Ezmae Chang
This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
Nicole
I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.
Staci Frederick
Blistering performances.
keelhaul-80856
How this movie is rated 8/10 I'll never know. For some unbelievable reason, the USA gave Michael Moore a platform as some visionary film maker, and boy does he run wild with it. Some things Moore has pointed out about US foreign policy make sense. That is about where it stops. He makes fun of a bank for giving away guns to new customers, as if this is horrible! Who cares? Tons of people own guns in America, and practice our 2nd Amendment rights, and lawfully/safely, I might add. Moore is in some fruity love affair with Canada, and thinks we should follow them, and he parades around with dishonest interviews and hypocritical views. He stands around, angrily asking K-Mart and random stores, why they sell bullets and guns. Like, seriously??? It is K-Mart's fault that some idiots took some guns from their parents or wherever and murdered people like psychopaths? I would have told him he is a moron and walked off. People are killed from cars constantly, poisons, cigs, alcohol, knives, hammers, big pharma, accidents, etc. For some reason, the only people to blame are gun owners when a small amount of idiots(with no morals or trained by a stupid society) hurt someone. Moore is nothing but a fat, brainless loser masquerading as a master of cinema and political commentary, which he fails at on many levels. Again, I can agree with some of his criticism of US warmongering, but his gun control hard-on and self-righteous, sissy baloney dream for the USA(which was born out of revolution and violence anyway) is just too much to take. Plus, if he and Rosie O'Donnel donated their body fat, they could use 400 tons of lard to feed the starving children. This "documentary" is for low-IQ people who fight from a keyboard and teleprompter, who worship at the gun control lobby, yet depend on men with guns to keep them safe, secure their resources, and disarm their political opponents. Designed for brainwashed robots who think that disarming regular citizens and pretending we can sit around like Canada or Switzerland will solve everyone's problems, instead of standing firm and teaching actual morals and Constitutional values.
Amy Adler
As most of the world knows, in April 1999, two Columbine High School students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, took guns to school and shot thirteen students and one teacher dead. How did they get the guns? What does bowling have to do with anything? Those looking for an in-depth look at the two shooters will be disappointed. Although Mr Moore does record that Harris and Klebold went bowling on the morning of the shooting and later takes two of the wounded students, now recovered, to buy bullets at Kmart, this is not really about Eric and Dylan. Rather, it is more of an examination of the "gun culture" of the USA. The National Rifle Association, in this film headed by Charlton Heston, has ensured that getting a gun and ammunition is as easy as filling a prescription. Moore notes that we are unique among countries in that our rate of gun shootings and killings far surpasses that of Canada, our nearest neighbor, and other Western civilizations. Some have blamed violent video games, some singers like Marilyn Manson (interviewed in this film as a favorite singer of Harris), still others that "family department" stores like Kmart and Walmart have the weapons and the ammo. Interestingly, Moore also takes a look at Work-to-Welfare programs like the one near his hometown of Flint, Michigan. A young single mother was forced to work at a casino, 90 minutes away, to satisfy the welfare requirements but still couldn't pay the bills. When she was forced to move in with an uncle and had to leave her six year old son in his care, the young lad found his uncle's gun and took it to class, only to shoot a fellow student dead. what a tragedy! In short, anyone wanting to talk about the Second Amendment and gun control would do well to begin with this film. Those seeking in- depth information on the Columbine shooting should look elsewhere.
SnoopyStyle
Left wing filmmaker Michael Moore examines the issue of guns in America. The title refers to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold responsible for the Columbine High School massacre were supposed to be bowling for their class earlier that morning. Moore sarcastically wonders if bowling caused the massacre. He takes a wide-ranging look at guns and the overall culture in America. He talks to various people. The most compelling is James Nichols, brother of Terry Nichols who was convicted of the Oklahoma City bombing. The man has crazy eyes. There is a glee in his demeanor about guns. Marilyn Manson has a couple of intriguing responses. Matt Stone comes from Littleton which is next to Columbine High School. There is a cartoon in a South Park style that gives some simplified views of fear in America. Moore concentrates more on this idea that Americans live in fear. He contrasts America with the world by going to Canada and their unlocked doors. This is not a traditional documentary. One can easily pull it apart by pointing out any number inaccuracies and loose facts. Moore is painting a picture and a feeling. The best idea is to pull everything back to fear in America and get out of the actual guns as the issue. Sometimes, he overreaches by going general politics. Also, not everybody in Canada keeps their door unlock. This is a little scattered but Moore eventually puts everything into focus.
