film: Bowling for Columbine - Documentary or Fiction? (merged)

[wendisoul]

Whoops... typo... I meant 2nd Amendment

 

[alasdairm]

d'oh! i was wracking my brain... sometimes the answer is the simplest one

thanks.

alasdair

 

[lostpunk5545]

The nightly news is propaganda... sure this movie might be biased but it's about time some left wing bias made it to a medium that will be absorbed by a large amount of people... I am sick to death of the right wing view of the earth...

 

[michael]

It's a documentary. The above article is largely bollox IMHO - I looked through it before and it's at least as guilty of the biases and self-deceptions that it claims BFC to be

perhaps you can show where the author of that article exaggerates stastitics, performs serious editing on a number of speeches and then presents it as a single occurance, where he outright lies, where he has staged scenes to bolster his "evidence", or where he has edited several political ads together and then presented them as one?

actually, can you show one thing from that article which is bollocks?

i'm all for less violence and gun control, but moore (among many others) and his brand of pop politics has got to go.

 

[Frustrated]

actually, can you show one thing from that article which is bollocks?

I second that request.

Anything? At all? Your answer will reveal the same degree of bullshit this article exposes, right?

 

[AmorRoark]

My feeling is that this film should not be showed in a classroom setting. I know my US Citizenship (a required class for graduation) course had to watch Micheal Moore movies and I thought they were an embarassment to the left. But, being that most of the audience was completely ignorant about the subjects in the film, they bought it... all of it. The whole idea that public schools show propaganda such as this didn't make me very happy.

 

[SA]

The more we see of Michael Moore, the more we see of life.

 

[DigitalDuality]

I will say i can see this film for what it is..through the propoganda and the "bullshit"... but i'm not one to stand up and bash it left and right b/c i agree with the overall point of it.

What's worse propoganda? 1 single solitary michael moore film? (I'm taking it as it was a college class setting)

Or learning american history/gov't all your life and being told we're a christian nation, a DEMOCRACY in its upmost ideals, ... our whole history classes in public schools is nothing more but the continuation of Nationalism.

Funny.. b/c years before they teach american history/gov't.. which is normally 11th and 12th grade for avg american students... you learn about how nationalism rose to be a long running trend in earlier history classes..funny how its not reiterated later on.

Whether it be the Pledge of Allegance, and all the ultra patriotic, G-rated repubilican sugar coated crap that gets spoon fed you all of the avg american citizen's life, i think a little "ultra liberal" bullshit to counter it all kinda helps in setting the balance don't you?

If one person was affected by this film, to realize entertainment and art isn't a scapegoat for societies problems, that ignorant finger pointing is worthless, that the gov't and media do function and thrive off of a fear/consumption cycle, etc..

Then its did its job... no matter how much of the film/documentay was bullshit or not.

 

[RadarLove]

I can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is at least one thing in this article that is bullshit (or bollox for our UK friends).

As a resident of Colorado for my entire life, I keep track of the goings-on here fairly vigilantly. For 15 years, I lived next to Buckley Air Force Base just outside of Denver in Aurora. Literally NEXT to it. Once a week, like clockwork, Lockheed and Martin Marietta (which were later consolidated into Lockheed Martin) trekked Minuteman missles back and forth to Buckley AFB for routine maintainence. From Buckley there is an underground tunnel to haul nuclear wastes to Rockey Flats. Ask any Coloradoan. It is absolutely undisputed. The colorado landscape is litterally dotted with missile silos, some less than a mile from my home. And all of these are built here in CO by Lockheed Martin, capped with warheads by Buckley, and controled by NORAD in Co. Spgs.

Oh, and it was a damn good movie, though I'm still undecided on wether it was a documentary or not.

 

[michael]

Unfortunately, I'm included in Moore's film. I say unfortunately, because when I agreed to be interviewed, I did not know about Mr. Moore's style what I now know or I would not have granted the interview. Nor did Moore make his intentions known before the interview. In the film, he chose to imply a connection between America's defense budget and the defense/aerospace industry and the 1999 tragedy at Columbine High School. We strongly assert that this is a factually and ethically flawed judgment.

