FILM CRITIQUE:
Somewhere in "Bowling for Columbine" there is a coherent, logical movie.

In 1989 Moore managed to shine a bright light on a much more narrowly focused subject in his earlier movie, "Roger and Me," with its take on the General Motors Corporation and the economic effect on Flint, Michigan when that company decided to close its automobile manufacturing plants there.

Moore doesn't have that focus in this movie, and, as a result, "Bowling for Columbine" runs all over the lot with specious arguments, unsubstantiated suppositions, and enough accusations and liberal innuendo to fill the back of a manure truck.

As a film it is occasionally very funny, but, as a piece of propaganda, it is a narrative mess along with being an argumentative failure. The emphasis in "Bowling for Columbine" is clearly on the comedy, for to call this film a documentary would be an insult to the genre.*

This movie wanders all over the liberal agitprop map in a broadly based polemic directed against everything and anything having even the remotest connection to gun violence in its futile attempt to dissect the curious propensity of far too many of us Americans to favor a well directed bullet for the final solution to our problems in a proportion far outdistancing that of every other country on Earth.

Many other countries have a similarly militaristic past as we do, and yet none of them share our disproportionate per capita murder rate by firearms. As members of a society who are constantly under threat from a randomly shot bullet or even a psychotic gun owner, as the recent events around Washington, D.C., during the last several weeks have all too terrifyingly evinced to us, we certainly ought to examine just why far too
many of us have the mindset that gun violence against our fellow citizens offers the most attractive solution for far too many of our own problems, whether they be societal or personal.

It must be admitted that Moore does some justice to a question that certainly needs to be asked, but please expect neither an answer to that question nor a fair and balanced inquiry into this problem in his movie, "Bowling for Columbine."

The summary problem is that his filmed response to this question is so broad based with his scatter gun approach and loaded with so many points of dubious relevance as to maim, perhaps fatally, whatever argument he might have wished to propagandize.

Moore ends up with a film that is at least one half hour too long with its full two hour running length. This movie desperately needed a blue pencil along with an editor who could have cut out many of Moore's extraneous and irrelevant observations, many of which are downright silly.

Furthermore, Moore's habit of grandstanding for the camera strikes me more as an exercise in egotistic preening rather than merely enhancing his patented image as a lovable, messy, overweight, schlepp of a guy next door.

Moore starts this movie off by making the point that President Clinton started an important bombing campaign in the Balkan War just two days before the shootings at the Columbine High School. This military campaign had many civilian casualties and Moore then makes the more than tenuous argument that there is a connection between these two wildly disparate events.

Another argument of dubious merit, given the widespread dispersal of our military industrial defense industry throughout the country, is that the presence of the many defense contractors in and around Denver is somehow a breeding ground for this kind of violent behavior.

Moore then leaps from these two observations into the political realm of our foreign policy being dominated by a military solution to any and every crisis. The murder of President Allende of Chile and the overthrow and murder of President Diem of Vietnam, presumedly with the help of our CIA, is brought into this movie about Columbine as if to make the point that murder and violence are in our collective genes. Other past assassinations with suspected CIA complicity are also brought into the argument, such as the events preceding the installation of the former Shah of Iran.

This is all interesting stuff, but it adds little to Moore's presentation while at the same time being a distraction to the other arguments that he wishes to make. Furthermore, even a cursory examination
of current world history will find many countries with a long history of governments being overthrown, all without the help of our CIA. To assume that this is a peculiarly American phenomenon is to make an incorrect assumption.

Clips of President Bush arguing for increased defense spending to feed our apparent need for more guns to protect our national well being are shown with critical commentary by Moore in spite of the events on 9/11. Even though the WTC bombings are shown, they are glossed over and Moore moves on to other considerations that seem more important or more relevant to him.

One particularly infuriating "fact" is presented by Moore in a
"South Park" type cartoon format just for yucks, but the information in that cartoon is still offered as factual evidence without any challenge whatsoever. In that cartoon Moore claims that the total U.S. Black population increased from 700,000 during the War of Independence to over 4,000,000 some 60 years later.

This burgeoning Black population growth, Moore claims in all seriousness, was the impetus for Samuel Colt inventing the revolver in 1836. I mean, come on now! Is there anyone
out there who actually believes this garbage? That the Colt revolver was invented solely to "keep all 'dem Darkies down on de plantation where dey belong?" I was always under the assumption that the Colt revolver quickly went into our military for use and then moved west with the settlers to combat the Indians and the cattle rustlers.

It's bad enough that we have to cope with Urban myths today,
and now this purported "fact" will no doubt enter the lexicon as another liberal or Black historical myth. Promoting this idea in a commercial movie is just insane, and Moore ought to be ashamed of himself. This is the kind of liberal propaganda that comes from the same unquestioning mindset that produces the idiot White Supremacists and gun nuts that Moore more effectively lampoons earlier in his movie.

However, the silliest argument that Moore makes in this movie has to do with the tragic shooting death of a six year old girl in his home town of Flint, Michigan. Even more tragically, the killer was a six year old male fellow classmate. He was the son of a single mother who was being evicted from her apartment even though she was traveling 80 miles by bus each and every day in order to hold down two low paying jobs at a shopping mall. Her son had found a gun in the home of his uncle where he was temporarily staying and he later brought it to school and shot the young girl.

