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Bowling For Columbine [2002]


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Editorial
Amazon.co.uk Review

An Oscar-winning documentary based around a 1999 massacre at an American High School in Colorado, Bowling for Columbine is filmmaker Michael Moore's take on the culture of firearms violence that is, apparently, peculiar to the USA. Significantly, this is no detective investigation into the psychology and motives of the two students who randomly opened fire on their classmates, killing 12 of them--Moore regards such particulars as practically irrelevant--rather, it's an attempt to counter the moral panic and right-wing diagnoses that followed the massacre, with the likes of rock star Marilyn Manson blamed by some.

Using a mixture of roving interviews, statistics, historical documentary footage, cartoon animation and the set-ups familiar to fans of his TV Nation series, Moore teases out appalling truths about gun proliferation in America. He's able to obtain a rifle by opening a bank account and shows that the bullets used in the Columbine massacre were still available at KMart--until he confronts their management with victims of the shootings. But it's not just gun proliferation that's the problem. Canada, Moore discovers, is similarly rife with firearms yet has a far lower murder rate. The problem with the US, Moore believes, is an irrational climate of fear that has driven the country to reactionary extremes since the days of the pioneers, persuading citizens that they need to be armed to the teeth.

In a film short on lowlights, the highlight is Moore's confrontation with NRA President Charlton Heston. Moore's deceptively genial, shambling, regular American dude appearance (as well as his NRA membership) wins Heston's confidence and Moore teases from the actor an inadvertently racist slip of the tongue, before turning up the heat, at which point Heston terminates the interview. In this moment, the sort of anger Moore demonstrated at the 2003 Academy Awards ceremony surfaces briefly as he brandishes a picture of a gunshot victim to the retreating Heston. Funny, shrewd, righteous, hard to deny, Bowling for Columbine is uncomfortable and irresistible filmmaking. --David Stubbs


lame
Review date: 2008-11-10 Rating: 2 out of 10

Very biased, with Moore continually making irrelevant comparasions between different states and gun violence.

He seems to want to throw every liberal hangup in, from racism to poverty to corporate crime.

And the interview with Heston is absurd, because Moore really is just trying to advance his own agenda, not to find out why Heston holds the views he does.

It is very cheap to say that Heston is a racist because he suggested that mixed race communities might be more porne to conflict and violence. It is quite possible that he is right.



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Reviews


Gun Nuts... or Just Nuts?
Review date: 2008-08-14 Rating: 8 out of 10

This is the most important film you will see all year. It could change lives.

It's not about big explosions, merchandising, t-shirts, or selling you popcorn. It isn't about making you feel good or giving you a nights entertainment. It peels the top off the American Psyche and exposes the gaping holes inside. It takes you from joyous laughter to tears of sorrow and howls of rage within ten minutes.

As drunk American moms talk about keeping guns in their houses to prevent the evil hordes of `niggers' from battering down their doors. As the president demands billions of dollars to wage yet another pointless war and can`t even pay to keep his own people in foodstamps. As redneck hillbillies in combat gear talk about their guns. As two school-children from Columbine are shown through grainy CCTV footage murdering 16 people. And that anyone in America thinks they can justify anything they do simply by claiming "I'm An American". If it works for the President, it's good enough for Charlton Heston and anyone else who can't justify their actions.

So we get a journey of Michael Moore, author of the suppressed best-seller Stupid White Men, venturing into the depths of America trying to understand the American way of life. Ostensibly it's about the American obsession with the `right to bear arms', but instead becomes about the American obsession with the right to do whatever the hell they want and pack a gun at the same time.

Michael meets Charlton Heston, who babbles incoherently about how the 11,127 murders a year in America are a result of the nations multi-ethnicity. He gets the door slammed in his face by American hero Dick Clark. He meets Marilyn Manson backstage and storms the reception of Walmart headquarters armed only with two crippled victims of the Cloumbine shooting who want to return to the bullets lodged in their bodies to the store that sold them. We get Matt Stone taking the lid off middle-class white American paranoia, and a veritable horde of white trash nobodies who talk about sleeping with loaded guns under their pillows, stealing guns to sell to drug dealers, making home-made napalm, and how the violence is all the fault of the black underclass on welfare.

We also get five of the best minutes of cinema I've ever seen : A South-Park style "Brief History Of America" that exposes the cruelty of those in power more viciously than anything I've ever seen. It's one of the most damning indictments of the American way of life that's ever been shown.

