Where to Invade Next

Plot synopsis:
"This is an expansive, rib-tickling, and subversive comedy in which the eccentric, left-wing, populist filmmaker Michael Moore, playing the role of 'invader,' visits a host of nations to learn how the U.S. could improve its own prospects".In the opening voice-over, Moore gives a sarcastic introduction about him visiting the Pentagon in Washington DC and given the green light to "invade" a series of countries authorized by the joint chiefs of staff. Moore leaves to "invade" Europe to discuss the subjects which he most covers in his activist work which are worker benefits, school lunches, early education, college education, worker inclusion, decriminalized drugs, low recidivism, women's health care, and women inclusion.ItalyMoore arrives and visits a factory where he discusses with the owner and various workers about labor rights and workers' well-being (paid holiday, thirteenth salary, parental leave, etc.). It ends with him in a person-to-person interview with Claudio Domenicali, the CEO of DucatiFranceMoore visits an elementary school where he talks with the students and teachers (via a translator) about various topics such as school meals and sex education and how the USA school system exploits the students in his country.FinlandMoore discusses Finland's education policy (almost no homework, no standardized testing, etc.), as well as speaking with Krista Kiuru, the Finnish Minister of Education.SloveniaMoore visits a university where he discusses with the local and foreign students about the debt-free/tuition-free higher education system and about the political nature of that county's education. He has interviews with Ivan Svetlik, the University of Ljubljana's rector, and Borut Pahor, the President of Slovenia.GermanyMoore visits two factories and business parks where he talks (through his German translator) with various other blue-collared workers about the country's labor rights and work life balance. He and his film crew visit the pencil making factory Faber-Castell, and discuss education about Nazi Germany.PortugalMoore arrives in Lisbon where he talks with some people as well as three city policemen about the country's May Day holiday for the workers, the lenient drug policy of Portugal, and the abolition of the county's death penalty.NorwayMoore discusses Norway's humane prison system and comparing it with the harsh and overcrowded prison system in the USA. Moore visits the maximum-security Bastøy Prison and Halden Prison, and Norway's response to the July 22, 2011 Utøya attacks committed by the right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik.TunisiaMoore meets with some women activists to discuss the evolution of women's rights in the country, including reproductive health, access to abortion and their role in the Tunisian Revolution and the drafting of the new Tunisian Constitution of 2014.IcelandMoore discusses the theme of women in power, speaking with Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the world's first democratically elected female president of Iceland. He also meets with members of the Best Party with Jón Gnarr being elected Mayor of Reykjavík City. Also discussed are the 2008-2011 Icelandic financial crisis and the criminal investigation and prosecution of bankers, with special prosecutor Ólafur HaukssonThe Fall of the Berlin Wall.In the final scene, Moore travels back to Germany to Berlin where he points out that many of these ideas actually originated in the U.S.A., such as the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment, abolition of the death penalty, the struggle for the 8-hour workday and the May Day holiday, the Equal Rights Movement for women, prosecution of financial fraud during the savings and loan crisis, etc. He discusses the fall of the Berlin Wall as hope for not only Germany but the rest of the world. The film ends with a film clip of the 1939 film 'The Wizard of Oz' where he explains that the solution to the problems America is faced with is always in plain sight as with Dorothy who learns that she always had the power to travel back home to Kansas with her magical red shoes.

Tags: satire, historical

Review:
Filmmaker Michael Moore ("Capitalism: A Love Story," "Sicko"), a welcome voice for sanity, returns to the big screen in his first film in seven years to tell us that perks like this exist, just not in the United States.
In simple terms, so-called American exceptionalism is often not as exceptional as most people think.Though the title of the film may suggest an exposé of the government's penchant for endless war, Moore has something else in mind.
Taking his camera crew to Italy, France, Finland, Slovenia, Tunisia, Portugal, Iceland, and Germany, he interviews workers, teachers, students, CEOs, government officials, and ordinary folks who tell him about the advantages they have.When he departs the country, he makes sure to plant the American flag to signal his success in stealing its ideas.
He learns that Finland has no private schools so that the community is dedicated to making the public schools work.According to Moore, Finland's school system has risen from the depths to become number one in the world.From there we travel to Slovenia (not to be confused with Slovakia) which has a free university system, especially inviting for foreign students, to Germany where factory workers toil 36 hours a week while being paid for 40 hours.
