Bowling for Columbine
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Movie Reviews of Bowling for Columbine
Movie Review: American Society: an immortal Culture of Fear
Summary: 5 Stars
Michael Moore, the American movie maker and author of many high-class books, released a documentation on school massacres and their causes in 2002. Although often criticized, this controversial movie which is called "Bowling for Columbine" got rewarded as the best film in its genre at the Cannes Film Festival.Moore does not only present real footage and interviews. He is also trying to make the American audience realize, why there is such an increase of violence in their society. By covering the aspects of gun control or political issues, Moore's intention is to mainly bring up the culture of fear, which is created nowadays. He also explains who or what keeps this culture preserved.
The movie basically is an enumeration of TV Ads for the NRA, speeches of politics, family members of the victims, and different communities in American villages, where took place. It is very clever to use pro and con strategies to leave the audience the decision what to believe. For example Moore uses crosscuts of Charleton Heston and a victim's father, both holding speeches.
While using professional editing of camera shots, he also managed it to accessorize the movie with special music, which allows the viewer's mood of irony to increase steadily. Armstrong's "What a wonderful world" is a leitmotif during the whole production and is usually shown during short cuts following one another very quick, showing war scenes.
Another important interview he presented, showed a conversation with the mostly feared rockstar Marilyn Manson. He himself was one of the victims that was called guilty for influencing the boys from Columbine due to commit their brutal crime. Being a fan of him for a long time, it does not surprise me to see him stating his opinion in a decent way. I've always thought that he is a very intelligent individual.
When Moore talks about the media, he certainly is appealing to the modern culture of fear which is mostly created by TV channels, radio stations and of course the internet.
American news media shows 600% more negative material than it used to, although the crime rate is constantly decreasing. Therefore most people get scared easily, regardless what true statistics prove.
I personally liked the movie a lot and to me it was one of the best documentaries I've ever seen concerning usual documentaries only show what happened at the high schools and just a few, like Moore, try to figure out why school massacres happen or why American Society is so panic. Without making it a real serious and depressing movie, Micheal Moore states his opinion and tries to make the audience realize how we could change things and to think about solutions for the issue. Although it was "just" a documentary, which usually is not my genre, I went through any emotion there is, while watching it. Sadness, fear, shock, fun, and the end impression I had was that Moore, the famous movie maker and author, allowed me to sympathize with his main opinion: We the people, and only us can change the cruelty that is taking over everywhere on this planet, 24/7. I share his point of view completely and state it once again by one of my most favorite quotes regarding society by Charles Horton Cooley :"Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also."
Movie Review: The United Shakes of America
Summary: 5 Stars
After his two previous documentaries, "Roger and me" and "The big One", in which Michael Moore targeted some big company leaders (Roger Smith from General Motors, and Phil Knight from Nike) who's fired most of their workers and closed their factories on the U.S. territory while they made hundreds of millions (even billions) of dollars in benefits - Moore himself used to be a worker in General Motors factory in his native city of Flint, Michigan -, the filmmaker extends his action field and, from the massacre in the Columbine high school, in Littleton, Colorado (where two kids armed from head to toe, killed twelve pupils and one teacher after a bowling game), deals with his whole country addicted to all kinds of weapons (fire guns, bombs, missiles, etc.) with an average - and amazing - result of over 11,100 people shot dead every year - a world record.'Whose fault is it, if the Americans are just a bunch of crazy cowboys?' Moore seems to ask in his film, edited like a documentary as well as an investigation. The fault of the whole political class, which since the end of World War II (and the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan) has been organizing illegal and bloody invasions and destitutions all over the (third) world, financing and giving weapons to dictators and terrorists, sending out bombs and missiles everywhere? Of the medias, which permanently keeps on an atmosphere of fear, suspicion and hate through violent and bloody pictures broadcasted daily, in TV news and shows, with an obvious commercial purpose? Of the huge poverty which hits mainly the Black people, who - as well as some hard rockers with weird figures and shapes, like Marilyn Manson - are put on an evil level in order to be used as guilty ones every time something wrong happens?
