AmateurMovieReviews.com

Liza Johnson
Bowling for Columbine

After having seen Bowling for Columbine four times in the past few months, I have come to really enjoy the movie. I have read both of Michael Moore's books, and have also seen his first documentary and I realize that a lot of what he has to say must indeed be taken with a grain of salt. Ideas that come from his movies, books, and thought groups like Amnesty International and Project Censored are probably all based on truth, and most likely give correct information. The movie presents things in a very real time, in a very real way. There are so many things involved in the move itself that you never really know what could be false. You just have to take it all together at once, and hope that somewhere you are getting the right idea.

However, one must be aware when dealing with any of these groups that a lot of the ideas might be taken out of context, skewed slightly, or changed a little to make it all appear stronger towards the left. This is just the reality when dealing with political and social activists such as Michael Moore. It is the same as watching Fox News you know that whatever they report will take a far right stance, where as the same thing reported by Michael Moore can make the right look really, really bad. However. Taken all of this into account, if you can reasonably believe 20 percent of what Michael Moore says in this particular documentary, it is a VERY scary world out there. Even if you cannot safely say that most of what he said is true, even if only a small part of it is true, there are many things that he presents in this movie that end up being very frigtening indeed.

The first time I saw this film, I was studying abroad in France. We decided, one afternoon, to see an English film, and this was the only one playing. To make matters worse, it was the Fourth of July, and the four people in my group and I were the only Americans in the theater. As the show went on (with French subtitles), we sank lower and lower into our seats, horrified by what we were seeing, and humiliated to come from the country where all of this was taking place. We, the four of us, laughed a few times out loud at Michael Moore's satire and the amazing things he brought up. However, we were the only ones who laughed at all. The other audience members seem disgusted by the facts that he presented. We tried to be as quiet as we could while we were laughing, absolutely sure that someone was going to take us all out behind the theatre and get very, very angry at us just for being from the country we were. However, nothing bad happened. It just opened our eyes to our country, and what is currently going on in it.

What I found very enlightening in this documentary were the interviews with so many people who absolutely loved their guns. It makes you shake your head at the stupid things they would say, much like you would dialing through channels if you accidentally ended up on Jerry Springer, except in this case it didn't seem so obvious it was all a joke. The people who talked about keeping guns under their beds scared me. Also, Timothy McVeigh's brother scared me a lot. His discussions about the things he kept on his farm, and his reasons behind having them kind of freaked me out. The most disturbing, however, was the interview with Charles Heston. I couldn't believe the things he was saying about guns in America, it made me want to call him up myself and give him a piece of my mind.

One of the things I found in this movie that you really had to think about as you watched it and realize that it might not be exactly true, was a lot of what he said about Canada. I think that the majority of the facts were probably true, but watching it you realized that when he was knocking on doors in Canada and found them all unlocked, he could have easily edited together the doors that WERE unlocked, and edit out any he found locked. Its little things like that, which are obviously done for production reasons, that you have to be careful of while you watch this movie. You always have to know that things have been edited together, and things might be left out that don't agree with Michael Moore's opinions.

Most of all, this movie made me realize that there are a lot of people in America who are gun happy, and who might not care about anything but "protecting" themselves. As a future teacher, I know that these ideas might be something I will have to deal with if I teach in areas where people believe these sort of things.