I like the fact that it adds in the gun-related suicides in Australia.
Considering we have the highest suicide rate in the world.
At least we're ot killing each other -- just ourselves.
What a wonderful world!
Edit: I just read that RevoketheOscar.com page.
I was interested to read the opening blurb:
Bowling for Columbine is a nasty bit of anti-American propaganda. Viewers are taught that:
America was founded on violence and fear, as quarrelsome pilgrims fled to the new world, where their paranoia led them to massacre the Indians, then the British, and then each other;
Well how exactly did most of all those American Indians die?
Must have been floods or locusts.
The Columbine murderers' violence might have its roots in the fact that one had a father in our military (American soldiers are presumably murderers, and it must rub off on their kids) or that there was a defense contractor in the area;
The ol' Lockheed-Martin point.
Many say they only build rockets for launching satellites.
Then again, who knows what other pies they go their fingers in.
Business (in any country) is always a very hidden affair.
Charlton Heston (one of Hollywood's few upstanding men) is a callous fool;
I only half agree with this point.
Heston was a active campaigner for civil rights in the 60s.
He even marched with Martin Luther King.
He was awarded a Jean Hersholt humanitarian Oscar in 1977.
This point Moore omits in his doco.
However, oore does not call Heston a racist (as the essay says) or a fool (as the RevokeTheOscar sit says) -- he lets us make our minds up over the interview.
And despite Heston's work in the 60s, one has to wonder his current standing in the NRA -- he says he's exercising his constitutional rights.
However, at what point do constitution rights affect basic human rights (especially the right to live).
The terrorist attack on 9/11 is related to past American foreign policy -- in short, America's own fault;
Umm -- they were and it was, doofus!
I could go on for hours how Sept 11 was linked to American foreign policy and how it was their own fault -- but only if you're THAT desperate to privately post me and ask.
But this post is long enough now.
Whatever the case, I think all the controversy over Moore doco is just pedantic nitpicking.
The doco still raises far greater questions on a global scale than any other doco released that year.
Any statistic can be scewered any which way to push your own point of view across -- I've done it many times in the past.
Moore's doco questions a facet of the US -- it's something that doesn't happen very often in this fast-paced, profit-driven, give-the-people-what-they-want, media circus world of ours.
I'm glad Moore continues to write and make films -- his opinion may be unpopular, but that's what I like it.
It's an alternative.