Pausing for a serious look at how one country deals with its unpleasant past, Moore explores how educators and students confront the Holocaust in Germany, even though it is uncomfortable to face.In Norway, we see how prisoners are treated as human beings, even mass murderers like Anders Breivik, even though Breivik has threatened to go on a hunger strike because of what he claims are "deteriorating" living conditions — isolation from the other inmates and allowing only contact being with health care workers and guards.
While Moore doesn't pretend that these countries have no problems (watch the right-wing media say otherwise), his examples certainly seem to be "winners" that he invites scrutiny of.What's likely to be most controversial about this movie is one of the conclusions he draws: that systems seem to work better when women are involved in the decision-making process.
So the best way for this film to have the most impact is for it to screen in regions of the U.S.A. where there's big demographics that want status quo, that blame the minorities for the economy, that are still gung-ho about endless wars.From "Roger & Me," to "Bowling For Columbine," to "Sicko" to "Fahrenheit 911" and now "Where To Invade Next," Michael Moore knows which buttons to push to tick off the right wingers.
There were moments of levity in each of his films but the humor on display in his first feature Roger & Me had been replaced with a political or prejudice view Moore hoped to express.Moore's latest documentary, Where To Invade Next takes us back to the fun and wit that made his earlier work so refreshingly entertaining.
In this his eighth feature documentary (but first in six years), Moore travels to Europe where he visits countries that seem to have captured the American dream of a work/life balance.
We travel with Moore to Germany where we find small companies who pay big wages, to Italy where employees are given more weeks annual vacation than an American can hope for over a five year period and to Slovenia which offers free university tuition.
Anyone one voted under a 7 did so out of a bias anger..What this movie shows it how The USA attitude of were are the greatest county in the world just isn't true anymore.The basic things..Diet,education,Health Care..The Justice system has all failed in the USA.We simply do not have the best of any of these things anymore...I don't understand how this movie is sailing in under the radar with out much publicity..I was alone in the theater when I saw it,that is no one else was there..it was empty.I thought I might get bored but found myself amazed by what I was seeing.I wanted to run out and tell everyone what I just saw.I would like to make this point I work at a USA college admissions office..Once in awhile someone would come in saying they had a college degree in another county could they transfer any of it here..it was always met with a resounding "no"..I asked why..do they have less elements on their periodic table?
Having spent a good deal of time in North America I can completely understand why he tries to make it so that the ideas shown and expressed in the film are as "American" or "American born" as possible, but when you're from someplace else, and when you know more about history or such things in general, it seems just a bit annoying that they try to make some ideas that are pretty much universal, or just not American, as American as possible.
So "Bowling for Columbine", "Fahrenheit 9/11", "Capitalism - A Love Story" are all great films, because they make a case for a clear message.What's problematic, though, is when Moore travels the world, because he picks certain elements out of a different culture and presents that as a better way that America could easily adapt.
That ignored the reality that a great deal of people wanted to get out for lack of perspective, and that free health care is an effective tool to rally public support for an otherwise unpopular political system.In "Where to invade next", Moore presents a potpourri of European social systems, and being from there, it is extremely obvious that he randomly picks out certain aspects while ignoring where these come from.
But in Slovenia, he focuses on free university education including foreigners - which is an exception, in most European countries foreign students ARE charged, while domestic students are not.In Tunisia, he drives a far fetched angle from legal abortion to the Arab Spring, and while the argument of women's rights effecting positive social change is a good one, what happened to the Arab Spring?
I love all his documentaries, and his liberal views closely align with mine, so I just want to say Where To Invade Next is amazing, emotionally moving, and Moore's most positively infectious film.
For the doc, he covers a wide range of issues that is plaguing the US, including paid time off for work (or lack thereof), school lunches, women's rights, abortion, not being able to acknowledge our dark history by sugarcoating things in classes, college debt and rising tuition, the education system as a whole, the prison system, the incarceration of black men, the death penalty, the war on drugs, among others I'm sure I missed.
Despite taking the US to task, Moore believes we have the power to change things if we care enough to (like the countries he visits in the film), and that's the positive takeaway of Where to Invade Next.
And the positive role women play as equals in society And as he in false country boy innocence marvels at what he sees, it suddenly hits him that the very flag he planted say in Finland or France or Portugal or Norway or Italy and yes in Tunisia and Iceland and Germany or Slovenia, that all these countries he invaded and conquered found ideas and inspiration in America of it seems eons ago.
