I did it. I watched Bowling for Columbine. If you have heard of the film or Michael Moore, you are probably polarized on the subject. You either love Moore and BfC or you detest them. As a rule, I detest Michael Moore. His form of yellow journalism is downright dangerous and hurtful to the documentary as an art form. He really hurts his own case when he takes comments out of context to make some crazy point. The sad thing is that he makes some really good and legitimate points. He points out the problem with corporate criminals, but then tries to make some inane point about the NRA.

His own film disproves one of his major points. He blames Columbine on the NRA and the preponderance of guns in America and then travels to Canada to discover why homicide rates are so much lower there. The problem with his trip north is that Canadians have a HUGE number of guns per household and they aren't killing folks. Gross inconsistencies like this make his valid points hard to accept.

He blames a murder of a little 6yr old girl by a schoolmate in Flint, Michigan on Dick Clark! Because the mother of the child was given a job by the state at an American Bandstand restaurant instead of given welfare, it is Dick Clark's fault that her child killed another child. He never mentions the fact that the little boy had already stabbed a child earlier in the year and has since stabbed another. His mother having to work for her welfare was not what killed the girl. The mother raising the boy in a crack house littered with criminals and guns and being a crappy mother is what made the boy kill the girl.

He makes great points about the media's rampant reporting of fear combined with consumerism. He makes great points about Enron, Bush, Halliburton and Cheney. But further research reveals at dozens and dozens of misrepresentations and outright lies. Check out BfC:Documentary or Fiction

Moore then goes and acts like a moron by harassing Charleton Heston. He cut the Heston interview in such a clearly staged manner as to be reprehensible. The shots of him holding the picture of the dead girl were clearly shot after Heston was gone and he cut it together to appear that Heston had turned his back on the little girl. It was a sad piece. It is crap like that which make you want to discount everything he says.


RATING 6 out of 10

- posted by Chris @ 12:13 AM