Apparently Moore is unfamiliar with the statement Ghandi made that depriving a whole nation of arms was one of the worst things they'd done. Apparently Moore is disavowing his own paranoid theories about how our government operates.
Also,
Bowling is
a misleading piece of propaganda not a true documentary. Among those in media, at least according to a fellow whose whole family is in the broadcasting industry, left or right, he's hated. He's hated especially it seems by the non-limousine left, the well-researched center-right guys see him as more of an amusing nuisance.
EDIT: --
Well, it happened again, before I even read the dissertations and arguments the first time I watched, the movie pissed me off. It did the same exact thing this time.
Now, my ulcer acted up and my headaches got worse. I'm still washed out from the flu. I could have watched Ben Hur instead. Much better movie.
From the start, with the staged bank scene, to the bad-remix of Joe Cocker's "What A Wonderful World" I felt like I'd better chew some gaviscon and eat a ton of crackers. I did that very thing, twice, I still had serious pains.
Some of the editing techniques are apparently nondescript. By comparison to previous documentaries (Martin Scorsese's previous attempts and documentaries I've seen about the American Nazi Party) I've seen, some edit cuts seem unusual. Focus is drawn on an object and sound stretched in a loose fashion for reasons nonapparent. Politically concerned, the reasons are obvious. No different from the decisions behind the camera placement in Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda documentary Triumph Des Willens, it brings together the emotional impact of the shot, scene and take altogether at once. While Triumph Des Willens was a paean to the Nazi Party, the technical comparisons are there. The politics of course to be seperated. Some scenes, such as the cuts of the three Heston speeches, and the interview with Heston (the story of which is rather sordid, which I'll get to later) in person, are all technically brilliant, using fraction-of-second cuts for maximum impact.
Those cuts among other presented edits, are one of the key sources of the controversy. It's Moore's vertuosity as a director and editor that brings out such powerful controversy. His edited scenes, such as shots from NRA rallies or Get out and Vote rallies, are chopped together in a cinematically efficient fashion (a more roaming or slower director might have taken perhaps another half an hour to forty-five minutes to bring certain points together) but as a documentary, this efficiency crosses into moments that may mislead a viewer into drawing false conclusions, and there is in fact one scene which is rather bizarre, the coup de grace; The interview with Charlton Heston himself.
From a political and humane standpoint, his approach to Heston was nothing short of disgusting. He approached him as an NRA member, as one of his own, and then slowly challenged him as the leftist he truly is. The result, one the audience might not infer, is that an old man suffering from Alzheimer's disease is caught defenseless, and isn't prepared against a real attack. Moore is a Trojan Horse. Even 10 years ago, it's rather likely a younger, sharper Heston would have had Moore's name checked out, or if Moore had gone to Wayne LaPierre today, that would have happened. Knowing who Moore really is, Heston or Moore, so prepared, would have been able to tear anything he'd have thrown at them to pieces. However, from a technical standpoint, that's not the perplexing thing. The thing that cuts under the surface and leaves me baffled is, quite frankly, how did they film all the angles in the walking away? Either there was a second camera (in a position so located it would have been physically impossible to film in one take, and would have been caught in the other 'shot,' Moore making a technical assertion to the contrary is a lie) or it was a multi-shot, meaning the scene is not quite what it seems. Is it really a defeated Heston that walked away, or was the conversation concluded under what Heston considered more amiable circumstances? Who knows. It's one of those mysteries likely to remain unresolved for a while. In general, good technical merits aside, some conclusions drawn in the film are outright squirrelly. Squirrelly in the sense that you really have to climb up the wall to find what orbital shell these people drew their ideas from. Real, "If aliens come here, they'll fix all our medical problems" stuff. Blaming Dick Clark for Kayla Rowland's murder, saying she was forced to work, at the same time tying in a paranoid diatribe about Lockheed Martin. Efficient delivery perhaps, but the results are ludicrous.
[ 02-27-2004, 06:30 PM: Message edited by: Oblivion437 ]