No longer at top price only two years after release!!! Wow, what a humiliation!!! :rolleyes:
(Note that it’s still priced at $9.99 in the picture, hardly clearout territory)
Bowling for Colombine was excellent but flawed for me. It seems MM builds up quite a good casethat US violence problem being caused by media invoked “fear of the stranger next door” when combined with easy weapon availability. But it falls over at the end when he ignores the media responsability and goes after the NRA figure-head. Ignoring the fact that lethal weapons are easily available in every country on the planet, and his specific observation that Canada has as much freedom of gun ownership as most of USA. No where does he give any thought to combating the media fearmongering other than blaming the Bush administration for it.
But how exactly did “hype and misinformation” drive a couple of kids to shoot people in a high school?
Bippy, when people in the USA pull the trigger and kill other people, is this really caused by media-invoked fear of the stranger next door? Is a so-called culture of fear really the factor that makes people kill others? I don’t see it. If Canada has proportionally the same number of guns as the USA (perhaps even more - it doesn’t matter for the sake of this argument), and yet more people kill other people using guns in the USA than in Canada, doesn’t this point to underlying and increasing social problems in the States? Alienation, disillusionment, breakdown of the family, materialism? Aren’t these (or other social factors like them) more significant and more important than the influence of the TV, radio, cinema, newspapers and the Internet? And shouldn’t the means by which these killings are committed (guns) be the subject of reflection and a reconsideration of their role and function in 21st century America, alongside reconsideration of the militia spirit of the second amendment of 1791?
Grammar point: Gorilla Man, I was aware that MM is still a member of the NRA. I wrote: “Moore made a point of mentioning how he was a member of the NRA and had won trophies for shooting when younger in Flint.” The use of the simple past tense ‘was’ after the reporting verb phrase ‘made a point of mentioning’ allows that interpretation. The fact that the second clause after the reporting verb contains the past perfect (‘had won’) + a phrase of completed time in the past (‘when younger in Flint’), and is thereby distinguished from the first clause, should prompt the reader to understand Moore’s membership of the NRA to be ongoing and current.
Exactly the type of defence the Moore-defenders are criticised for using (such as evey attempt to explain the KKK comment earlier in this thread). However, I’m prepared to concede that it was irrelevant to start with, and that I only made the correction at a time when I thought this was something other than just another Michael Moore thread.
In case you haven’t seen the film, or can’t remember it, he does tackle the fundamental differences in the way the two societies are structured (healthcare being the example that springs to mind).
What I suspect he would like people to do is not to simply pick holes in small aspects of the film, but to stand back and say “So if it isn’t a ‘culture of fear’ that causes this huge death toll from guns, what is it???”
He blames Bush for the culture of fearmongering??? I’m not sure Bush was even in office while the film was being shot.
Good catch; it was Clinton in office and Moore criticized him for bombing Belgrade. So did Marilyn Manson and the South Park guy.
It’s no ‘catch’. Chapter 10 of Stupid White Men is a vicious attack on Clinton and the Democrats.
The Moore-defenders are all proficient in pedagogical grammar? We have more in common than I thought.
I saw M.M.‘s Roger and Me when I was younger. I thought he made some good points and did a good job showing the stark contrast between the Flint boom town of his youth and the urban waste land it has become.
I now realize that he simplifies complex issues, uses piss poor logic to “prove”
his points (the whole Dick Clark thing in BFC) and exploits cinematic techniques to make connections that don’t necessarily exist (the whole animated “history” in BFC).
I know he never said the KKK became the NRA but imagine if showed you an image of a man and a woman holding hands looking into each others eyes. One would assume that there was a romantic involvement. “Ha! you silly bastard! She cut her finger and he was squeezing her hand to stop the bleeding “He was giving her a sympathetic look to calm her down!”
On the plus side I thought the Marilyn Manson interview was nice.
Keep in mind, a lot of “docs” are largely staged and highly edited. Nanook of the North is a prime example. I could film Mike Tyson whipping my ass and with some clever editing I could make it look like I was the baddest MO’ FO’ of all time.
BFC raises a good valid question. Why is there more gun violence here than anywhere else. MM never answers that question. Is this because MM wants you, the intelligent viewer to make up your own mind? I don’t think so. MM puts you on a path, gives you a map that shows no other roads and at journey’s end you arrive at a shanty town consisting of ramshackle examples of bigotry, redneck stupidity, evil gov. and evil big business.
Is it all an elaborate exercise in personal catharsis, I wonder?
I don’t think Moore claims to have an answer; I think he set out to find an answer, discovered he could not, and decided to share his meandering journey with us. Maybe he hopes someone in the audience can tell the rest of us why we’re so much more violent than the rest of the world.
He certainly feels there are big threads in our society that contribute: shallow and hyper-sensational news reporting; insensitive corporate interests; politicians who pander to the lowest common denominator; and a public that readily accepts the “products” of these folks without demanding more, better, and complete information.
He’s *definitely * an undisciplined film-maker. But then, he was trying to cover a really BIG topic - kudos to him for trying, for making it entertaining throughout, and most importantly, for getting us all talking about it.
The Dick Clark thing was an attempt to show how disconnected Corporate interests are from the people who are effected by their decisions (or refusal to make decisions); the Charlton Heston thing was an attempt to show how zealotry in pursuit of a good thing (Second Amendment rights) only adds to the tone of incivility in society. (All this IMHO, of course).