ironhorse_iv
This movie is probably, filmmaker Michael Moore's most famous film. The documentary explores the reasons of gun violence, by looking into the gun culture of the U.S. In doing so, he learns that the conventional answers of easy availability of guns, violent entertainment, violent national history, & even poverty are inadequate to explain this violence when other cultures share those same factors without the equivalent carnage. In order to arrive at a possible explanation, Moore takes on a deeper examination of America's culture of fear, bigotry and violence. Furthermore, he seeks his own investigation and confront the powerful elite political and corporate interests in fanning this gun culture for their own greedy gain. With his signature sense of awkward humor, the activist filmmaker pretty much change, how documentaries are shown. Love him or hate him, he has been the most influential documentary filmmaker of the past 30 years. Gone are the days of monotone narrating lectures. In are the more playful, and colorful documentaries full of funny cartoons, cool graphics to transfer information and perspective, catchy music tunes, pop culture references, and celebrity talking heads interviews. Very entertaining. The documentary also has a lot of heart & sad moments, includes a number of disturbing scenes to illustrate its points, such as footage of real-life people being shot, gun suicides, assassinations, battle footage, and so on. Perhaps most terrifying, the movie includes security camera footage from the Columbine High School massacre. These scenes are brief, but effectively horrifying. It can be hard to watch, at times. Moore's techniques and message are so powerful and persuasive and his scruffy, paunchy everyman image so likable that it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2003. Still, the movie is without its faults. I'm not a ring-wing propagandist, but I found a lot of doubt in Moore's credibility information. Moore was often called out for his somewhat deceiving practices. He does like to edit some of the interviewee's responses to make it seem like they agree with his statements. A good example of this is the sequence with South Park co-creator Matt Stone. Stone was just there to talk about high school life at Columbine, but the movie made it seem like he was for 'Gun Control' by twisting his words, and making it seem like Stone help created the animation sequence in the film about the history of guns. Clearly, South Park Studios have no hand whatsoever in making the segment and Stone thought the cartoon that Moore presented was complete BS. This disagreement, cause Matt Stone and Trey Parker to put a negative caricature of Moore in 2004's Team America: World Police as retaliation. Moore's investigation was supposed to carry out ostensibly to uncover subversive activities, but actually felt more like harassment and undermined those that of different views than Moore. Most of them, don't really have much of a connection to the problems of gun violence. A good example of this is when Moore tries to link television producer Dick Clark with really irrelevant evidence to the murder of a six-year-old by a six-year-old, because the boy's mother worked at one of Clark's restaurants in a welfare-to-work program. Yes, Clark did kinda dodges Moore's questionings, but I really doubt Dick Clark is to blame for this tragedy. He didn't really hand the gun to the kid and force him to kill the other child. After all, it's more like the gun owner's fault. Sad, to see the movie makes Clark look like the devil. Another bad judgment call by Moore, was his relentless questioning during an interview with a clearly memory-impaired Charlton Heston whom by this time, was suffering from both cancer & Alzheimer. Moore clearly took great advantage of Heston's weakness to make Heston look like a fool. When Moore asks Heston why he continues to taunt communities that just underwent gun-related tragedies by holding his ridiculous rallies, Heston couldn't provide any answers. The reasons for this is that Moore implied that the National Rifle Association deliberately scheduled its annual conferences to exploit the Columbine shootings, when the truth of the matter is the conference had been scheduled months or years in advance. Moore also accused Heston of holding an NRA rally right after a shooting in Flint; however, the footage he used was of Heston visiting the city almost a year later for a campaign event. Throughout the movie, Moore strung together snippets from several of Charlton Heston's speeches to make them sound like one arrogant speech. Moore has really gone to great lengths to misleading the audience. Another good example is where Moore goes to a bank which was giving away a free rifle to anyone who opened an account with them. What Moore didn't show, was the bank actually handed out, was an certificate for a free rifle at a gun store down the street, where the store performed the same background checks and waiting-period requirements as if a customer had walked in to buy a rifle with cash. There are way too much countless amounts of distorted information, throughout the documentary to noted, here. It's really up to the audience to decide what is truth and what's false, but I do advice people to do their research when going to see this movie, because this film clearly need further investigating. While, his research is up to debate and there are some good points that Moore brings up. My favorite is Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" playing over footage of the atrocities by various US-backed regimes. To his credit, he's not exactly anti-gun – or doesn't seem to be; rather, just like me, just curious about gun-culture and believe a little gun-control is needed. Overall: I give Moore credit for this film as gun control not an easy topic to talk about. I just wish, his facts were a little more solid. Sadly, it was not.