In answer to your specific question, in the film Moore states that Lockheed Martin monthly ships one of its "missiles" through neighborhoods where Columbine students sleep. The word "missiles" implies a weapon. Although other units of Lockheed Martin Corporation elsewhere in the country produce weapons to support the defense of the U.S., we make no weapons at the Littleton-area facility Moore visited. I provided specific information to Moore about the space launch vehicles we build to launch spacecraft for NASA, NOAA, the Dept. of Defense and commercial customers, including DirecTV and EchoStar. Some viewers also may be left with the impression that we transport our space launch vehicles at night for some questionable reason. The fact is they are huge and move slowly; we prefer to avoid causing traffic jams, so we transport them from our facility to the airport at night when traffic is comparatively much lighter. They are then flown to launch sites at Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg Air Force Base, depending on the mission.

-Evan McCollum (the guy interviewed in the film)

from http://www.geocities.com/evil_spoon/articles/bowlingforlockheed.htm

what moore now says:

"[T]he Lockheed rockets now take satellites into outer space. Some of them are weather satellites, some are telecommunications satellites, and some are top secret Pentagon projects (like the ones that are launched as spy satellites and others which are used to direct the launching of the nuclear missiles should the USA ever decide to use them). "

from http://www.bowlingforcolumbine.com/about/faq.php

 

[AmorRoark]

G-rated repubilican sugar coated crap that gets spoon fed you all of the avg american citizen's life, i think a little "ultra liberal" bullshit to counter it all kinda helps in setting the balance don't you?

WHAATTTT???? This is not what my education was like. It's not a mystery as to which bias teachers usually have in regards to politics. Most of my classes had a bias towards the left. It was simply known amongst all that went to the school. I am honestly confused as to where public schools install the "g-rated reupblican sugar-cated crap" that you speak of. Did you go to school in a small town or something?

:is confused:

 

[randycaver]

I would like to echo AmorRoark here... wtf are you talking about Digital? My education was not like that at all. I had no CLUE what political ideals my teachers had for the most part because they didn't want us to know, but the ones I did know were Democrats, and far from 'sugar coated republican'.

 

[DigitalDuality]

no i went to a school on the outskirts of Richmond in VA... decent sized city... but then again.. it was the capital of the confederacy..

Everything in that place leans to the right.

My college education on humanities topics has leaned greatly to the left. But my school didn't so much as allow you to wear hats in school. I got sent home for having blue hair b/c i was a "disruption" and the principle didn't like when i said " i thought the south was over this color thing by now.."

I attempted to argue in a gov't class that the U.S. was not a pure democracy.. and i got a detention for it where i had to clean the fucken classroom.

I also got detentions numerous times for saying that we don't hold up our constitution withou hypocrisy. I got another one when a history teacher tried to tell the class that the entire civil war was over civil rights. (which seems like a leftist thing...but on black/white issues.. the black side was pushed to extremes b/c of the high levels of racial tension in that city... the whites just preached it almost in mockery)

I got sent home once b/c i had a sex ed teacher who was only teaching abstinence. I was like "there's people in this very class who had sex last night.. i don't think that's the way to approach the social problem" So i got sent home for using my presentation time to "promote the youth engaging in sexual acts"

Trust me, my school was biased as fuck.

The only teachers i had that were worth a fuck with literature/english, foriegn language, and the arts.

By my senior year, i was sent to the principles office to sit for the first 15min of school so i didn't "infect others" with my rebellion of standing up for the pledge b/c i didn't believe we were under god.

 

[michael]

logical fallacy:

a) i went to school
b) my school was biased towards the right
c) so anyone that went to school was fed "g-rated reupblican sugar-cated crap"

 

[DigitalDuality]

^^
that's fair.. i'll admit that

 

[NateVeronica]

Just to bring the conversation back to the topic for us non American people.

David T. Hardy [an amateur who has for the last year been working on a serious bill of rights documentary], to include the Second Amendment.

Fact: This guy is an amateur. It's all too easy to deconstruct an argument when you sit on the right. Thus, postmodernism allows for more than one truth.

