'Where to Invade Next' - Movie Review

Michael Moore is a political gadfly, kind of the Rush Limbaugh of the left. In this movie, he declared his purpose to be to "invade" countries where he could still "pronounce the names," and bring back innovations that the United States needed. (I watched this on a nine hour transatlantic flight: impaired judgement from lack of sleep may have been a factor.)

Moore visits various countries and discovers excellent working hours in Italy, a laid-back (but nevertheless successful) school system in Finland(?), and a very liberalised view of drugs in Portugal (he visits several other countries as well). The movie works fairly well as he interviews people to find out about the systems that are working overseas in various areas that are considered somewhat broken in the U.S. But when he gets to the whole discussion of the legality of drugs, he finds it necessary to go into a considerable discussion of what's wrong in the U.S., something he didn't bother with on any of the other topics - it was simply left implicit. Which actually worked better. His anti-U.S. rant about the failures of the U.S. on drugs is the low point of the movie: it was unnecessary and painfully bitter while the rest of the movie concentrated on the good that could be brought in from other countries.

Not a great movie, but for the most part a fairly likeable effort to open some eyes to different ways of handling things that may not be at their best on this continent.