The animated bits? Hyperbole, certainly rendered in such a ridiculous manner that we are meant to see it as such. Of course, the purpose of hyperbole is to goad us into examining the truths that lie beneath - Mr. Moore is doing us the favor here of assuming we have enough intelligence to dig a little.
My overall impression? He’s a deeply thoughtful person who is genuinely pained at what he sees in our society, desperately wants to know how to go about fixing it, and has found to his dismay that he cannot. So he lays it all out for us. Give him credit for doing it in a clever, entertaining and thought-provoking way, for the obvious sincerity of his beliefs, and for the civility in his approach. I came away from both BFC and F9/11 with a much higher opinion of Mr. Moore than I was expecting to, pre-viewing.
He doesn’t answer his own questions directly but points the viewer to one fairly likely single source: America’s institutionalized culture of fear, perpetuated by both national and local new’s penchant for taking statistically unlikely events and constantly harping on them for weeks at a time.
Think of the many, many scare stories that were the vogue of recent seasons: school shootings, shark attacks, road rage, Ritalin abuse, date rape drugs, medical malpractice horror stories, etc. What is the point of reporting all these kinds of stories when statistically, they’re unlikely to happen to you and/or to people you know? All of these events pale in the wake of 9/11/01 and the looming threat of international terrorism, which not only has added to many people’s fears but now has had the government weighing in with dire warnings about vague “chatter” prompting us to raise “terror alerts.”
Nationally, fearmongering has the effect of making security and safety ongoing paramount concerns for many, which tends to lead to an erosion of civil liberties people willingly give up in pursuit of securing said safety, like implementing Zero Tolerance policies in schools or submitting to searches on planes, trains and even Greyhound buses.
Finally, by demonizing various people around us, fearmongering incites people into a “shoot first, to hell with asking questions” worldview. Police are given the authority to overreact with lethal force, or use the slippery slope of “profiling” to pursue suspects on the basis race, ethnicity and nationality. People are exempted from criminal prosecution for gun violence on their personal property if they merely think they’re in some sort of danger… and far too many people settle disputes with guns. It comes to the point where even the idea of banning guns outright in some places (like schools) is viewed as anathema to some people, who think that, on the off-chance that someone shows up with a gun, another gunowner (with no police training) is exactly what’s needed to defuse the situation.
Also, in the case of school shootings, the instant celebrity enjoyed even post-mortem by perpetrators must be seen as having a copycat effect on some unstable youngsters elsewhere.
THAT’S why, IMHO, America has five times the level of gun deaths than other countries.
The DVD is definately modified for post 9/11 events (or I’m going mad, or maybe he mentioned Bush senior and I got confused) I’ll look again.
I’m not saying that is what I believe, just what I got as MM’s argument put out in the DVD version of Bowling for Columbine. He basicly twisted the idea that the number of people working for Lockheed Martin in the Columbine area made it somehow that people thought weapons were good in that area. And that ‘fear of the stranger’ helped alienate the children involved. He doesn’t seem to have any great logical argument there at all.
Personally I have seen Alienation, disillusionment, breakdown of the family, materialism occuring in the UK for many years without a great increase in violence, but then again UK does not make guns easily available, and <sarcasm on> of course guns are the only lethal weapon possible to use <sarcasm off>. But the ‘be affraid’ meme seems to be coming to UK and prevellent in USA. The ideas that there are bad people out there (true) and they will kill you or your children if you don’t take huge precautions (extremely unlikely). The world seems to have gone from “children, don’t accept sweets from strangers” to “children, don’t talk to strangers” to “children, avoid strangers” and is getting towards “children, be affraid of stranger”. I don’t think this is healthy, but I don’t think it is by any means the soul or even primary cause of violence in USA or elsewhere.
Actually the film was trying to make these points. MM did not only point out that the media in Canada is less fear mongering.
He tried to show how one horrible incident in Flint, the young boy shooting his female classemate, may have played out differently in Canada. He pointed out how the boys mother was now in a ‘get off unemployment’ program and was being bussed quite a ways so she could work in a mall selling hamburgers at a restaurant owned by Dick Clark. Now I think going and talking to Clark was a mistake as it was not the real point. The mother still lost her residence and the boy went to live with an uncle, who also delt crack. Now over in Canada, the woman would not have lost her dwelling and her job retraing and working would have kept her family together and maybe that little girl would not have been shot.
Without having read other’s comments:
The message I got was - “I wanted to make a film about how America’s gun culture was the primary reason for escalating violence in the US, especially school violence, but as I was making the film, it turned out that it really wasn’t, so I thought maybe it has something to do with fear and/or poverty, or maybe not. Still, I was 2/3rds of the way done with the movie by the time I came up with the new idea, and I didn’t want to reshoot - so here it is!”
Considering Moore’s detractors always accuse him of “lying” in his movies, wouldn’t it have been easier for him to fake the ending/conclusion he wanted?
I think Genghis Bob got it; Moore started with a question but no answer, and Bowling for Columbine is just his meandering journey to try (and fail) to find one. Moore does not claim to be Moses, stepping down from Sinai with holy writ; he just wants to prod our brains and make us think about the issues.