He sells socialism yet chooses to live in the U.S. which has made him a wealthy fat hypocrite.
NY Post: Leftist provocateur Michael Moore drops the angrily strident tone of “Fahrenheit 9/11’’ and “Sicko,’’ and attempts to preach beyond the converted with “Where To Invade Next,’’ a feature-length infomercial for socialism in the more playfully funny mode of his classic “Bowling for Columbine’’ (which won the documentary Oscar) and “Roger & Me.’’
While the title sounds like a critique of American militarism, “Where To Invade Next’’ is actually a sort of spinoff of Moore’s only fictional feature, the 1995 comedy “Canadian Bacon,’’ about a US president who declares a cold war on our neighbor to the north to increase his popularity.
In this case, it’s Moore trying to recapture his place in popular culture by staging mock “invasions’’ of various socialist republics, where he feigns astonishment to discover that ordinary citizens are treated so much better than in the home of American exceptionalism.
A chef who prepares served-to-the-table gourmet meals for elementary school students at what we’re told is one of the poorest villages in France reacts in horror (as do the kids) to photos of school lunches in Boston. Sex-education classes in France that stress loving respect are juxtaposed against a clip in which Rick Perry (the only presidential candidate in the film) insists that teaching only “abstinence works, I know from personal experience,’’ when confronted by an interviewer about Texas having the nation’s highest teen-pregnancy rate.
Italy is portrayed as a worker’s paradise of two-hour lunch breaks, eight-week paid vacations and five-month paid maternity leaves (never mind the perpetual political unrest). Portugal has dramatically reduced addiction by decriminalizing drugs. College is tuition-free for all in Slovenia, including American students fleeing massive education loans. And Norway has reduced recidivism with human prisons aimed at rehabilitation — even a mass murderer can only be incarcerated for a maximum of 21 years there.
Germany is portrayed as another worker’s paradise, in which employees by law hold half the seats on corporate boards of directors, and CEOs tell Moore that greed isn’t good for anybody. But at the risk of turning off the larger American audience he’s courting, Moore can’t resist equating the genocide of Nazi Germany with America’s treatment of its black population, from slavery to Ferguson.
The mostly entertaining two-hour film ends with a ringing endorsement of women’s rights and female governmental leadership, from Tunisia (whose Islamic voters enacted the kind of equal-rights amendment to its constitution that failed in the US) to Iceland (which elected the world’s first female president and where female leaders made sure that crooked bankers were sent to jail, unlike in the 2008 US financial crisis).
It’s fair to speculate if Moore’s most optimistic film is a stealth endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (a full-frontal attack on George W. Bush’s re-election didn’t work out so well in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” even if it was the highest-grossing doc of all time). Moore wasn’t saying at a Q&A following the premiere Thursday night, joking that Meryl Streep should run for office.
“Where To Invade Next’’ will most likely be released in time to qualify for the documentary Oscar, though it doesn’t currently have a distributor. The Hollywood Reporter counted reps from at least five companies at the premiere — and that didn’t include Moore’s longtime champion Harvey Weinstein.
DCG