The fact is that Moore's documentary may in fact be totally true. Heston did say these things, he may not have said them in that way, but he did say them. Some elements of the film may be incorrect, but depending on which way you look at it, it is also true.

The bottom line: can a film be called a documentary when the viewer cannot trust an iota of it, not only the narration, but the video?

Documentary films have reconstructed and manufactured reality for as long as documentaries have been around for. The famous film Nanook of the North by Robert Flaherty is an expository documentary that reconstructed the lives of North American Eskimo tribes. The film showed footage of the tribes people trading with the "whites" and fishing in the middle of a snow storm on a boat made of seal skin. This was made in 1922, long after Eskimos had figured out how to make boats from wood and lived in nice warm huts.

2. NRA and the Reaction To Tragedy. The dominant theme in Bowling (and certainly the theme that has attracted most reviewers) is that NRA is callous toward slayings.

Umm, who are you going to contrast in a film about guns? Wendy's icecream stores? It's rediculous to think that the NRA is callous toward slayings, I agree. But the NRA is the body responsible for putting the guns in the hands of these people, and as such the NRA has a moral obligation to these situations.

6. International Comparisons. To pound home its point, Bowling flashes a dramatic count of gun homicides in various countries: Canada 165, Germany 381, Australia 65, Japan 39, US 11,127. Now that's raw numbers, not rates, but let's go with what Bowling uses.

This is a stupid argument he presents. There are thousands of organisations who collect statistics throughout the world. Go and pick one to choose what numbers you want to use for your next film.

Canada: Moore's number is correct for 1999, a low point, but he ignores some obvious differences. Canada is considerably more rural than the U.S. (It has one-tenth the population density of the US, although to be fair it has a lot more unoccupied land which "pads" that figure.).

Another stupid argument. The point made in the film was not to compare the US to Canada, in size/population or whatever. The point is that there are guns in both countries. Lets not get caught up in a dick size competition.

8. Fear. Bowling probably has a good point when it suggests that we are prone to irrational fears, and the media feeds off this in a search for circulation and the fast buck.

You don't boost circulation and profits with that sort of approach, and Bowling for Columbine follows the very adage it condemns: "If it bleeds, it leads." Fear sells -- and can win you an Oscar.

All governments across the world use fear to oppress the people. Both the left and the right use fear to attract their followers. Fear is used, as suggested, as a money making machine. To contrast this film with say a Hollywood blockbuster like 'Scream'. This film strikes fear into the audience, it is its purpose, its why peole go and see the film.

The point is far more fundamental: Bowling for Columbine is dishonest. It is fraudulent. It fixes upon a theme, and advances it, whenever necessary, by deception.

Isn't this the point of making films? That is, to find a theme and develop around it? Don't politicians use fraudulent tactics, deceive people. Don't television stations have make subjective statments? Take Fox News for example, part of the News Media Corp. Fox News more or less promoted the war in Iraq. Was it the truth, who's truth is it?

 

[cravNbeets]

The film i saw was an editorial. Far far too emotional and biased to be a documentary. I loved the film despite a few bad parts. There were times when Moore himself made me cringe. Asking Heston to apollogize to the shooting victim was just embarassing for everyone. I felt the scenes @ Kmart headquarters, while they yielded results (unbelievably), seemed to be Moore(pun) for the benefit of the film's shock value than actual social activism. In the end I thought it made Moore look cheap.

Several times during the movie i was close to or in tears. It was gutwrenching to see what the Mother of the 6 year old gunman in Flint Michigan had to go through to simply to stay POOR

more to come...

 

[-spiderman-]

That KMart stunt really bothered me.

What was the point of being so hard on K Mart becuase they sold bullets? I thought he spent a huge chunk of the movie proving that bullets and guns that are readily avaliable aren't the problem, which is why he did the segment about Canada. So why be so hard on K Mart?

I didn't like that part at all.

 

[wanderlust]

i love you michael moore

 

[-spiderman-]

^^^
Holy SHIT did he get skinny?!?!

Maybe he was tired of being a stereotypical FAT American.

Or then agian maybe its camera magic