Possibly Mike Moore's best work so far.The gist: America crossed many significant social progress hurdles 50 years ago, and these countries have learned from American lessons and fought their good fights to enjoy the social benefit fruits today.
When I first heard that Michael Moore was doing a new movie - his last, "Capitalism: A Love Story," came out in 2009 and focused on the 2007-2008 financial meltdown - to be titled "Where to Invade Next," I thought it was going to be a critique of U.S. foreign policy; the film's not-so-subtle name certainly made it sound like it.We were all wrong.Moore's basic premise with this film - that the U.S. has seriously fallen behind in the world despite being A-#1 - goes abroad to Europe and North Africa to seek out new ideas to Make America Great Again.
But as Moore soon finds out, many of the great ideas put into play in these countries, were originally from the U.S.Yes, the ideas of paid vacation and maternity leave, universal health-care, equal opportunities for women, treating prison inmates with dignity and respect, treatment for drug users instead of incarceration, workers' rights, no standardized testing, and free college - all concepts used to great effect by foreign nations - were originally ideas conceived here in the United States, for us, by us.
Many of the foreign citizens (and American expatriates) that Moore interviews in "Where to Invade Next" express dismay, bewilderment, disappointment, and - in one instance - out-right anger at the way America treats its citizens (and our acceptance of it without question), while they have it so much better in their countries.
(Moore is quick to point out early on that these countries are not paradises on Earth and have their own problems, but in general the people are much happier and complacent with their lives.)There are parts of "Where to Invade Next" that are down-right hilarious, but there are other segments that are also heartbreaking.
For instance, when Moore stops over in Germany, he sees that the country's tumultuous World War II history - the rise of the Third Reich, the Holocaust - are not whitewashed, and that all German schoolchildren are aware of their history as to "Never Forget." (The United States, by comparison, barely ever mentions slavery and, I suspect, even deliberately tries to gloss over the less glamorous parts of our country's history - for whatever reason.) When Moore makes his way to Norway - which in 2011 had experienced the worst instance of mass murder in the country's history when white nationalist Anders Breivik killed 77 people, most of them children, in two separate acts of domestic terrorism - and interviews a man who lost his 17-year-old son in the massacre.
But I guess from a movie-making standpoint, that would have been too superfluous, which I understand, but still...With "Where to Invade Next," Michael Moore has probably crafted his most mainstream feature to date - more so than "Capitalism: A Love Story" or "Fahrenheit 9/11" (2004) - and that's a good thing.
Here, although he's on-camera more, he still lets his interviewees do most of the talking and having them express their thoughts about what's so great about their countries and how they could be of great use in the United States.And one thing that's noticeably absent from this film are Moore's trademark stunts (i.e., driving around the Capitol in an ice cream truck reading the Patriot Act like in "Fahrenheit 9/11," or taping off Wall Street and branding it a crime scene like in "Capitalism: A Love Story").
No matter what your political take or point of view whether or not you like Michael Moore or embrace socialism or not you must agree that America has serious problems.
The plot of the film has Moore traveling to other countries to showcase how much better that they have it than the good old United States of America.
As Moore makes the point from the start of the film America's biggest problem is they are always ready to go to war and fight as it's never revealed to people as Moore stated that much of the taxes cut out of their paychecks goes to the military budget.So as Michael travels around the globe with his travels the footage and meeting of people shows just how good foreign countries have it, from paid vacation for many weeks, to better and great school lunches, and the educational system is better.
Plus democracy is better in many countries with labor unions and the lowing of voter age and women's right are much better as the economic system runs smoother.Need I say more see Moore tell the truth with this documentary and ask yourself why can't America use it's own ideals that many countries are winning and being happy with.
the premise is Michael Moore "invading" other countries (mostly European) to highlight what they do better than America ,whether it's healthcare, education, prisons, drug enforcement, or all of the above.
A highlight: Micheal was able to talk with that Muslim president of that country who said, I think in these words, "Power isn't everything." Bravo!Then, at the end, after a couple hours of reflecting on the great elements of these countries, Micheal reminds us that, AS EVEN THE OFFICIALS IN THOSE COUNTRIES ASSERT, WHAT THEY PRACTICE AND PREACH THEY GOT FROM America!So, those who are inclined, like some of my extended family to contend that Moore is "anti-American," that's nonsense.
