"My mission is to pick the flowers, not the weeds." So says Michael Moore early on in his hilarious new documentary Where to Invade Next, in which he visits — that is, "invades" — a range of foreign countries to figure out what things they're doing right and America is doing wrong.The countries in question are Italy, France, Finland, Slovenia (not Slovakia), Germany, Portugal, Norway, Tunisia, and Iceland, and the picture is Moore's usual mix of comedy and truth bombs. In each country, he speaks to people from various walks of life about things such as Italy's legally mandated seven weeks of paid vacation, Slovenia's free college system, Portugal's lack of drug laws, or how Germany pays its workers a comfortable wage and requires company boards to include employees. More importantly, Germany doesn't shy away from remembering that whole Nazi unpleasantness, and teaches children about the horrible things in their country's past in ways that, say, Texas textbooks do not. Especially effective is the segment about gender equality, which includes a lyrical interlude set to Bjork's (instrumental) "Overture" from Dancer in the Dark. Where to Invade Next is everything right-wingers (as well as some leftists) hate about Moore, though as always, the truth is probably somewhere in between. Or a little left of the center, anyway.
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