From the supermarket of guns to the bank which gives a rifle as a gift when an account is opened, through an exhilarating cartoon in the "South Park" style, resuming in a few minutes the history of America, based upon fear, ignorance of the other in front and blood, the interviews of some teenagers at school, all familiar with guns and bombs, of some adult 'gun nuts' (including James Nichols, the brother of Terry, one of the two people who destroyed a building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people - he sleeps with a 44 Magnum under his pillow!), who consider the carrying of guns as a duty and a responsibility as an American, and of a disgusting Charlton Heston, who used to play Moses in "The Ten Commandments" (THOU SHALT NOT KILL), and who's now the president of the NRA (National Rifle Association) which still keeps encouraging the free market of fire guns all over the country -, Michael Moore, within only two hours, manages to tell with strength and an undeniable humor about all the more serious problems in the so-called land of free and the result is an astounding shocker, a great demonstration of the American paranoia, the admittance of powerlessness of a whole manipulated country. A must see, as soon as possible. Doesn't the official, State violence, encourage and lead to the individual violence?
Movie Review: Entertaining and thought-provoking
Summary: 5 Stars
This film made some excellent points about guns and violence in America. I loved the scene where the Lockheed-Martin representative is talking about Columbine and how we need to reduce violence--while standing in front of a Lockheed missile. I also liked the scene where a seemingly ordinary teenage boy wearing a loose-fitting shirt turns out to be a walking arsenal, with dozens of guns concealed in his pants. My husband and I were practically rolling on the floor laughing at that one.
Seriously, though, Moore brings across very well how much better our quality of life in the U.S. could be if we rethought our love affair with guns. Canada has strict laws about registration of guns and the like, and their quality of life is no worse than ours. What would be so terrible about making sure that lunatics and criminals can't buy guns, and seeing to it that guns used in crimes can be traced? Although Moore doesn't mention this, I think that gun owners and manufacturers should also be required to pay into a fund that hospitals would use for the enormous health care costs caused by guns. Gun owners and makers should also pay the cost of the extra policing that guns make necessary.
Moore does tend to fall off the liberal deep end at times. He makes a big deal of the fact that the mother of the 6-year-old who shot his classmate was in a welfare-to-work program, working two jobs, and had no time to supervise her son. While this is sad, in my opinion Moore is barking up the wrong tree by blaming welfare-to-work. The first thing to ask is why a woman with no skills and no husband chose to have a son. Did her church tell her it was a sin to get an abortion? If so, it should be her church who supports the two of them, not the taxpayers.
Another question Moore fails to understand is that it's rather odd that this woman works full time but can't afford to pay rent. I think more welfare is not the answer here. The sad fact is that no one has ever figured out a way to spend money to relieve poverty without creating dependency; no matter what you do, you end up with a problem worse than the one you started with. To find the right answer, you need to ask why housing costs are so high in the U.S., and why there is so little low-cost housing near jobs. After all, the salary this mother was making at the mall would have put her into the middle class in most countries, and the cost of building materials is simply not that different between countries. Surprisingly, a big part of the answer as I see it is bad zoning and parking laws and overly restrictive building codes in most U.S. cities. These laws make it difficult and expensive to build housing here, and the housing that does get built is spread out widely, so that it's hard to get around without a car. For more on this, see Kunstler's book "The Geography of Nowhere" and Shoup's "The High Cost of Free Parking."
Overall, though, the movie is consistently entertaining. Watch it even if you don't agree.
Movie Review: Fair and balanced Thought provoking!
Summary: 5 Stars
Bowling for Columbine isn't a movie I planned on watching, much less owning, in large part because of how Mr. Moore has come off in media interviews I have watched. He often makes me wince. But I wanted to be fair, so I got the movie and while there are parts that bothered me, overall the movie is excellent!! What I liked or appreciated about the movie, was the overall fairness, which I will note the TV and print media hasn't shown very much. Which is one reason I assumed it was an anti-gun movie, which it is not.
