Speaking of Michael Moore`

[AJWatson3]

GlennX,

"Moore’s latest documentary offering, Bowling for Columbine is a case in point. In it, Moore essentially blames Charleton Heston and the National Rifle Association for the Columbine tragedy. Correct me if I’m wrong Mike, but I don’t recall any news reports of Heston and the folks from the NRA paying a trip to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, putting firearms into their teenage hands, and exhorting them to go and kill as many of their classmates and teachers as they could."

Not sure if you saw "Columbine" or not, but MM never accuses CHeston or the NRA of the shootings-- in any way.

However, he certainly accused them of capitalizing on the tragedy, same thing in the case of the girl who was shot at school by the fourth grader (in MICH). And Moore is a gun-owner and NRA member... life-time.

He might question the publicity tactics of the NRA, but doesn't blame them for making guns so easily available, nor the ammo purchased at KMART....

and thanks for the info about Allen Rucker.

[G-Town]

Gun Control, Gun Control. We will live with this issue for ever. If there was a ban on all guns in the US, a criminal can still get a gun no problem. If he or she wants to commit a crime bad enough they will, and they WILL have a gun if need be, even if all guns were banned. Simple as that. Banning guns wont do $hit for ALL the problems.

[AJWatson3]

Originally posted by G-Town

Gun Control, Gun Control. We will live with this issue for ever. If there was a ban on all guns in the US, a criminal can still get a gun no problem. If he or she wants to commit a crime bad enough they will, and they WILL have a gun if need be, even if all guns were banned. Simple as that. Banning guns wont do $hit for ALL the problems.

That's why I like having my own. Criminals will get them no matter what.

[Glenn X]

Originally posted by AJWatson3

Not sure if you saw "Columbine" or not

To be honest, no, I have not. However, I have seen several different previews for it and read a rather long, thoroughgoing interview with Moore in an issue of Entertainment Weekly right before Bowling for Columbine was initially released theatrically. From those sources, I got the strong sense that Moore was basically convicting the NRA by association: Harris and Klebold used guns in the Columbine massacre + the NRA likes guns = just like Harris and Klebold, the NRA is bad.

Since I haven't seen the film yet, my take here could be wrong and I may be painting Moore's portrayal of the NRA in Bowling for Columbine with a broad brush... which Moore himself has certainly been accused of doing a time or two.

Originally posted by AJWatson3

Moore is a gun-owner and NRA member... life-time.

Per the aforementioned Entertainment Weekly interview, Moore said, if memory serves, that he found out while doing research for Bowling for Columbine that there's some arcane piece of internal club procedure in the NRA that went something like if an individual NRA member contributed a certain amount of money to the club till, ran for NRA president and won, then that person could decide to disband the NRA altogether. Moore says he contributed the required monetary sum, planned to eventually run for club president, win, and then do away with the NRA forever.

Yeah... Moore's a real friend of the National Rifle Association, alright.

[The Evil Genius]

Glenn,

This article seems to speak differently about Moore's membership status in the NRA - additionally, Moore is supposed to be a certified marksman of some sort - I read that other day - but I cant find where!

Either way - Bowling was a good movie - heavy handed for sure - but it does raise some legit issues. Like the bank in Texas I think that was selling guns also. How funny is that?

Bowling for Columbine' spares no one

By Hap Erstein / Cox News Service

10-24-02

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Michael Moore is a troublemaker, as well as a filmmaker.

The man who took on General Motors in his pointedly comic documentary "Roger and Me" felt the need to make a cinematic statement about violence in America. So he whipped out his camera and began taking potshots.

The result is "Bowling for Columbine," opening Friday, which began soon after 12 students and a teacher were shot to death at Columbine High in Littleton, Colo. Moore, 48, expected it would be about the need for gun control, but the more he looked into the situation, the more he realized the subject was larger.

"I started out with the typical liberal viewpoint that if we had less guns and more gun-control laws, we'd have less violence," he explains. "And then I got to thinking about it, and it became clear to me that that wasn't the answer."

With his trademark ambush interview style, Moore went to Kmart headquarters to ask why the discount store chain stopped selling handguns but still sells bullets.

He talked his way into the home of National Rifle Association president Charlton Heston to ask him why he defends weapons used to kill children.

When he heard that a mother had to ride a bus 40 miles to a second job at a Dick Clark fast-food restaurant, he tracked down Clark and tried to get him to respond on camera to her plight.

Moore's interview antics are entertaining and thought-provoking about the underlying causes of our ruthless society.

"Our ethic is 'Every man for himself.' It's me, me, me. Mine. mine, mine. And I'm telling you, having that American mentality, what that does is it creates a culture of violence," he says. "This (movie) is my statement on where America is at in 2002. And I think we're better than this. I think as Americans we're better than what you see on that screen."

Still to be determined, of course, is whether the nation wants to see a mirror reflecting its violent side. Earlier this year, "Bowling for Columbine "-- the title refers to the Colorado student shooters' pre-massacre activity -- became the first documentary accepted into competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 46 years.

It won a special prize and was bought for distribution in international markets "at a record level," according to Moore. But he says he is receiving resistance to the film from a major theater chain in the United States, and he worries about its reception here at a time when patriotism and war fervor are high.

