Review
Saw Bowling for Columbine, a documentary by Mike Moore, on Saturday night. It was very much worth seeing, but I left with mixed feelings about its content. Most of you will be aware (and I'm sure a lot of you will have seen it) that it discusses the causes and consequences of American gun culture at some length. The title refers to the fact that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went bowling hours before the massacre they committed at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Moore puts forward a theory that bowling causes violence as a playful satire of the hypotheses commonly plugged by the media regarding the antecedents of the shooting sprees that are becoming more common in the US - hypotheses about TV, film, computer games, gun control, whatever.
The film is both informative and moving (particularly the sequences in which the viewer witnesses the consequences of military actions of the US overseas - topical with the approaching conflict between US and Iraq), and at times, shocking, for example when we are privy to the lunacies of a potential accomplice to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, or the National Rifle Association as represented by its figurehead Charlton Heston. But Mike Moore is such an intense polemicist that by the end of the documentary (which clocks in at over two hours) you're questioning whether or not some of the 'facts' (just how distorted are they?) are even relevant to his case.
I found interviews and other footage shot in Windsor and Detroit, which face each other across a river on the northern border of the US, particularly interesting due to having just seen the Eminem vehicle 8 Mile (quite a fun film) which is set in poverty-stricken areas of Detroit. The documentary footage demonstrated the accuracy of 8 Mile's depiction of Detroit. The contrast of cultures between the US and Canada is very marked in the film, but I thought Moore's presentation accentuated the vicissitudes of one country in comparison to the virtues of the other too heavy-handedly, ignoring any good points in American culture and any bad points in that of Canada.
Definitely a good film despite these flaws though. One finds it hard to disagree with Moore's basic position that the US is unreasonably violent compared to other First World countries (works out at about 20 times as many gun-related homicides per capita per annum as Australia, which is about 3 times again as bad as the UK, for example). I'm convinced that this is due to the easy access Americans have to powerful firearms, and also the legitimacy granted by their media to the use of firearms in self-defence and in defence of one's home. Bowling for Columbine shows you there are a hell of a lot of nutty Americans with guns out there. Scary stuff.
Saw Bowling for Columbine, a documentary by Mike Moore, on Saturday night. It was very much worth seeing, but I left with mixed feelings about its content. Most of you will be aware (and I'm sure a lot of you will have seen it) that it discusses the causes and consequences of American gun culture at some length. The title refers to the fact that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went bowling hours before the massacre they committed at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Moore puts forward a theory that bowling causes violence as a playful satire of the hypotheses commonly plugged by the media regarding the antecedents of the shooting sprees that are becoming more common in the US - hypotheses about TV, film, computer games, gun control, whatever.
The film is both informative and moving (particularly the sequences in which the viewer witnesses the consequences of military actions of the US overseas - topical with the approaching conflict between US and Iraq), and at times, shocking, for example when we are privy to the lunacies of a potential accomplice to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, or the National Rifle Association as represented by its figurehead Charlton Heston. But Mike Moore is such an intense polemicist that by the end of the documentary (which clocks in at over two hours) you're questioning whether or not some of the 'facts' (just how distorted are they?) are even relevant to his case.
I found interviews and other footage shot in Windsor and Detroit, which face each other across a river on the northern border of the US, particularly interesting due to having just seen the Eminem vehicle 8 Mile (quite a fun film) which is set in poverty-stricken areas of Detroit. The documentary footage demonstrated the accuracy of 8 Mile's depiction of Detroit. The contrast of cultures between the US and Canada is very marked in the film, but I thought Moore's presentation accentuated the vicissitudes of one country in comparison to the virtues of the other too heavy-handedly, ignoring any good points in American culture and any bad points in that of Canada.
Definitely a good film despite these flaws though. One finds it hard to disagree with Moore's basic position that the US is unreasonably violent compared to other First World countries (works out at about 20 times as many gun-related homicides per capita per annum as Australia, which is about 3 times again as bad as the UK, for example). I'm convinced that this is due to the easy access Americans have to powerful firearms, and also the legitimacy granted by their media to the use of firearms in self-defence and in defence of one's home. Bowling for Columbine shows you there are a hell of a lot of nutty Americans with guns out there. Scary stuff.
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