Where to Invade Next

by George Wolf

If dashed hopes and broken dreams have a face, you’ll see it early in Michael Moore’s Where to Invade Next.

While Moore talks to an Italian couple, we see a montage of holiday pics as they happily discuss the many weeks of paid vacation they’re allotted. When the man explains that he and many of his friends dream of one day living in America, Moore drops the bomb.

“You know how many paid weeks you get, by law? Zero.”

So, two hours of America-bashing, then? Only if that’s what you’re looking for.

Italy is just the first stop on Moore’s crusade to crisscross the globe and plant the American flag wherever he finds ideas worth claiming for the betterment of life back home.

He travels to Finland to uncover a once broken education system that is now thriving, speaks with Portuguese officials about how they combat drug abuse, outlines the historical successes of the women’s rights movement in Tunisia, and more.

These aren’t zero-sum proposals, just ideas that are making people’s lives better, and that don’t seem hard to emulate. Would copying France’s school lunch program turn us all into surrender monkeys? No, but it would probably make for healthier kids who understood more about nutrition.

Moore’s self-important tactics can be grating enough to sometimes derail his ambitions, but here he’s at his most affable and sincere. Though a less than healthy appearance makes the news of his recent hospital stay unsurprising, Moore is funny, self-deprecating and downright charming as he chats up the locals across various foreign borders.

That’s not to say Moore only tries on the kid gloves. Some segments do hit hard, such as one on Germany’s approach to addressing its shameful past, and a Portuguese police officer’s advice on keeping “human dignity” above all.

Where to Invade Next is not only a nice rebound from the rambling cynicism of Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story, it stands as one of his best films to date. Focused, engaging and undeniably hopeful, it delivers shots of common sense that sound a lot like a rallying cry.

The Choice

by George Wolf

Just when I thought all Nicholas Sparks movies were churned out of the Sap-o-matic 5000 supercomputer, chocked full of the same melodramatic plot devices played out by interchangeable characters, along comes The Choice to prove me wrong.

Oh sure, it’s still built around a dreamy Southern setting full of beautiful white people getting caught in the rain and kept apart by tragedy, and there’s flashback storytelling, cheating that’s really okay and contrivance out the wazoo, but when the credits finally rolled, one thing was missing.

Where was the are-they-really-going-there shameless plot twist? No wise friend who’s really been dead all this time? No children needing an organ from an old love who was nice enough to die at the perfect time?

Nope.

Other than that , though, same old dreck.

Travis (Benjamin Walker, Abe in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) narrates, and takes us back seven years to when he first met Gabby (Teresa Palmer from Warm Bodies). She moved in next door to Travis’s waterfront South Carolina place, and of course had to bother him in the middle of the night so he could come to the door half dressed.

The spark was lit, and Gabby’s boyfriend Ryan (Tom Welling, Superman from TV’s Smallville) was nice enough to leave town for a few weeks so Travis and Gabby could use her dining room table in a way that I’m pretty sure voided the warranty.

Director Ross Katz dutifully checks the boxes next to rain, tragedy, empty philosophizing while gazing at the sky, plus plenty of pretty scenery.

And then there’s the dialog.

Between Sparks’ source novel and writer Bryan Sipe’s adapted script, there may not be a single conversation in the entire film that rings true. Even the great Tom Wilkinson, showing up as Travis’s father, can’t make these lines seem like something real humans might say.

Then again, they’re not humans, they’re Ken and Barbie dolls in the latest Nicholas Sparks playset.

Silly me.