Michael Moore is my sort of guy, a liberal in a land where the term liberal is mostly used as an insult, and according to one Morning Star article - a closet Marxist. The latter seems less plausible, but what is true is that he is one of the world's most famous documentary film-makers and very possibly one of the best.
I had seen part of Bowling for Columbine before, but never all the way to the end - thus it is eligible for this blog. We watched the whole film over a couple of lessons in Media Studies (blah, blah, blah easy subject etc - yep I've heard it all before).
America is infamous for having one of the highest gun crime and gun murder rates in the world and the high rate of gun ownership has been blamed for this, but by the end of the film Moore comes up with a new, more thought-provoking idea: The Media.
Looking at some of the examples of TV news from the US he showed, gives some idea of the climate of fear created that separates the US from equally gun loving Canada. Put simply, fear drives violence and the violence drives more fear and continues in a vicious cycle fuelled by the news media, looking for their ratings.
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I saw that at it's UK debut at the London Film Festival. The bits I remember are the despicable way that the NRA showed up in town within a couple of days of the shooting, and Moore testing the theory that Canadians leave their doors open by just walking into someone's house - that was classic.
ReplyDeleteOh, and doorstepping Charlton Heston was fun too.