Bowling for Columbine: An Intellectual Poison Movie Review
I'm sure there are plenty of reviews of Michael Moore's latest movie out on the internet and I've not taken the time to read a single one of them. Instead, I got the movie and watched it and will attempt to draw out some conclusions about the movie based on just that.

First off, my movie store kicks ass. I've been wanting to watch Bowling for Columbine for a while now but missed it in the theatres (like most movies, I rarely go out to see movies anymore). And when I pulled up to the rental place they had posters all over their windows for it, literally every single space was a Bowling for Columbine poster instead of the latest cinematic masterpeice starring Lisa Kudrow or Susan Sarandon. Nope, instead they had big, fat, slumpy Michael Moore plastered everywhere.

And it wasn't until I got to the DVD rack that I saw the sign saying East Cliff Video was allowing its patrons to take the movie home for a night for free because they felt strongly enough about it rent it for free. I'd link to their home page but they're quaint enough to not have a web site yet. Oh well.

Overall I have to give the movie a thumbs up for the way that Moore exposes the utter lunacy in the gun culture but also the atmosphere of fear perpetrated by the American media. The most telling and memorable statistic from the movie for me was this: the homicide rate in the US has gone down by 20% but the media coverage for homicides has gone up by more than 600%. Broken down that means that less people are being killed but the media is covering those deaths more than 6 times as much as before. Granted that the backup statistics would have been helpful in that there was no time frame for either number, no scope of what a homicide was (did it include vehicular homicide, stabbings or poisonings?) and what constitutes coverage? But still, it stuck with me and goes a long way to highlighting the sensationalistic nature of the media. The old adage, if it bleeds, it leads, seems to very much be alive and festering.

There were several points in the movie where I had to call bullshit. The biggest and most often used one was to show the large number of gun owners in Canada, something like 10 million guns for 30 million people. And then he makes this enormous leap of logic to Europe and asks why they don't have the gun deaths that we do here in the US. I'm sorry, Michael, but you can't use one country as a premise and then go to two totally different countries (he uses England and Germany which do have pretty severe restrictions on gun ownership in place and have for a long, long time) to prove a point. He makes a logical error in arguing this way and as such diminishes much of his righteous and sensationalistic mockumentary style.

The other scene that I found to be utterly self serving was the "interview" with Charleton Heston where it was obvious that he was merely playing nice until he got to the meaty questions, namely why would the NRA continue with a rally in the weeks following the Columbine massacre and then again in the short time period after a 6 year old boy shot and killed a 6 year old girl in school. Yes, it was a valid question that deserved an answer but Moore came off as pumping the dead little girl for shock value and to piss off Heston. Again, his argument loses alot of air when he bases portions of the argument on incredibly self serving and lame exploitations. Was Moore more shocked and bothered by the fact that the 6 year old shooting took place in his home town or that it was a 6 year old who died?

But overall, I did enjoy the movie. I found alot of his insights to be both valid and scary. The part in which he tries to get KMart to accept the return of the bullets that were still lodged in two of the Columbine victims was pure publicity and he seemed honestly astonished when KMart bowed and vowed to pull handgun ammunition from its shelves. I think he was a little disappointed that he couldn't roast the company in the spotlight as they ignored him. But no, they caved and pulled the ammo. A good thing but highly manipulative and I'm not sure if he cared about the potential side effects to the two guys he used, the two kids who'd been shot by the Dylan Harris and Eric Klebold.

An interesting and valuable set of insights was offered by celebrities being interviewed. Marilyn Manson on how he and his music was singled out for having been a major cause of the Columbine tragedy. He spoke well and while I think his music is pathetically terrible, I liked what he had to say. One of the creators of South Park was interviewed too because he was from Littleton, I can't remember if it was Parker or Stone but he made a truly excellent point.

High school doesn't matter. Sure, it feels like it is everything that exists in the universe while you're in it but once you're out of high school, the world doesn't give the slightest damn about whether you were a stud, loser, geek, freak, nerd, jock or whatever else in high school. And he also said that all the cool guys in high school were insurance salesmen now and the losers were opening their own companies and doing something valuable with their lives.

I'm not sure whether the movie was about the lunacy of being a nation that kills more than 11,000 of its own citizens with guns every year or whether we're being punked by the huge media companies that continue to feed fear of violent death to everyone at every turn. My belief is that the latter is a better message and one that is easily fixable. Don't watch the news that caters to sensationalising death, murder and mayhem. Oh yeah, and don't get pissed off and go on a damned killing spree. Be a man about it and deal with it, break your hand punching trees or whatever but killing other people just makes you a permanent asshole.

I'd recommend Bowling for Columbine to anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of the chasm between the US and the rest of the world for gun deaths.

Oh yeah, that's another failing of the movie, or omission really, they only talk about gun deaths, never about other violent attacks or other means of killing off fellow humans. And it would have been nice to know, sure, Japan had 38 gun deaths that year but what if they had 570 sword slayings and another 800 knife murders? Kind of tosses a molotov cocktail on the violence aspect of gun deaths. And no, I don't think the numbers are anywhere near either of those but without Moore to disclose those stats, its left up to me to go and find out on my own.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Or wait, guns aren't the only way to kill people.

If you're in Santa Cruz then go and hit up East Cliff Video before the end the offer. And if they've already ended it then go and pay to rent Bowling for Columbine, its worth a look even if you have to look past Michael Moore's shambling hulk of hypocrisy and disconnected logic to make his point from time to time.