Junto Boys

BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE (A Movie Review)

I saw it for the first time today and I’m not sure the point that Moore is trying to make. At first, you get the impression that Moore in making anti-gun film which it mostly is, but then he switches gears and shows that Canadians own even more guns per capita than we do and have fewer gun murders. At that point he turns the camera on the media. He shows that American news is swamped with coverage of violence while Canadian television discusses the location of new speed bumps.

There are plenty of funny moments. The news anchor outside of Detroit who is doing in standup about a school shooting is close to tears. It would have worked if you hadn’t seen him more worried about the length of his hair before the shot took place, or you hadn’t seen him gloat about his coverage going national after the shot. The story, though tragic, is really just an opportunity for him to gain national exposure.

In fact, that’s what Moore is doing here too. By taking a couple of victims from Columbine to K-Mart Headquarters in Michigan to return the bullets that are lodged in their bodies, Moore is exploiting a local tragedy as a national epidemic. By making a movie about these incidents, he’s using violence to scare people just as he shows the media using violence to scare people.

The big ending with Charlton Heston is much less dramatic than it had been reported before the movie was released. Heston was supposed to have said that race was the contributing factor to gun violence, and others have said it since. Instead, Heston gently said that we had more ethnic problems than other countries. Heston was really gracious to allow Moore into his home and he was frank when answering questions.

The movie was plenty entertaining, but was misleading at every turn. His take on foreign dictators and their relations to the United States is clever distortion. Never does he explain the horrors of the opposition. He treats American support of the contras like support for butchers, but Ortega did the real killing in that fight and when Nicaragua finally had free elections, they voted with the Contras.

But there were some laughs.