Watched Michael Moore’s latest documentary “Where to Invade Next”… which sounds like a screed against the military/industrial complex but is actually just a bit of shtick he used to travel around Europe finding cool ideas. He pretends to invade that country and steal those ideas to bring back to the US (since we tried to invade a bunch of Middle Eastern countries and we didn’t given get the oil they promised us… yeah, he does get his digs in).
So this movie is about him hitting various countries like France, Italy, Iceland, Portugal, Germany, etc. and finding ideas that he thinks we should take up (and reminding us how we handle these idea ourselves). So things like 35 hour work weeks with guaranteed 7 weeks of paid vacation, 5 months of paid maternity leave, women running the banks in Iceland, super chill prisons in Norway, relaxed teaching standards with no standardized test, free college tuition with no debt, and the way the Germans ensure that their history of violent oppression is never forgotten.
Yeah, it’s a checklist of all Michael Moore’s ranting and raving ultra-left wing liberalism and, to be fair, he says very early on, he’s here to pick flowers, not the weeds. These countries, he vaguely admits, have their own problems. And that’s the real problem is that it’s all rose-tinted glasses and optimism without any practical analysis.
But as long as you get that this is agit-prop and can take the movie on its own merits (whether you agree with his stance or not), it’s still interesting to see the interviews he gets, the different import these social systems have for different peoples, etc.
Some people reading this will champion Michael Moore and others will hate him. That’s cool – I think some of his movies are brilliant and others are shockingly blind to the realities of the world. This one is in the middle and, even if you disagree with them, it’s good to be educated (within the frame he’s placed) on what some Europeans believe and put their stock in.
Caught this one on iTunes (it was released in 2015).
Score: 85