Bowling for Columbine

Michael Moore uses pathos, humour and emotion to point out the foibles in society. This is what he has done his entire career. My first encounter with his film making was with ‘Roger and Me’, seen in a university sociology class. I hadn’t seen any of his work from then until ‘Bowling for Columbine’. Since this film came out, the media’s attention on the alarming increase of multiple-victim gun shootings in the United States seems to have increased ten-fold.

This film is Moore’s crowning achievement. Even though it is a documentary, I still put it in the category of a film because it tells a story and it became the touchstone for so much debate. The animated history of violence in America, backed up against footage from the real shooting is incredibly moving – going from one emotion to the other extreme. Charlton Heston’s appearance is just sad. Dick Clark ends up looking like, well, a dick. This is one of the most important and best documentaries ever made.

Unfortunately, after the success of this film and the strong reaction it brought from gun lobbyists, every film that Moore has made since has been unfairly scrutinized frame by frame because they think he is making things up and not really telling the truth in the true fashion of documentary film making. What they don’t realize is that Moore has created a hybrid style of documentary film making to get his message (or story) across.

It’s sad when Moore has to defend every single line or frame of film by publishing a compendium of attributes to go along with his films (as was the case with Fahrenheit 9/11. It is annoying when critics of his work dissect every frame of his film, looking for something to pick at. They think he’s being serious. Their problem is they don’t understand satire, taking ridiculous situations and blowing them way out of proportion to show how ridiculous they are. The critics are the ones who end up looking ridiculous.