Where to Invade Next

In his sunniest most upbeat film yet, the activist/director of Fahrenheit 911 and Bowling for Columbine mounts a comic assault on the good citizens of several of the worlds most liberal social welfare states. Michael Moore, still the baseball-hatted scourge of corporate America, is back with his first film in six years  and his funniest and most optimistic ever. The invasion promised in the title is a total ruse: he crosses Europe, Scandinavia and the Middle East to reconnoitre social welfare programmes that might usefully be plundered for export to the US, or to any other bastion of free market ideology. Adopting the posture of an incredulous free marketer himself, he elicits highly amusing responses from the contented beneficiaries of government intervention in numerous& er, nanny states. A super-fit Italian couple proclaim the benefits of six weeks of paid vacation and five months maternity leave. Their boss concurs. French public-school kids learn about nutrition, lunch on lamb skewers and tomato salads and say yuck to Coke and ketchup. Portuguese cops say a sardonic não to the war on drugs. Elsewhere successful approaches to crime and punishment, womens rights, defence budgets and school homework are expounded to the marauding Moore.