The movies value for me was or is, the historical over view of how fear is used to scare Americans into thinking that people with darker skin, or some unseen bad person is waiting outside our homes for the right time to hurt us. And how mythical fear is used to sell goods from guns to security systems, to selling candidates who then sell the citizens on some unseen boogie man who wants to rob us of our country. Thing is, its the people doing the selling that are also doing the robbing. Sort of like the arsonist who then runs to help put out the fire they started that has hurt and killed people.
One positive piece in the movie is the segment on K-Mart. I applaud K-Mart for meeting with Mr. Moore and the two young men from Columbine who were shot and maimed (one disabled for life), and for making the wise decision not to sell guns and ammo anymore.
William Hares review is one I agree with too. And I was shocked at how Dick Clark treated Mr. Moore who was being so nice and simply wanted to know how this squeaky clean image of Dick Clark is so foreign from what I see as reality. He owns a string of big business restaurants and pays lousy wages and demanded take breaks to boot, because he hired poor single welfare mothers who had to travel sixty miles one way to work, and for pay that didn't support their family. Often getting home late and unable to pay for childcare. One of Dick Clarks workers was a young mother whose child was killed by another child. Had Clark paid a decent wage the mother would have been home when her child was home.
And its a great movie for anyone who wants to be reminded of how America has bred guns and violence outside our own borders and how we may have a great Constitution and Bill of rights but our leaders have not or are not the peace loving people they may want us to believe. And YES Mr. Moore was/is critical of G W Bush and his war in Iraq. But Mr. Moore is also very hard on Clinton and his wars while in office! So no one can say that Mr. Moore is being unfair or not balanced. He is simply a man who dares us to think outside the box.
The DVD has a segment where Mr. Moore is sitting at a picnic bench somewhere in Michigan with the Oscar he won, and is explaining how the movie came to be, and the path that took him to the Oscars and the speech he gave when he won. Hearing the speech spoken in such calm terms gives it more meaning and is something I hope viewers who watch the DVD take the time to listen to.
Movie Review: Hilarious, Alarming, Sad, Thought Provoking, Everything!
Summary: 5 Stars
More compelling that nearly every other film of the past few years, 'Bowling for Columbine' had me wondering why there aren't more documentary's on general release in cinemas, because I left the cinema feeling not only entertained, but more thought provoked than I have been in a long time. The film/documentary basically puts forward the question - are Americans nuts about guns, or just plain nuts? Moore's film would point to the latter, and it's not without its reasons. America has by far the highest toll of gun deaths for a Western country per year, 11,000+ as the documentary explains compared to the few hundred by the next highest ranking country. The average viewer would quickly come to the conclusion that it is because America has so many guns, but this view is challenged when Moore points out that Canada has seven million guns in ten million families, but "only" a few hundred deaths each year.'Bowling for Columbine' focuses on the 1999 Columbine school shootings and the death of a six year old girl to form the basis of the documentary's questions. He also takes a look at the culture of fear that has been created by the American media and its victimisation of African Americans. Two of the documentary's highlights are the acts of America's foreign policy, played ironically to Satchmo's 'What a Wonderful World', and a cartoon explaining the brief history of the USA, which while simplistic, is certainly funny. And not to be forgotten, of course, is the interview with Charlton Heston. Moore lays into him like a ton of bricks and ends up making Heston look like what he is - a gun toting, far right fanatic with no moral basis for his beliefs. Well done Moore for exposing this!
One slight drawback of the documentary I felt, was how Moore seemed to present America as a land where guns rule and killings occur throughout it, but having been to America and having many friends who are American, I know for a fact this is not true. It obviously varies from place to place, which Moore didn't seem to explain.
As many critics have claimed, the low point of the documentary is Moore's failure to come up with an answer to his question. This is true, but I think the words of a review I recently read in the newspaper sums it up well - "While Moore may not provide any conclusive answers to the questions he poses, in a world where people are too afraid to question anything, at least he's asking them".
As the for the question Moore posed, that being why America has so many gun deaths compared to other western countries, I have come up with a view, which may or may not be correct. Ever since the Pilgrims arrived in America in the sixteenth century, Americans have constantly moved west to find new land. Because of this, they moved so quickly that often they had no governing body to restrict their actions, so people took matters into their own hands. Could these periods of lawlessness have created such a society?