From: Adam Kempenaar
To: Sam Hallgren; Eric Baker
Subject: If all else fails, blame the media
First off, thanks to Eric for mentioning yesterday's release of 'Glengarry Glen Ross' on DVD. I had intended to bring it up on Monday. It's about time Artisan got around to giving 'Glengarry' the full Special Edition treatment. The absence of a cast commentary is disappointing -- Pacino, Harris, Arkin, Spacey, any of those guys would be great -- but I'll be curious to see what director James Foley has to say in his commentary since I believe 'Glengarry' is the best adaptation of a Mamet play and/or screenplay, even better than any of Mamet's own renditions. On to 'Columbine'...I have to admit that I was just as surprised as 'Dazed and Confused' to see Sam rate 'Bowling for Columbine' as his #7 film of the year after he spent the majority of his post criticizing it. In Sam's defense, I think this apparent contradiction comes back to the issue of expectations. When you go into a movie expecting it to be great and then find that it is merely "good," or even "really good," you can't help but point out all of the flaws because that's all you noticed -- all the things that kept it from being what you hoped it would be. Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader called 'Columbine' Moore's "best film to date," a position that I do not share, unfortunately, although I found it to be extremely provocative and often times very funny. As Eric said, the sequence where we see the actual footage of the Columbine massacre combined with the audio from the 911 calls was very effective. I'd go so far as to call it harrowing because it made me feel uneasy watching it, even with the surveillance video from inside the school being mostly blurry and unrevealing. My problem with 'Columbine' in comparison to 'Roger and Me' is the fact that Moore's latest effort seems a tad too didactic. [I know, Michael Moore? Didactic?] With 'Roger and Me' Moore used his voice-over primarily to provide an ironic counterpoint to what we were seeing and hearing on screen. And he used the camera to show us just how bad things had become in Flint. Here he just seems to be preaching most of the time -- telling us why things are so messed up instead of showing us. What surprised me most about the movie is that it really is not at all an indictment of the NRA, as 'The Deacon fdba Judge Dredd' points out in the Feedback Forum. My feeling is that Moore may have initially had in mind a documentary that ridiculed the NRA, but as he progressed he shifted his target to a much larger, powerful and nebulous group -- the media. The NRA doesn't come off even half as dirty in the movie as the many local TV news stations Moore shows footage of. Following the lead of Prof. Barry Glassner's book, 'The Culture of Fear', Moore basically tries to pin the blame for our obsession with guns on our obsession with fear, which is caused by media outlets who try to get us to watch their newscasts by promoting stories that "just might save our life," and who devote increasing amounts of time to crime despite the fact that the crime rate in this country has been consistently declining for years. Moore almost pulls it off, too. He pretty easily refutes the usual arguments given for why Americans kill over 11,000 people a year with guns while other free nations average only a few hundred such deaths -- that our country has a more violent history (compared to whom? the Germans?) and we have more access to guns (as Moore shows, in Canada you can get a gun just as easily as you can here). And yet, something about blaming the media just rubs me the wrong way. It seems akin to blaming rockers like Marilyn Manson (who proves again in the movie, as he has in many interviews I've seen with him, just how intelligent he is; watch a clip of Moore's interview with Manson here) for kids shooting up schools. Moore clearly doesn't believe artists should be blamed for actions taken by people who listen to their music, but then isn't a CD, or book, or movie just another form of media? I understand the distinction Moore is trying to draw, but it still seems like we're blaming a bogeyman -- one who, unlike Roger Smith, can't actually be held accountable since who really is "the media"? I do want to take issues with some of Sam's comments. First, he describes Moore's tone as being "caustic." I'm not sure I agree. Moore seemed incredibly restrained to me, much more so than in 'Roger and Me' and his bits on 'TV Nation'. He appeared far less intent on making people look bad and more interested in trying to get legitimate answers to his questions. This is especially true in the over-hyped interview with Charlton Heston at the end. There's no doubt that Heston comes off as incredibly stupid and, well, old. But Sam says that Moore "bully and baits" the NRA figurehead, whereas I sincerely feel that Moore asks his questions with as much diplomacy and genuine curiousity as he can muster. 'Columbine' may lack the narrative focus that 'Roger and Me' did, but I respect Moore's ambition. I'm still thinking about certain issues he raised the next day. And hey, any movie these days that you didn't forget as soon as you exited the theater has to be pretty decent.
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