The film has its flaws : Moore's argument is emotionally-driven, and therefore, will probably only preach to the converted. The film is too long and often `loses the plot' with detours into US foreign policy, the Welfare System, and a brief history of colonialism. Michael Moore is often unfocused in his actions and, as they gatecrash the home of Moses himself, loses his opportunities to ask the really tough questions. But the questions he does ask are still enough to cause a reaction as revealing, cowardly, and telling as any I've seen on film.

Bowling For Columbine is a document that will stand the test of time, acting forever as a snapshot of the paranoia that drives America to think it has the right to shoot anyone it wants as well as exposing the central hypocrisy and stupidity that drives Western Civilisation as whole. The big question after September 11th 2001 for many people was "Why? Why is America hated so much?". This film starts to give the answers.

Funny polemic, incoherent documentary
Review date: 2008-04-21 Rating: 4 out of 10

If you take this as humour first, and a documentary second (or third, or fourth), then you might like it. However, on the whole, I think people are a little bit too willing to swallow Moore's message and too little interested in scrutinising his claims and arguments. A lot of this is pretty vacuous - asking some Canadian teenagers who had bunked off school about violence, thus supposedly showing that Canadian culture is not violent; eliciting pearls of wisdom from Marilyn Manson ("I would have listened to the kids"... please - though I see at least one reviewer was conned). Many of the grand connections he makes are spurious, unprovable. He also contradicts himself on several occasions. It's interesting that he believes the media foments an irrational fear of crime after quoting the horrendous annual statistics for gun deaths in the United States.

I suppose, in our sound-bite culture, few people bother to ask whether a "documentary" about guns and gun culture should be a serious-minded, honest inquiry into the issue. The fact that the film is fun and presses the right buttons with people who already share Michael Moore's views is enough.

I find Moore funny, but I don't think the film even begins to fulfil its purported function. It's a funny political polemic, not a documentary.

What is it with Yanks and their guns?
Review date: 2007-09-23 Rating: 10 out of 10

I was working near Columbine a couple of days before its high school massacre happened, so this film was a 'must see' long before Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 made him a household name. In many ways, this is a better constructed film and a real eye-opener. If you ever think that the Americans are 'a bit like us Brits', think again: they are just OBSESSED with guns!

In Virgin, Utah, every adult has to carry a gun by law. I'll repeat that: every adult HAS to carry a gun by law. In some banks, they will give you a gun if you open an account.

It is not just the fact that there are so many guns in America that is the problem, though: in Canada they have almost as many per head of population but they don't go killing each other in the same way. This is because Canadians are not as greedy and as paranoid as many Americans. Why, they even have a state health service (the subject of Michael Moore's latest film)! In the eyes of many Americans, this makes Canadians dangerous commie subversives.

Americans are very peculiar people.

The conclusion does not follow the arguments
Review date: 2007-09-13 Rating: 8 out of 10

Michael Moore hit the road of glory with this documentary. He speaks of the High School shooting in Littleton. He is always surprising. We expected an approach that would try to recapture the two young men who went berserk, their backgrounds, their surroundings, their friends and families. In one word try to explain why these two perfectly normal young men could have run into such a pile of guano. But no. Michael Moore attacks somewhere else. He attacks the National Rifle Association all along, and yet he comes to the idea that it does not explain anything because in Canada they probable have even more guns per head. And they do not have a number of killings with fire-arms that could come close to comparing with the US. That's just the point here. The whole film is built on a line that in the end he has to push aside. And he comes up with another completely different and hardly supported in the film: Americans have a problem with their psyche. He does not specify if it is their individual psyches or if it is their collective psyche. And I must say it is kind of disappointing. He brutally interrupts the President of the NRA, Charlton Heston who is speaking of the wide presence of violence in American history (and the ethnicity of that violence) by quoting Germany, Russia, England and Japan as violent countries. But that does not in anyway bring him towards his conclusion. In other words he concludes with an opinion that is not supported by what he has shown in the film. For a documentary it is harsh to say so.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Product Details/Specifications


Actor(s):
Marilyn Manson
Mike Bradley
Michael Moore
Jacobo Arbenz
Charlton Heston

Creators:
Michael Moore (Primary Contributor)
Michael Moore (Writer)
Charlton Heston (Primary Contributor)
Charles Bishop (Producer)
Charlie Siskel (Producer)
Chris Aldred (Producer)
Gillian Aldrich (Producer)
Jeff Gibbs (Producer)
Jim Czarnecki (Producer)

Director(s):

Recording label: Momentum Pictures
Manufacturer: Momentum Pictures
EAN: 5060049140353
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 1
Format: PAL,
Release date: 2003-05-12
Number of discs: 1
Audience rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
Region code: 2
Running time: 120 minutes
Theatrical release date: 2002
Language: English (Original Language)

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