Bowling for Columbine (2002)
Directed by Michael Moore
This is not a film about gun control. It is a film about the fearful heart and soul of the United States, and the 280 million Americans lucky enough to have the right to a constitutionally protected Uzi. From a look at the Columbine High School security camera tapes to the home of Oscar-winning NRA President Charlton Heston, from a young man who makes homemade napalm with The Anarchist's Cookbook to the murder of a six-year-old girl by another six-year-old. Bowling for Columbine is a journey through the US, through our past, hoping to discover why our pursuit of happiness is so riddled with violence.
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What critics compared Bowling for Columbine to
This was Fritz Lang's theme for Germany's crime problems after WW1 when he made the classic "M." Taking a parent away from her child even if it's to get work just creates another problem, as this solution hailed by a majority of both Democrats and Republicans probably contributes more to crime in the streets than all the other reasons presented.
It first entered mainstream cinema in Peter Bogdanovich's early film Targets (inspired by Charles Whitman's killing spree on the University of Texas campus in 1966), and has since been seen in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and Gus Van Sant's Elephant.
Michael Moore went further: He showed the actual surveillance footage from the high school in his 2002 documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” which relentlessly sought a solution to the problem of school shootings.
Parallels will be drawn to Bowling for Columbine , although not because the latter is sloppy, clueless, insulting, and monstrously self-indulgent, that is, a celluloid version of Michael Moore.
It's a lightning-rod film — not the first to address the recent wave of school shootings, but the highest-profile one since Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, and whatever one may think of its merits, there's no denying that Elephantleaves an indelible mark.
As much as the school massacre phenomenon has become an obsession of American cultural observers because it seems to touch on something indefinable but disturbing at our core (besides Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," there was this year's "Zero Day" and numerous plays including the following: 1 , 2 , 3 ), it's not clear what "Elephant" adds in terms of understanding the psyche of those involved.
…won a prize for "Bowling for Columbine," a typical documentary from the liberal director that blamed the military-industrial culture around Columbine for the tragedy.
It is the unsexiest movie since Bowling for Columbine.