The two high school students made infamous for their rampage at Columbine were rumored to have been at a bowling class at the school the morning of the shooting. It turned out to be urban legend, but Moore kept the catchy title, anyway. There seems to be no in between in regards to the filmmaker. I flat out love his work, all the way back to Roger and Me, and his TV shows, TV Nation and The Awful Truth. Here he takes on the NRA and Charleton Heston, or Moses, as he is best remembered, as he was the chief spokesman for the gun rights organization. As a gun owner, living in a secluded area, even I recognize the need for proper screenings and some restrictions on firearms.

As usual, Moore uses sardonic humor to make his point. At a bank in Colorado, he is given a hunting rifle for purchasing a CD. As he leaves the bank with the weapon, he asks, don't you think it's a little dangerous handing out guns at a bank? The high point is when Moore interviews Heston, asking him about the high level of gun violence, and Chuck answers that the reason is "race mixing" in America. This was seen by some as an ambush; I see it as Moore capturing the actors true feelings, and they are frightening. RIP Charlie boy.

Bowling for Columbine is both informative and entertaining, and Moore is our best documentary filmmaker. Look out, Dittoheads, the truth hurts.

In the wake of the most massive tragedy of all, the planes on 9/11 flying into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and into a field in Pennsylvania, Bowling For Columbine found a ready and receptive audience and earned itself an Oscar for Best Documentary. It's not clear however whether this will stand the test of time like some of the work that Edward R. Murrow did with Joe McCarthy or with migrant workers. Murrow was simply telling a story and focusing like a laser on a specific problem with some suggested cures. Michael Moore was lumping everything into a general us versus them.

No doubt about it gun violence is one god awful problem. I spent years at New York State Crime Victims Board paying claims for funeral expenses for survivors expenses to bury loved ones. The availability of firearms in the USA is some kind of surreal joke. The best part of Bowling For Columbine is right at the beginning with Moore getting a choice of firearm for opening an account at a Michigan bank. I opened an account at Citi-Bank when I moved to Buffalo and got a piggy bank.

Long before the USA was industrialized we were a frontier nation and that's ingrained in our national culture. That second amendment was put into our constitution was something thought necessary as we also were adverse to a standing army. Well we've sure got one now, but no one bothered to modify that 2nd amendment or reinterpret it. I was also a member of the Army Reserve in my younger days, but no one took their M-16s home with them nor did we purchase them for our own use.

The National Rifle Association is one powerful lobby because so many people feel the need to own a weapon. Until that's excised from our national consciousness, we won't see a realistic reduction of weapons any time soon.

Michael Moore took all of his beliefs and crammed them into one film. These things have the flimsiest of connections if any. I remember in Oliver Stone's JFK we bring in Donald Sutherland's character to pull together all the conspiracy threads that led to the JFK assassination to make it all clear. With Moore doing his own narrating the film is like Sutherland's scene exponentially expanded with visuals.

The NRA after the Columbine High School shooting massacre rather callously did not call off a convention scheduled for Denver. To keep the issue of the right to bear arms as they see it they elected a celebrity president, Hollywood screen legend Charlton Heston. Sad to say Heston was in his dotage when he took the position and left it when he acknowledged said dotage admitting Alzheimer's Disease.

Personally I've always kept beliefs and entertainment in different worlds. If I didn't I wouldn't enjoy the work of a lot of people like Charlton Heston. In fact in his younger days Heston marched for civil rights in the 50s and 60s. He's not the first or the last person to change his mindset on issues. He grew more conservative as he aged, I in fact grew more liberal.

So I'm not amused at Moore's mocking of Heston. No more than I was amused at Howard Stern mocking Kirk Douglas after his stroke. It just wasn't called for.

A little less mockery and a lot more focus would have given Michael Moore a better film.

A decent Michael Moore documentary exploring America's obsession with guns and the consequences of that obsession. I generally liked all of this; it has the right amount of politics, news stories, and some shocking clips. The only thing I didn't care for was Moore ambushing a clearly senile Charlton Heston at the end; very much the wrong target, here.