6.02.2009

Movie Thoughts: Bowling For Columbine (2002)

I don't want to call this a review, because I always wonder what qualifies movie reviewers to look at someone else's vision and say whether it's good or bad? I mean, you can criticize certain technical aspects of a film, but overall, one person's Glitter could be another person's Citizen Kane.

So, my thoughts while watching Bowling For Columbine, by Michael Moore:

*I find it interesting that Marilyn Manson, the man often blamed for the shooting, was respectful enough to cancel his tour stops in Colorado and wait 5 years to return, but the NRA just didn't give a FUCK about having their convention there so shortly afterwards.

*Trey Parker and Matt Stone are from Littleton? South Park is Littleton? Huh.

*The numbers on how many people are killed by guns around the world are striking. In case you don't know, we have RIDICULOUSLY higher rates of gun death. Like, all were under 300 people and many were under 100, while we're in the 11,000 range. Yeah.

*I did appreciate the cartooned history of America's relationship with slavery, wealth, white fear, gun ownership, and the KKK/NRA.

*I never though of the parallels between national fear and this country's obsession with gun rights. It seems obvious, but I never really connected it.

*Was the Y2K panic only in America? That should have been our first signal that there was nothing to it.

*And I really wasn't expecting him to connect fear of the Black man to media propaganda to white fear and the need to own a gun to feel safe from Black men. And that the guns that gangs in the inner city get come from the white suburbs.

*Charlton Heston is a douchebag, and now I can't watch any of his movies.

Well, I seem to have learned a lot about the lack of gun control in this country (yay!), but I didn't learn how to change it (boo!). Really, I don't think that it can be changed, there are too many white people making money off of the lack of gun control in the US.

1 comment:

bawdy_bookworm said...

I need to re-watch this film - it's been a while. Everywhere I go these days there seems to be crazy white men who think that the government is evil and they shouldn't have to pay taxes and they should get to be armed to the teeth with crazy military-grade weapons against some unknown conspiracy theory. And those are exactly the kind of people that SHOULDN'T have guns...