Perhaps I could have stated this more clearly and specifically, but "Sicko" is piling up box-office receipts much more quickly than "Inconvenient Truth" did. Its growth is more explosive, and its per-screen average so far is considerably higher. True, its overall gross has not reached that level yet, but it's only been in wide release for 2 weeks, and even now is only on 700 or so screens (compared to 3,000 or more for a major Hollywood film).

All available evidence suggests that "Sicko" will be a much bigger hit than "Inconvenient Truth" by the end of the summer (although not quite, as I said, on the scale of Moore's own "Fahrenheit 9/11").

Interesting to hear that one reader has already watched "Sicko" on the iPhone. I was thinking it was pretty much the perfect candidate. I like Moore's movies pretty well, but for cinematography he ain't exactly Orson Welles or Kurosawa.

Jesus, that's some damn fine discussin'. I'm always grateful to have Salon's readers, grumpy as they may sometimes be, but even by that standard this has been great. And the meatheads seem to have gotten bored and drifted away.

Dogtown, we all owe you for that fascinating essay on Antonioni (about whom I have never claimed special expertise or a special affinity). I'm going to clip 'n' save it for future study. I'm pretty confident there's just a level here where my taste just irreducibly vibrates to a different frequency from yours (and how do human beings figure out how to talk about that without sounding like wishy-washy idiots?) but there's a lot to chew on in your piece. I agree, for instance, that Angelopoulos and Tarkovsky share some of Antonioni's aesthetics -- but I think I value the things they share with Bergman more ...

Most of you totally grokked this, but I absolutely did not mean the side-by-side comparisons of 3 pairs of films to be an Arthouse Idol competition, where we all vote on who's better. (Come to think of it, that would make a hilarious TV skit.) Obviously we'll all have our views about that, and we're likely to share them. But I just hoped to spark some discussion about two directors who seem to me to have radically different views of filmmaking, art and life. I suspect that watching these films together might produce some unexpected juxtapositions, and that they'll shed light on each other in unexpected ways. (Thanks for suggesting La Notte and Scenes From a Marriage, whoever that was. Brilliant!) I genuinely mean to approach the exercise myself, with as much humility and as little prejudice as I can manage, if I can possibly find the fucking time.

I wasn't asking who was the better artist, calavera -- I was actually saying that they're impossible to compare in that way. That's also what I meant in mentioning A's 7 major films with B's couple dozen-plus; of course that doesn't equate to a value judgment, but the standard of comparison is just very different.

Beaubourg, I'm not impressed by the idea that you can't apprehend Bergman in translation. Maybe that used to be true with those crappy British-y Janus translations that left so much out. But his screenplays are widely available both in Swedish and good English translation, and the more recent DVDs, especially the Criterion releases, are quite well translated into idiomatic English. (Also, English and Swedish are so grammatically and rhythmically similar that I believe it's a highly solvable problem.) And I defy anybody to claim that the script is a major factor important in any Antonioni film.

I'll defend Bergman as a brilliant maker of images as long as I live, but it's perfectly true that, as one poster pointed out, his movies will be remembered at least as much for the actors and performances as the pictures. I'm reluctant to say this, but I suspect we're dealing with an almost existential or epistemological division here, between those who see film as essentially a dramatic medium (whatever else it may convey) and those who see it as essentially pictorial. There's no right and wrong about that; I'm not trying to be subtly pejorative in either direction. And we all might say, oh, it's both, and other things besides. But on some basic, stupid level, isn't that what the legacies of these two directors boils down to?

On his Premiere blog, Glenn Kenny has some interesting thoughts on why we seem to be "awash in Antonioni imitators" (actually Michael Atkinson's phrase) but there are very few Bergman imitators, at least who do it well. Anybody to nominate, in either category? I mean, beyond the obvious? I have some thoughts, but must shut up now.

Normally, it's cheating to edit things after they've gone up (except to correct mistakes). But that was a mistake, at least aesthetically. So I thank you.