I just saw Bowling for Columbine...

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StrikeFire83

StrikeFire83

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Well, I finally saw Michael Moore’s documentary. Here are some of my impressions:

-Perhaps this should be called “fact-inspired drama” rather than documentary, or maybe it’s a music video

-It’s a very well made film. Good pacing, editing. It is very funny. Good mix of interviews, news footage, file footage.

-Complete bastardization of Charlton Heston. Moore exploits a growingly senile old man for the movie, and it’s disgusting. I’m sitting there watching this movie, which is edited in such a way as to construe Heston as a racist, and I’m saying to myself…”wait, isn’t this the guy who marched with MLK at a time when it really could have hurt his career, before celebrity activism was the soup de jour”

-I was surprised that with a title like “Bowling for Columbine” how little and how late the film actually dealt with the school massacre.

-Moore spends two hours telling us what’s wrong but provides no alternative. Okay, so some high school kids used some guns to kill other high school kids. What do we do about it! What gun laws, exactly, would have prevented the massacre? None of these questions are answered.

-The people in the “pro-gun” segments are complete idiots. Let’s see, on the one hand you have intelligent, college educated people proselytizing about poverty and crime. On the other, you have the brother of a convicted domestic terrorist and a group of inept militiamen, one of whom is so fat that he has trouble putting on his belt.

All in all I was pretty disappointed, I didn’t get as angry or excited as I thought I would. I don’t see what all the hoopla is about. The biggest weakness of Moore’s piece is its strongest point to gun owners: HE HAS NO SOLUTION. At that point is simply becomes at rallying cry to the already indoctrinated and little else to the general public.

Just my thoughts.
 
Yes, in the context of the way the film is shot, its very funny.

For example, whe Moore in interviewing the a "security expert" who reports increased sales of burglar doors and the like, he correctly points out that someone with a spear can defeat burglar bars.

It is very funny. I don't see what so many see this film as dangerous. I see it as well-made propaganda, which is only likely to effect those who already share its sentiments.
 
It is a well-done movie. As was pointed out, the way the movie was set up, all the people who took a pro-gun-control position were sane, articulate, college-educated and non-senile. The people who took the pro-RKBA positions were ignorant, crazy, stupid and / or senile. Gee, if I pick my subjects like that I could take any position really.
 
I disagree. I know many fence-riders or those not knowledgable who've been severely tainted by this piece of Goebbelesque filth. One is a good friend of mine (who wasn't a friend at the time of this movie release, who had seen it, and being new to all of this, a total blank slate - took in a lot of it as true) Fortunately, I've worked on him a bit and he's on our side now.

A lot of people saw this film, and they left with a few lies embedded in their heads as being facts or truths. Even if people are hardly effected - at the very least a lot of people will have learned another idiotic gun-myth (like the stupid Kellerman 41x more likely lies) and that's another thing we have to work on.

All propaganda is dangerous and disgusting. This film even went as far as to taint many semi-pro-gun people. Those types who believe in a RKBA because they like to hunt, but like many forms of gun control. People who are pro-gun but support very anti-gun forms of gun control piss me off the most but that's another story. Well actually, it is not. Moore, and the anti-gun lobby try hard to divide and conquer us by working on the hunter-types who look down on semi-automatic firearms....

Moore made this film first and foremost to make money (quite capitalist of him considering his extremely anti-capitalist themes in all his works), and secondly to indoctrinate as many people as possible to his twisted world-view.

Look, we're here to do the same thing. To educate people on the truth of the RKBA as well as responsible and safe gun ownership. However, there's one big difference - in that we're actually providing the truth.

Moore targets the youth. Tries to make his movies "funny" or silly. Uses music popular to teens and yound adults and makes fun by showing complete idiots in the movie. There's a reason he targets the youth. They are far more impressionable They are not yet 100% independently minded like a full grown adult which will be more skeptical. Less experience.

His target audience is the under 22 group. Which is why he is always hitting up universities and schools.

Like a sick predator, his goal is to try and portray himself as the anti-establishment (fight the power - especially corporate power, since big business is the root of all evil in their pro-governemnt pro-socialist thinking) type guy who walks around in jeans and a ballcap and just wants to bring some truth out about the "real" world.

Every young person, at that critical age - is searching to seek truth and what they believe in. This is why the government drafts 18 year olds in times of war. It has nothing to do with physical fitness.


I've visited a number of forums where a lot of youth are present (non-gun forums), and all I can say is, this movie had a profound effect on so many of them. Teens cite that movie so many times as their source for information on the subject.
 
"Bowling for Columbine" will go down in history, along with "Birth of a Nation" and "Jew Suss" as a masterwork of sheer exhuberant dishonesty and malice.

The only way Michael Moore could outdo himself would be to film "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion".

For a near frame by frame analysis of the lies in "Columbine", read "Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man".
 
