Where to Invade Next (15.)
Directed by and featuring Michael Moore. 120 mins.
Just weeks away from the big EU referendum, our great generational defining choice between Project Fear and Project Nutter, here's an unexpected intervention from American film provocateur Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 911, Bowling for Columbine, Capitalism: A Love Story) - a new film about how brilliant life in Europe is. (And Iceland and Tunisia.) His latest jape is to pretend the Pentagon Chiefs of Staff have decided to abandon the idea of trying to improve the American way of life by waging costly wars. Instead they have asked Moore to identify countries that have policies and ideas worth co-opting and go and invade them singlehandedly and claim their ideas. So he goes to Italy for their generous holiday allowances; France for their quality school meals; Germany for factories with windows and ability to address their past crimes; Slovenia for their free university education; Portugal for abandoning the war on drugs; Iceland for its sexual equality and putting corrupt bankers in prison and Tunisia for its abortion clinics.
Of course, you'll notice that he doesn't visit Britain. Though the film is shaped as a message to Moore's countrymen, every free market failing he identifies in the States goes just as much for us. Particularly painful is the moment when teachers in Finland, the world's No 1 education system, talk about how pointless SAT testing is.
Don't shoot the messenger is a noble ethos, but sometimes the messenger really asks for it. Beneath the bluster, the failed jokes and overly long two hour running time* there is an eminently sane examination of all the brain dead mistakes the free market roundheads have led us into over the last four decades, but because it's Moore you wouldn't trust it as far as you can throw it. He always chooses important and relevant subjects but his cherry picking is so extreme and his presentation so overblown that he really does shoot himself in the foot. You see these visions of utopian Italian and German factories, French schools and wonder how to square this with the chaotic view of Europe we have. (The film could be used as propaganda for the Leave campaigners – doesn't Italian workers getting 7 weeks of annual leave, plus national holidays, plus maternity leave, suggest we are getting a raw deal from the EU?) Like every Michael Moore film, you yearn for someone to follow him around and make a balanced, factual version of his polemic.
*Moore's really not funny any more. The film's conceit calls on him to play up his role as an Ugly American, but his aggressively unkempt appearance is annoying. He does, eventually, remove his baseball cap for a meeting with the President of Slovenia, but throughout he tramps around in trainers and dirty blue jeans. Nobody saying shirt and tie, but the occasionally engaging of a washing machine isn't asking too much is it? The film is also far too long, the point is made quickly and less than an hour into the film you are wondering if there is going to be some kind of variation or twist to this lecture, and there isn't.
Where to Invade Next (15.)
Directed by and featuring Michael Moore. 120 mins.
Just weeks away from the big EU referendum, our great generational defining choice between Project Fear and Project Nutter, here's an unexpected intervention from American film provocateur Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 911, Bowling for Columbine, Capitalism: A Love Story) - a new film about how brilliant life in Europe is. (And Iceland and Tunisia.) His latest jape is to pretend the Pentagon Chiefs of Staff have decided to abandon the idea of trying to improve the American way of life by waging costly wars. Instead they have asked Moore to identify countries that have policies and ideas worth co-opting and go and invade them singlehandedly and claim their ideas. So he goes to Italy for their generous holiday allowances; France for their quality school meals; Germany for factories with windows and ability to address their past crimes; Slovenia for their free university education; Portugal for abandoning the war on drugs; Iceland for its sexual equality and putting corrupt bankers in prison and Tunisia for its abortion clinics.
Of course, you'll notice that he doesn't visit Britain. Though the film is shaped as a message to Moore's countrymen, every free market failing he identifies in the States goes just as much for us. Particularly painful is the moment when teachers in Finland, the world's No 1 education system, talk about how pointless SAT testing is.
Don't shoot the messenger is a noble ethos, but sometimes the messenger really asks for it. Beneath the bluster, the failed jokes and overly long two hour running time* there is an eminently sane examination of all the brain dead mistakes the free market roundheads have led us into over the last four decades, but because it's Moore you wouldn't trust it as far as you can throw it. He always chooses important and relevant subjects but his cherry picking is so extreme and his presentation so overblown that he really does shoot himself in the foot. You see these visions of utopian Italian and German factories, French schools and wonder how to square this with the chaotic view of Europe we have. (The film could be used as propaganda for the Leave campaigners – doesn't Italian workers getting 7 weeks of annual leave, plus national holidays, plus maternity leave, suggest we are getting a raw deal from the EU?) Like every Michael Moore film, you yearn for someone to follow him around and make a balanced, factual version of his polemic.
*Moore's really not funny any more. The film's conceit calls on him to play up his role as an Ugly American, but his aggressively unkempt appearance is annoying. He does, eventually, remove his baseball cap for a meeting with the President of Slovenia, but throughout he tramps around in trainers and dirty blue jeans. Nobody saying shirt and tie, but the occasionally engaging of a washing machine isn't asking too much is it? The film is also far too long, the point is made quickly and less than an hour into the film you are wondering if there is going to be some kind of variation or twist to this lecture, and there isn't.
