"Bowling for Columbine": Moore's "Documentary" is More of a Work of Fiction

Michael Moore, everyone's favorite pudgy populist is back. His latest movie "Bowling for Columbine" has received both rave reviews and an amazingly good run at the box office for a documentary film. RottenTomatoes.com gave it a 96%, out a whopping 114 reviews by critics, only 5 were negative. However, the disturbing part about "Bowling for Columbine" is the way it passes itself off as a documentary, while the drastic statistical distortions and factual inaccuracies makes it nothing more than a fictional piece of propaganda.

The distortions begin with the very title of the movie. The title comes from Moore's claim that the two Columbine murderer's went to a bowling class on the morning of the day of the massacre. But, according to Forbes' Daniel Lyons, "Cool story, but police say it's not true. They say the shooters skipped their bowling class that day."

In the very beginning of the movie, Moore visits a Michigan bank that appears to give out guns in exchange for opening an account, and leaves with a gun. This is obviously meant to show that it is too easy to get a gun, but apparently he did it by staging the scene. The truth is that the you pick up the weapon at a gun store after buying a long-term CD and taking a background check. So the audience is led to believe that the bank itself hands out guns on the spot to anyone who gets a bank accounts.

Moore says that in Littleton, Colorado there is a Lockheed Martin's assembly plant where "weapons of mass destruction" are being produced. There is a video of giant rockets being put together shown. But in reality, as Lyons, points out "Lockheed Martin's plant in Littleton doesn't make weapons. It makes space launch vehicles for TV satellites."

According to Ben Fritz, writing in the Orange County Register, there is also an altered Bush/Quayle campaign ad that was originally run in 1988.

Perhaps most egregiously, Moore has apparently altered footage of an ad run by the Bush/Quayle campaign in 1988 to further implicate then-Vice President George Bush in the Willie Horton controversy. Trying to make a point about how racial symbols have been used to scare the American public, he shows the Bush/Quayle ad called "Revolving Doors," which attacked Michael Dukakis for a Massachusetts prison furlough program by showing prisoners entering and exiting a prison. Superimposed over the footage is the text "Willie Horton released. Then kills again." This caption is displayed as if it is part of the original ad.

Moore also repeats an age-old leftist myth that the U.S. gave $250 million dollars in aid to the repressive, terrorist Taliban regime. However, the aid was actually sent to non-government organizations to relieve an impending famine.

His most strategic omission is in his description of a tragedy in which a young boy shot and killed a classmate. The boy's mother left him with her brother when she got a job, so Moore blames the tragedy on a welfare-to-work program. What is left out is the fact that the brother's house, as described by the Weekly Standard's Matt Labash, was "a crack house, where guns were often traded for drugs."

Despite all of this, all of the big name critics critics can't seem to get enough of him. Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly raves "We need [Moore's] noisy, cocky energy, his passion and class consciousness; we need his shticks, we need his stones."

The Rolling Stone's Peter Travers exclaims "This volcanically funny and seriously scary look at America's obsession with guns is meant to shake us up good. And it does".

The Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert proclaims that "Michael Moore's 'Bowling for Columbine,' a documentary that is both hilarious and sorrowful". In the movie Moore takes two victims from Columbine, who still have bullets in their body, to K-Mart, where the bullets where allegedly bought and "humorously" asks for a refund. He then continues to harass K-Mart employees until they agree to remove bullets from the shelves of their stores. This is obviously tasteless, exploitive, and just plain stupid for hundreds of reasons. For one thing, it will make it much harder for law-abiding citizens to protect themselves. But Ebert calls it "brilliant theater" and applauds Moore's idiotic scheme. At least Ebert's accomplice, Richard Roeper, has the decency to say "[Michael Moore's] brilliant at what he does, but I don't think he's always being honest."

Michael Moore likes to think of himself as a rebel, but he seems to be a conformist with the rest of the Hollywood leftists, who all denounce capitalism and the 2nd Amendment while basking in their million dollar mansions and protection from armed body guards. Moore is well protected from exposure by the liberal media establishment, and continues to abuse the very freedom he wants to take away from the average American.

Andrew Boksansky is a Junior at Trinity High School who lives in Garfield Heights, Ohio.