Where To Invade Next

Michael Moore's latest starts with the premise of deciding who the U.S. can invade next in a fight it can win and becomes a tour of mostly European countries with strong social democratic traditions and policies that are much more humane than the conquering nation provides, including generous leave policies (Italy), school nutrition programs (France), education (Finland and Slovenia) and women's rights (Iceland and Tunisia, the only non-European country represented).

There's much to be said about these policies along with questions about why they aren't more present in the U.S. or, to a lesser extent, in Canada. That said, the film rarely moves beyond a superficial examination of these ideas and tries to make its points by juxtaposing the scenes in Europe with news footage of class and racial struggle in the States. There were only a few scenes where the discussion went deeper than that -- notably in Portugal with its liberal drug laws and Norway with its prison system that is focussed on rehabilitation rather than punishment. In both cases, the underlying theme presented was one of human dignity and respect. To me, it felt like they should have reduced the number of countries and explored those ideas further.

Through it all, Michael Moore plays the naive American abroad, which becomes wearing over the length of a feature film. Given the episodic structure of the film, it could easily be chopped up into short TV or YouTube segments without consequence.

Although not without its charms, it's a film that mostly preaches to the choir.

During the Q&A, they distributed application forms for the free Slovenian university system and invited the audience to a free "people's" after party down the street. I wasn't able to check it out, as I had a film right after his.