However this segment was an exception to that, and fortunately only a small bit in the film.My only other critique of this film is that Moore himself looks like a raggedy old hitchhiker throughout the film...even when meeting the president of a country(!) This comes off as pretty disrespectful, and makes me wonder why a shower and a haircut would be such a bad thing for our lovingly persistent political gadfly.
Michael Moore 'invades' other countries to steal ideas that could make 'The American Dream' a reality.
These include: Italy (extended vacations for less stress), France (superior school nutrition and straight-forward sex education), Finland (top rated education despite no homework, short school days, and no standardized testing), Slovenia (free college education which means no debt for graduates), Germany (strong middle class, national healthcare, high wages at small companies), Portugal (decriminalization of drugs resulting in less crime and lower drug usage), Norway (prison rehabilitation), Tunisia (women's rights), and Iceland (gender equality).To convince us of his kinder, gentler self, Moore obsessively flaunts the American flag throughout.
As an American, Moore's Films have opened my eyes to just how "Awesome" of a country America isn't anymore and things we could/need to fix in order to become what we have potential to be.
These policies include treating all human beings as equally worthy of respect, ensuring all children are properly nurtured, viewing education as a social good accessible to all, imposing no cruel and unusual punishments on criminals, and making sure women are fully represented at all levels of practical governance.But in recent years the USA has turned its back on such policies, and Moore crosses the Atlantic to show how other countries (including such unlikely ones as Slovenia and Tunisia), have taken up the progressive torch with remarkable results.
Documentarian and Gadfly on the Wall of the Human Condition, Michael Moore's latest Rant about what We could do Better as a People, especially here in America, is a Thought-Provoking, One-Sided Plea to All of His Country's Patriots to Acknowledge where We Went Wrong and Correct Our Mistakes.
Michael Moore travels around the world to bring back some good ideas to America.
It's up to us as citizens of our respective countries to decide if our system is better and, if not, how can we make it so - because there are real world examples of great ideas, great people, and great results for all involved.Moore, as ever, shines a light on a problem and offers the hope that there is a solution.
Even when The United States were colonized by European people with little scrupulous and a lot of bloodlust and greed, the founding fathers had some good ideas about how to do things properly, and it'd be great to have them back instead of having this travesty of political and social system that is North America nowadays.Unfortunately, not far into his "invasion", Moore disappoints extremely with his praise of the menu served in the French school.
I'm only an informed citizen as far as certain issues go (nutrition and health, in this instance).Alas, after that incident, I watched the rest of the 2 hours documentary with a bit of suspicion, and opinion I read years ago about Moore manipulating facts came to mind.In any case, the film is interesting and, somehow, inspiring, even when it only takes the real good stuff into account (Moore confesses this at the beginning), and doesn't really look at the big picture.Anyhow, it'd be indeed great to have some (or all) of the ideas implemented in most countries, not only U.S.A. Without the lactose, please..
Those movies are excellent and changed the expectations for all documentaries.Where To Invade starts out really strong with school lunches and vacations but begins to slow down with free college and really bogs down in Germany and Norway.The main point and premise is solid - and this movie gives good examples of things the United States needs to learn from and do better.Even at 50%, still way better than most of the features out there..
U.S. Documentarian Michael Moore travels to nine different countries (eight of them in Europe) in order to "invade" them i.e. to "steal" the best of their social policies and bring them back to the U.S. The ironic conclusion is sad as well as fascinating.Throughout this travelogue, the viewer learns of superior national policies and lifestyles: worker benefits (Italy and Germany), gourmet-like school lunches and open sex education (France), education systems with no homework and concentration on each child's full well-being (Finland), free university tuition even for foreign students (Slovenia), the benefits of fully acknowledging a nation's horrific past (Germany), how the legalization of drugs was followed by reduced drug use (Portugal), prison systems where the prisoners are treated with humanity and trust (Norway), a religious Muslim country that fully supports women's rights including full access to abortion (Tunisia), and how women's participation in banking and political life improves the lot for all (Iceland).This is Moore's best film since "Bowling for Columbine" (2002).
I think that people like Michael Moore forget how bad things WERE and willfully ignore the good changes that have occurred.
The documentary can be good for the American inhabitants, Politian's to, because to see how the rest of the world have for work and life conditions and maybe take after to make America great on some points.
In the documentary Moore ''invades'' some different countries in Europe.