Funny...yeah, the way Beavis & Butthead are "funny."

Moore is a disingenuous mocker. He's also a dangerous propagandist. He arrives to show us that there are a lot of people out there who are gullible and can't think straight and all too willing to believe in their own inanane prejudices.

Moore is symptomatic of the lack of clarity in today's America about so many vital matters.
 
"It is a well-done movie."

So was Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will,
another example of absolutely brilliant filmaking.:eek:

Bowling for Columbine reminds me of a library review of
Carl Bakal's (No) Right to Bear Arms: full of truths,
half-truths and insinuations; bias is the most important
ingredient and is painfully obvious; no attempt is
made to present a balanced picture. Antis have not
changed in forty years since the mid 1960s. It is
a wonder Mikey did not rant about mail-order RG10s
and easily restored Thompson DEWATs sold in the
back pages of VFW magazine.
 
See http://www.hardylaw.net/Truth_About_Bowling.html

Michael Moore cuts up interviews and speeches, re-edits them to make the meaning of someone's words change completely.

There have been some funny parodies done this way, but they're funny because we know they're dubbed together. I've enjoyed some, even if I didn't buy into the politics of their makers.

An example: http://politicalhumor.about.com/gi/...http://www.ebaumsworld.com/presaddress2.shtml

However, Moore presents this as a documentary, and the speeches as evidence, not as a parody of what was actually said.
 
Since you watched this movie, watch "Micheal and Me". This film is a rebuttal to Micheal Moore's film. It pretty much blows holes in everything Micheal Moore said.
 
A good follow-up film would be Team America: World Police. Notice Moore's character in the film. This was done on purpose by the creators of South Park after an interview with them was used in Columbine without permission, and re-edited to make them appear to support Moore's cause.
 
I watched it some time ago. All M.Moore films follow the same style, with an obligatory link to woeful Flint, Michigan (gawd, I can't remember if he used that same technique in F9/11).

At the end of BFColumbine, he speaks with Canadians who have no real concept of crime and who leave their doors unlocked all day. He stumbles around the solution but never goes for it when he notes that Canadians have about as many guns as Americans. He mentions American urban but never makes the connection. Demographics. The question is who are the people that commit the crime? Describe them, statistically. He couldn't bear to consider the issue of culture, race, and stuffing millions of people into a few square miles.

Gun grabbers would like to make people think that killers are just like you and me, except, they have guns.

Rick
 
Funny...yeah, the way Beavis & Butthead are "funny."
Click to expand...

Beavis and Butthead was some of the most witty comedy ever put on television. A 30 minute show dedicated to mocking the very audience that made it so popular.

Mike Judge's comedic and social commentary brilliance are completely misunderstood.

Moore, on the other hand, is a very talented propagandist who, when his game is on, could give Lennie Riefenstahl a run for her money. However, I suspect that his 15 minutes were up in the last presidential election cycle.
 
"It is a well-done movie."
Click to expand...

I keep hearing this, and yet everything I've seen done by Moore is poor quality, poorly shot, and poorly edited (any propagandist who's edits are so freaking obvious that the opposition can put up a web site outlining all of them is not that good).

His stuff is tripe ... and it's so obviously propaganda that the only people tho think he's wonderful are the sycophants that already agree with him. He may turn the occasional fence sitter, but I've talked to more fence sitters who were turned AWAY from his position by BFC.
 
I thought it was entertaining, and didn't really say anything anti-gun or anti-RKBA at all. It was largely incorrect factually and obviously biased but it didn't bother me a whole lot.
 
Justin - amen. It's a poor argument to say that people criticizing something don't "get it", but I do have to wonder if those who heap scorn on B&B have actually watched the program.

It holds up pretty well after a decade or so, too.
 
Michael Moore is an European idol. He sold millions of his books in France and Germany, his "documentary" attracted countless spectators.

During his tour to promote his book "Stupid White Men" in 2003 he was celebrated like a rockstar and spoke to thousands of fans, who cheered enthusiastically when he told them that Germans are educated and Americans are dumb, gun toting cowboys or money grabbing capitalists. :banghead:

Michael Moore is an American and it is above all the matter of the Americans themselves to judge his attacks on his own country.

Despite that, I hate him for this primitive propaganda and I'm afraid the impact of his anti-American hate mongering out of the USA is greater than some of you perhaps think.
 
Well, I watched this movie with quite a few non-gun friends. They all said it was funny, but it made a lot of Americans look stupid when presumably there are just as many stupid Americans as there are stupid other nationalities. They also said it was't what they expected as it wasn't really anti gun. They remembered the bit where Moore actually says guns arn't the problem (he goes to Canada, says they have just as many guns as the US, but much less violent crime). So they came away with a negative view of Moore for taking the piss, a few good laughs, and the message that American culture gone wrong is causing a lot of trouble. I don't think that's exactly high treason myself.
 
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