she complained that Villavagencio was pressuring her, and later when he actually raped her, prison officials did nothing. It was only when she had strangulation marks on her neck that they finally moved her out of the general male population.

The state (which refers to Alexis as “he” in its filings) will try to claim that she violated prison guidelines by consenting to sex with Villavagencio at first. And that she refused a transfer to another cell.

But the specifics of the case almost don’t matter. The bottom line is that, as attorney Greg Walston points out, you shouldn’t stick a woman into a male prison population. Rape and abuses are almost inevitable, and indeed one academic testified that her research shows 55 percent of transgender prisoners have been raped. Compare that with 4 percent of other prisoners.

Does Jerry Brown (the Attorney General whose office is defending the corrections department) really believe that trans women deserve to be raped more than half the time, if they commit even a minor petty crime? I wish someone would ask him, in person.