Was the uncle indicted by Moore for leaving his gun lying around? No. He's too easy a target. Does Moore indict the absentee father of this kid, whoever and wherever he may be? Again, no. Does the mother share any responsibility for not ascertaining that her brother didn't leave any weapons lying around the house before dropping her young son off for his visit? Once again, the assumption of personal responsibility is either not a requirement or not the problem in Moore's liberal mindset.

Moore then proceeded to indict, by extension, the Michigan state welfare system for not paying this woman enough so that she could instead be a stay at home mom, as if we taxpayers have the responsibility to support every single mother in the country so that they can all stay home and rear their children. Even among the supposedly rich of today, latchkey kids and kids staying with friends of the parents are common as both parents are forced to work to pay the bills.

Then Moore jumps to the attack of Dick Clark's franchised American Bandstand Restaurant, one of the places in the mall where this child's mother worked. In Moore's eyes, the real problem is that the restaurant didn't pay this woman enough so that she could come home earlier to take care of her son.

He even travels out to Los Angeles to "ambush" Dick Clark for an interview as he gets into his limousine, as if Clark is somehow responsible for the actions of a six year old son of one of his
restaurant's employees two thousand miles away. Or that his company should be blamed for having the courage to hire a welfare mother and put her to meaningful work. Great theater, lousy logic.

Equally effective, but equally illogical, is Moore's grandstanding in front of the K-Mart corporate headquarters with two of the Columbine student gunshot victims, both of whom still carry slugs in their badly scarred bodies. His one victory in this movie, which took the wind out of his sails and left him at an unusual loss for words, was this corporation's capitulation to his demands to withdraw from selling ammunition at any of their stores.

This is the same kind of stretch for corporate liability that tort
attorneys are working with their twisted and flawed rationale in many of our nation's courtrooms. After all, how does K-Mart selling or not selling ammunition have anything to do with anything? If they don't, someone else will, as these are all items legal for purchase and sale.

Once again, the cult of corporate responsibility as a deep pocket victim for legalized extortion seems to have trumped all efforts to maintain that it is the individual who must always be ultimately responsible for his personal actions. Whatever else may be said, K-Mart wasn't there pulling the trigger. Klebold and Harris did that and the source for their ammunition is factually and argumentatively irrelevant.

Finally, Moore goes after the great bugaboo of all American liberals everywhere, Charleton Heston, the president of the NRA. While the NRA admittedly shares some culpability and a lot of blame for being so tacky and tasteless as to hold gun rallies in both Denver and Flint shortly after these two tragic events, nowhere does Moore place the blame on the citizens of those two areas for probably demanding a NRA rally in order to protect their cherished right to bear arms.

Heston makes the mistake of graciously allowing Moore, surprisingly an NRA member, into his palatial Hollywood home for an interview, which turns out to be more pathetic than anything else as it is very plain that Heston is in the initial stages of the Alzheimer's disease and is very frail and shockingly elderly besides. This is no Moses coming down from the mount and he is no match for the youthful Moore, who goes out of his way to make
tasteless personal theater by grandstanding shamelessly for the camera during his visit.

Surprisingly enough, and most damningly of all to my way of thinking, Moore did uncover a gem of an idea as to why we American citizens are so hell bent on owning firearms for our own protection, and yet he failed to follow up on these observations to their logical conclusion. The middle part of his movie spends a considerable amount of time observing the way that our national media today plays into our natural fears for self preservation by
emphasizing acts of violence over practically everything else on the nightly television newscasts. Critically, Black violence is emphasized over White violence and the result created by these incessantly violent newscasts is an inordinate fear by many Whites as to the presumed omnipresent danger of rampaging Blacks to their physical and economic well being.

This is in spite of the statistics that Moore cites as showing Black
on White violence as being quite rare. He goes to the center of the Los Angeles Watts riots and proclaims himself to be quite safe. This is, of course, during the middle of the day when scads of police are around making an arrest. Moore instead wants them to arrest a businessman for making the air so polluted that he can't see the "Hollywood" sign some dozen miles or so in the distance.

He then goes to Canada where murders are very rare and people
even leave their doors unlocked at all hours of the day. This is in spite of the fact that their per capita level of gun ownership is very similar to our own. The climate of fear, so pervasive in the States, is virtually nonexistent in Canada, even in the metropolitan areas right across the river from Detroit. Even Blacks feel safer there.

The Canadians themselves blame the pervasive influence of violence in the news for our problems of rampant personal insecurity in the lower Forty Eight States. While not a novel concept, this was the most interesting of the many areas that Moore explored looking for reasons as to our astronomical murder rate by firearms.

Unfortunately, Moore presents these damning facts and then fails to follow up on them. Does he choose to dog Sumner Redstone, Chairman of Viacom (CBS News), Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman of General Electric (NBC News), or Michael Eisner, Chairman of Walt Disney (ABC News) for an ambush interview? Hell, no. Our liberal national media is not in any liberal's hall of shame for any culpability whatsoever for fomenting these fears through
their incessant broadcasting of "If it bleeds, it leads" news of the gore of the day.

This is a shame. Now THAT would have made for an interesting movie...

The title for the movie, "Bowling for Columbine," comes from the strange coincidence of the two students, Klebold and Harris, going bowling early in the morning before their murderous rampage at Columbine High School. This fact is merely a statistical coincidence, like the many other loose ends that Moore tries to weave into a tapestry of condemnation in order to achieve the philosophical ends that he would have liked to have reached, but couldn't, in this movie. On that point this movie fails as propaganda as well.