Yet Moore remains philosophical about its commercial prospects. "Look, I set out first of all to make a film that I would want to go see on a Friday night. And I trust that there's at least a million or two people like me, out of 270 million, that would like to see the same movie," he says. "I don't set out to try and please some demographic. I do what I think is the right thing."

The international market is hot for "Bowling for Columbine," Moore believes, not because people abroad like to see America's flaws exposed, but because they worry they are becoming more and more like us. "That's what the warning siren is in the film to people in other countries. If you want to end up in our predicament, just keep doing what you're doing. They're afraid that they're turning into us."

"Bowling for Columbine " is a risk for Moore, because rather than targeting General Motors' Smith, as he did in "Roger and Me," or Nike Corporation's CEO Phil Knight, as he did in "The Big One," he is taking aim -- pardon the expression -- at the very people he wants to come see his movie.

"With this, who's the antagonist? It's us, really, in a sense. What am I going to do, beat up the audience for two hours and say, 'You're the enemy, you're the problem, you're the Roger Smith now'?"

He invites everyone to see "Bowling for Columbine," even card-carrying NRA members like himself. When Moore was a young sprout growing up in Flint, Mich., he joined the NRA, because it was a very different institution then, in his opinion.

"When I was a kid, it was a gun safety organization to encourage and promote sportsmanship and hunting," he says. "We all hunted, we all had guns, but it was to teach kids to be safe with guns. They have a bigger agenda now. When they oppose legislation to ban cop-killer bullets, I want to know how that promotes sportsmanship."

Moore once toyed with taking on Heston within his organization. "Actually, what I was going to do, because I'm a life member, I was going to run against Heston for president of the NRA," he says. "But I decided it was better that I make a film than run for office."

He is also a card-carrying, knee-jerking liberal and distressed over the conservative shift in the nation. Distressed, but with a sense of humor.

"The right will always win, because they get up in the morning. Conservatives are up at 6. They greet the sunrise. We're still laying in bed," he says. "They never lose their car keys. It's always us. We can't find anything. They've got hooks with labels. I admire them."

Nevertheless, Moore remains an optimist. "Absolutely, because things get better. Slavery ends, Hitler dies, the bad guys usually do lose, things do improve. I cannot allow myself to sink into despair over this. That's why you have a lot of humor in these films, because the humor is there as a release."

He wants to get your attention with laughter, and then he wants to rile you up. "I want you to leave the theater angry, with the feeling that you better do something, you know? I'm trying to push your citizen button, to activate it and say, 'This is a democracy, this is not a spectator sport. If the people do not participate, it doesn't exist.' "

Call Moore a cinematic agitator crossed with a performance artist comic. Moore likes to turn the spotlight on major issues, because few other filmmakers will. And although he is good at identifying problems, he knows he isn't smart enough to have the solutions.

"I'm not that educated," he shrugs. "I didn't go to college. I've never read anything by Marx. I know, I look like a smart guy. But it's the glasses."

Hap Erstein writes for The Palm Beach Post.

[Glenn X]

Originally posted by The Evil Genius

Bowling for Columbine' spares no one

By Hap Erstein / Cox News Service

10-24-02

...the underlying causes of our ruthless society.

Hmmm, methinks Mr. Erstein has "issues" with capitalism (which is what "ruthless society" seems to be code for here), no?

Originally posted by The Evil Genius

The international market is hot for "Bowling for Columbine," Moore believes, not because people abroad like to see America's flaws exposed, but because they worry they are becoming more and more like us. "That's what the warning siren is in the film to people in other countries. If you want to end up in our predicament, just keep doing what you're doing. They're afraid that they're turning into us."

Yes, Mike, let's be more like France, which is exactly what you proposed we should do a number of months ago in an interview on FNC's The O'Reilly Factor. When O'Reilly responded by saying, yes, France is a beautiful country, but the French have a quasi-socialist system with cradle-to-the-grave entitlements that are anathema to the American ideal of self-reliance and entrepreneurship, you snorted dismissively, unimpressed.

Look, here's the bottom line on Bowling for Columbine? Moore made it for the same reason that Michael Bellesiles wrote Arming America; like Bellesiles, Moore wanted to paint a picture of contemporary America as a violent, gun-loving, kill-or-be-killed place. Also like Bellesiles (it would seem), Moore contends that this is a new phenomenon, that America was once some sort of pastoral utopia where guns and gun-related violence were not commonplace. (Clearly, Moore is forgetting, for example, that notable period in our history that many of the films of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood have zeroed in on.)

Am I saying that the NRA can do no wrong? No. Am I saying that the NRA is incapable of saying and doing stupid things or becoming too emotionally invested in certain political matters? Nope. The NRA most certainly is so capable. And so is Michael Moore. In fact, Moore has pretty much made a career out of getting emotionally invested in -- and very pissed off over -- matters of political import.

More than that, though, Moore isn't always consistent in what he says. For example, in this interview, he seems to be saying that he'd just like the NRA to soften their stance on certain issues and legislative matters. In another interview, he says that he'd like to see the NRA eradicated from the face of the earth. In this interview, he says that he admires conservatives. In other interviews he's given, he takes obligatory -- and unoriginal -- liberal potshots at pillars of conservatism, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, as well as those who support them, labeling them "dim," "slow," "stupid," etc.

In short, Moore is, to put it bluntly, an arm-waving loudmouth whom I can't always trust to give me the straight story. And that bothers me. Because I think Moore can be a damn fine documentarian when he wants to be.