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Review of Bowling for Columbine, Dir. Michael Moore

From an hilarious cartoon on the history of the United States to a deeply moving memorial of the Columbine Highschool shooting incident, Bowling for Columbine tells, through humor and brutal facts, a story that Americans need to hear. Directed, produced, and written by Michael Moore, this documentary is a fair and convincing account of gun violence in the United States.

The documentary is a two-and-a-half hour quest we take with Moore as he moves from place to place, in search of the question: Why are Americans so violent with each other? Rather than seeming to have an answer already in mind, Moore appears open-minded. The only real persuasion that seems to fuel the film is the suggestion that Americans need to be inquisitive: of themselves, and of their culture; they should want to know the truth, and they should be aware of the lies and fear promoted through politics and the media. Thus, while the film reflects a bias towards gun restriction and against the NRA, it comes off as mostly objective.

First of all, Moore pulls off this sense of objectivity from the very start, by explaining his affiliation with the NRA. When he was a kid, he explains, h

routine, in which he argues that the problem would be solved if bullets were not affordable to most people. Instead of 17 cents, why not $5,000? In that way, he says, if someone gets shot, there must have been a damn good reason for it.

informs us that Japanese kids have the most violent video games in the world, and they watch the same movies we Americans do, and yet, with only thirty-something shootings a year, they have the world's record for the least number of fatal shootings. Moore does, though, draw attention to the U.S. news media, as promoting and instilling constant fear in Americans. Whether its pesticides on produce that causes cancer one week, or razor blades found in Halloween apples twenty years ago, or "The Year of the Shark" a few years ago, the news media is always overwhelming Americans with bad news that causes us to always be afraid. This seems to explain why suberban America befriends the gun. But Canada, Moore points out, has 7 million guns to 10 million people. But there are only a little over a hundred fatal shootings a year there. Here in America, there is a staggering average of 11,127 people killed by guns every year. In the end, we are left empty, unanswered. As the title suggests, the Columbine incident can be linked to anything, such as the game of bowling that the two highschoolers played before committing that gruesome act. The point is, no one knows why we are this way. But the fact remains, this is the way it is. Therefore, the real question is, what are you going to do about it?

The tone of despair is effected through visual and audio techniques. In one segment, this tone is communicated by the ironic coupling of Louis Armstrong's "Wonderful World" and a picture gathered through fact after fact after fact of how aggressive and terrible the United States really is. A sort of timeline is given, as dates appearing at the bottom of the screen, dates that are documented events wherein the U.S. has been responsible for the mass murder of civilians, are supplemented by a visual background of these historical events.

However, the humor in the film complements, rather than inhibits the startling and horri

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Approximate Word count = 1463
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

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