Posted on 12/29/2002 5:19:30 PM PST by beckett
Tim Blair: The awful truth? It's a crock
December 30, 2002
CHILDREN'S television is quite an art. It's not just a matter of throwing together simple tunes, basic storylines and bright colours. Successful children's TV also requires the presence of a large, formless creature, an entity usually combining equal elements of human and bovine. The cow-beast is crucial.
So it is with Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore's Cannes-winning documentary on the wrongs of guns, capitalism, and America, now screening in Australia. The simple tunes and basic storylines are in place. Moore himself plays the Dorothy the Dinosaur role, clumsily loping about in pursuit of Bad Guys. It's a kid flick for the adult anti-American market.
Moore manipulates this market so expertly that you anticipate fans squealing "Go Mikey!" every time he plods smugly into frame. Fans like The Age's Stephanie Bunbury: "Isn't that great, you think with a huge sigh of relief as you see him bearing down, amiable but inexorable, on the next feral gun owner or racist lunatic. Go Mikey!"
Yay! Margaret Pomeranz of SBS's Movie Show awarded Columbine five stars, and also got into the toddler spirit: "Moore shambles around with his baseball cap on, his stomach hanging out; almost a teddy bear figure, Moore seems to encompass so much that's terribly important in the world today with the United States on the brink of yet another international gun expedition." Movie Show co-presenter (and film reviewer for The Australian) David Stratton detected vast importance, too: "It's a sobering film, but never a dull one, thanks to the brilliance of Moore's sometimes scatological approach to a profoundly important subject."
The subject is obviously so profoundly important that no local reviewer has been bothered to report the controversy in the US over Columbine's inaccuracies and distortions. Journalists have a damned nerve charging people money for less information than is available free on the internet. Writing about Columbine without addressing its flaws is like writing about Michael Jackson without mentioning that these days he looks like an albino bat.
A mind given to conspiracy theories might conclude that an element of cover-up is involved. For the record, and because you apparently won't read it elsewhere in the Australian press, here is a brief list of things believed wrong about Columbine, from sources ranging from Salon.com and Forbes to London's Sunday Times (these and more may be found at www.moorewatch.com):
No wonder Moore is so popular in France, where Thierry Meyssan's book Effroyable Imposture (which argued that September 11 was engineered by the American government) became a bestseller.
Some of his reviewer/fans share Moore's accuracy problems. Bunbury claimed that "he bails up the entire management of Kmart and confronts Charlton Heston on his own front veranda" although he meets only a few Kmart management types and interviews Heston inside his house; and The Australian's Jane Cornwell wrote that Columbine's vile three-minute cartoon history of the US, written by Moore and made by animators FlickerLab, was produced "by the guys from South Park".
Just as wrong are reviewers' standard lines about Moore "taking on big business" and "standing up for the little guy". Moore usually stands up to the little guy, bullying sales staff and humiliating small-town folk. At the cinema where I saw Columbine, a typically open-minded and compassionate inner-city crowd giggled indulgently as Moore (aided by sneaky editing) made fools of police, PR flacks, the unemployed, the undereducated and the working class.
Millionaire Moore who is to working class as French is to resistance, despite once spending one entire day on the Buick assembly line in his hometown of Flint, Michigan is waging a class war, but it's against the rubes and hicks he claims to represent. They are mere joke fodder in his deceitful Playschool morality play. Go to hell, Mikey.
The movie and the book appeal to America-hating foreigners because this is what they want to believe about the U.S: we're all just a bunch of gun-toting, tobacco-chewing, bible thumpers who lucked or bullied are way into our current wealth and power. If we were actually as stupid as Moore would like gullible lefties to believe, we'd still be living in log cabins and trapping squirrels for dinner. Moore knows this, but it is very profitable for him to play the anti-America game. We can expect more of this drivel from him as it has made him a multi-millionaire.
Millionaire Moore who is to working class as French is to resistance, despite once spending one entire day on the Buick assembly line in his hometown of Flint, MichiganIt wasn't an entire day. Ben Hamper wrote that just before Moore-on left for San Francisco he visited the line. Showed up in his Honda, hung around for a bit, and left. This is his (at least former) friend talking.
-Eric
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