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Bowling for Columbine
By mattmanuel Wednesday November 06, 2002
 Mattmanuel recently watched Bowling for Columbine, the following was written on demand a full two weeks after he watched the movie.
I am sitting in the Movie Call Lounge, it is a cathedral-like room, white walls, art deco lounge chairs, a giant life sized poster of Bjork (naked). It is filled with the sound of children laughing and music. Today I am wearing my red velvet robe and glasses. You may not have known that Mattmanuel wears glasses, but he does.
Let me tell you about Bowling for Columbine. I do not joke when I say that it is a powerful movie, the range of emotion one experiences while watching it is quite extraordinary. There are moments that will make you laugh out loud, such as when Michael Moore interviews James Nichols, (the brother of Terry Nichols who was an accomplice to Timothy McVeigh). James was acquitted of criminal charges and allowed to return to his Michigan farm to continue his descent into lunacy. When Nichols says that he sleeps with a handgun under his pillow, Moore pushes him, saying "C'mon, that's what everybody says". After some prodding, Moore gets him to go into his bedroom, and show him the gun. Nichols doesn't stop there, he cocks the (loaded) gun and puts it to his own temple, laughing as he does it. Which brings us to one of the important points of the movie, people who are in the NRA and/or militias are INSANE. They all keep loaded guns very near their bed, especially Charlton Heston.
Use this movie as a cinematic litmus test for your relationship. If your date is offended by the portrayal of guns as a tool for violent whackos to commit homicide which this film promotes, they may in fact be a member of the NRA or a militia, and you should stay very far away from them, behind kevlar.
But I am simplifying things a bit, as virile men tend to do, for the problems Bowling for Columbine explores are much more complicated, the events are much darker. We are witness to some very intense moments. We see Charlton Heston's speech at the NRA national meeting in Denver Colorado a week after Columbine, juxtaposed with Tom Mauser, the father of a boy killed at Columbine, who spoke at an anti-gun rally outside the NRA meeting. Heston comes off as insensitive, to say the least, when compared with Mauser: "Something is wrong in this country when a child can grab a gun so easily and shoot a bullet into the middle of a child's face, as my child experienced..."
And Heston: "I have a message from the mayor, Mr. Wellington Webb, the mayor of Denver. He sent me this and said don't come here, we don't want you here....Don't come here? We're already here."
Bringing you close to another tragedy, Moore interviews an officer in Flint Michigan who arrested a 5 year old boy after he fatally shot his classmate. The camera captures a drawing on the wall behind his desk. The boy drew it for him while he was sitting at the officer's desk immediately after the shooting. It is not a violent drawing but the same sort any 5 year old boy would do.
In his search for answers Moore covers a wide range of possible causes for America's extremely high gun violence, discounting the usual demons of media violence and video games. His theories, whether you agree with them or not, are less trite and his villains, perhaps more deserving of criticism.
Some people may be turned off by the less than objective nature of Bowling for Columbine... Michael Moore's usual method for documenting reality is to take a problem he feels really strongly about, find a rich white guy who is in some way linked to that problem, and make that guy look like a stupid jerk. He certainly does that with Heston, (and even Dick Clark becomes implicated by association with a gun tragedy), but there is much more to the film than that.
I would have to say that this movie was simultaneously funnier, more sad and more relevant than Booty Call. Take a date, the statistics on gun purchases since 9/11 will scare you into a frenzy of well justified pre-end-of-the-world lovemaking.
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