Despite the title, Bowling for Columbine is not really about Columbine at all, and in fact it's not even really about guns. It's more about the culture of fear in America, and why we have such a disproportionately high number of violent crimes and deaths, most of them due to guns.  Your average large American city has more gun homicides in a year than every other Western nation put together, and it's not all about the easy availability of firearms; they've got as many or more guns per capita in Canada, for instance, but the people there just don't shoot each other.

Why not? The film doesn't really answer that question, since no one can, and since it's just trying to get the viewer to think about the issue. It succeeded, in that regard.

To the scores.

Bowling for Columbine
Held My Interest: 8
Presents/Explains the Issue Clearly: 6
Contains New Information: 7
Replayability: 6
Is Entertaining: 9
Overall: 7.5

Quick review: surprisingly entertaining. After mostly enjoying Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, and being sporadically bored by Roger and Me, I didn't have real high hopes for this one. I was afraid Bowling for Columbine would be deeply depressing, as it droned on about how violent and crazy America is, how evil the NRA is, etc.

With those expectations, I was pleasantly surprised by almost everything in the film. The two most famous bits were far from my favorite parts, too:

In one Moore goes to K-mart headquarters with two boys who were shot (one of them is in a wheelchair for life) in the Columbine massacre, and who still carry bullets, bought at K-mart, in their bodies. This makes for some interesting theater and puts K-mart on the defensive, but I didn't see the point in it. What are they going to do? Forceps the bullets out and give the kids store credit? It's not K-mart's fault that we have ridiculously lax gun laws, especially as they relate to ammunition.  In the film Moore plays a clip of a Chris Rock routine where he talks about how gun control is pointless, and that we should just make bullets cost about $5000 each. It's funny, but doesn't really go anywhere.

The biggest coup of the film, is when Moore simply drives up to Charleston Heston's gated mansion, speaks into the intercom, and gets Heston to agree to give him an interview the next morning. Heston was the head of the NRA at that point, and while his position was clearly an honorary, "celebrity for the publicity" sort of role, Heston was allowing himself to be used as a figurehead and was going around the country and making his rabidly pro-gun speeches as a political tool. He spoke at a convention in Denver, very near Columbine just a few weeks after the massacre, and did the same thing in Detroit, just days after a 1st grade child shot and killed another young child, in school, with a loaded handgun he'd found lying around his uncle's house.

The Heston interview has become legendary, but it's really not that impressive in the movie. Heston is exposed as old and clueless, with absolutely nothing to base his opinions on when Moore very lightly challenges them. Moore just asks him if he thinks the NRA could or should have postponed or moved their conventions, rather than appearing in cities so recently scarred by horrible gun violence tragedies, and Heston sort of nods and mumbles before finally walking off and just leaving Moore and the camera crew sitting there, wondering if he's coming back or what.

As I said though, while those are the two most famous/infamous segments of the film, they don't take up more than maybe 10% of the running time, and they're far from the most interesting bits in the film. The rest of the film covers a ton of material, most of it related to why Americans are so afraid of virtually everything, and why, by extension, we have such a need for anti-fear talismans like guns. It's not dry and academic though; and there aren't a ton of boring statistics either.

One of the more amusing segments is in Canada, when Moore heads north of the border to investigate why there are so few gun deaths in Canada. Canada is a big hunting and fishing and outdoors country, so they have as many guns per capita as we do in the US. They also have crime, with a crime rate that's comparable to most of the US. It's just that their crimes are things like robbery and assault and vandalism and such; but not involving guns, or murder. Anyway, Moore heads across the border from Detroit to Windsor. Windsor is a good-sized city, with a population of about 250,000; smaller than Detroit, but it's not all that different, demographically. While there Moore talks to a cop and asks about recent murders, and the cop just stares at him as he thinks it over and finally says something like, "I can't remember the last murder. Maybe there were one or two in the last fifteen years?"  Meanwhile Detroit annually has one of the worst murder rates in the US, and usually has 300 or 400 or more people die every year, most from being shot by a gun.

Moore then follows that up by talking to a bunch of Canadians in public places, asks them if they lock their doors, and when they all say "Nope." he actually goes house to house in a suburb, trying front doors at random... and they're all unlocked and the people are all very friendly when he apologizes for barging in.  Just imagine doing that in the US? First of all, virtually every door would be locked, and even if you did find some that were unlocked, you'd run at least even odds of getting blown away by some trigger happy idiot. (I'm no exception to that, by the way; I always lock the door, as does everyone else, and if I heard someone trying to get in my immediate reaction would be to worry about defending myself and my girlfriend from unknown attackers. And no, the fact that nothing like that ever happened doesn't make me think it never will.)

Moore segues that segment into some coverage of the US media; how every time anything bad happens to anyone it's on the news. He shows sweeps week local news intros, and everything is just so ridiculously overblown towards fear. One report after another is like, "Invisible killers in your home! Your children could die the instant you turn your back! How to keep prowlers from hurting your family!" and so on. Meanwhile the Canadian news has nice features about communities helping each other, good news about new roads being built, etc.  The point being that there's crime in Canada, but they're not obsessed about it, and they don't spend all of their time in fear of it, and therefore live much happier lives.

Unfortunately, the film doesn't tie it all together in any way. Why are Americans so terrified by potential crime, and why do we think things are so much worse than they are? Why is there so much violence in this country? People often blame the entertainment industry, but Canada sees the same violent movies and TV shows as the US; they play the same murder-filled video games, they read the same serial killer novels, etc.

The movie doesn't answer the question, but I don't know that it could; the issues are just too vast and interlocking in so many weird ways, but while Bowling for Columbine is interesting and lively and informative, it leaves you with lots of questions and no real answers. We have a ridiculous amount of guns in the US. We feel we need them since so much in the news is bad and scary. Those guns endanger us far more than they protect us. The NRA is a parasitic organization devoted to fanning those fears and increasing gun ownership. The murder rate would drop dramatically if there weren't so many guns out there. Etc.

There are many other fascinating segments in the film, and the scenes with James Nichols, brother of convicted Oklahoma City bomb accomplice Terry Nichols, are frighteningly creepy. James talks about his brother's normal life, what they do on their farm, how all the alleged bomb-making materials the FBI found were common farm fertilizers, etc. James is paranoid and somewhat delusional, and when he says that he sleeps with a loaded .45 under his pillow, and Moore asks to see it, James takes him in and shows him the gun, then points it at his own head and talks about killing himself then and there. I was literally squirming on the couch watching that portion of the film, and there's lots more great stuff I'm not mentioning here.

Overall though, you get a lot of facts from the film, but what are you going to do with them? How is anyone going to change the US news from scare tactic bullshit to positive and informative information, when fear gets ratings? How is anyone going to remove the tens of millions of guns from our society? Why are Americans so much more likely to use guns to kill each other than the citizens of any other nation on earth?