Reviews

Like Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken, Michael Moore is an entertaining propagandist, but that's about it -- an ideologue flailing away at one of the most important issues of our time. He has no problem with getting extremely loose with the facts to further his cause -- see bowlingfortruth.com for a full accounting.

He also thoroughly fails at his mission of finding out why Americans kill each other with guns and instead descends into the leftist mantras of America's the world's great Satan (sometimes deserved), NRA bashing (also sometimes deserved) and "inanimate objects made us do it" (let's get K-Mart). He even totally loses it and tries to blame one killing on Dick Clark.

Moore uses his standard tactic of bushwhacking people with a camera and creative editing (fun but ultimately pathetic). That Chuck Heston was dumb enough to let Moore anywhere near him with a camera, blows my mind. I guess he really does have dementia.

Ironically, Heston's ill-advised musings really do touch on a HUGE factor in America's gun violence rate as compared to other countries -- one that Moore is completely unable to recognize or explore because of his own bias. I'm talking about black-on-black inner-city violence. Few people, especially an agenda-driven leftist like Moore, are willing to point out that if you remove unfortunate inner-city blacks from the murder statistics, America's gun murder rates are about the same as Europe's. It's sad, true, and thoroughly un-PC to mention it. In total denial, Moore even suggests that Canada with its much lower gun-violence rate is as ethnically diverse as we are, which is absurd (Canada is 13% non-white, 2% black).

Obviously, this does not mean that we do not have a problem, and there are a large number of social/historical factors that figure into why the urban black portion of our society is suffering as it is. However, it does make one wonder about the quality and objectivity of Moore's "investigation."

Moore hardly even mentions the inner-city crime issue, but surprisingly Heston does (indirectly). Moses obviously has thought and read quite a bit about our gun-related social woes (God, I would hope so). Unfortunately he did not have the forethought or finesse to explain it to Michael. I suspect that even if he had (maybe he did), the tape would have wound up on the cutting room floor -- smug, pseudo-Nazi, gun-lobby leaders are far more entertaining and in keeping with Moore's agenda. In short, this film is more about justifying Moore's poorly thought-out opinion than about exploring the issue.

It's also important to understand that the film's centerpiece, the horrible, graphic school shootings, have little effect on our murder rate. They create media frenzies (especially when they involve whites shooting whites) but they are a very small part of the picture. FAR more kids drown in pools (around 300) in the USA every year than are shot by their classmates at school. To his credit, Moore did quite nicely touch on the media distortion factor.

In summary, this movie is worth watching, and it's quite scary or funny on occasion. It makes some good points. Just make sure to take it with a grain of salt the size of Montana (you know, that state full of white gun nuts).

This film is irresponsible. I'm not talking about omissions because of the limitations of movie making. I'm talking about outright lies. I can almost forgive making stuff up about B&C since they were a couple of dirt bags, but I can't forgive making Frank Hamer (mispronounced in the movie) and other lawmen look like fools.

Frank's service to society was quite remarkable. It was so remarkable that the justified slaughter of B&C was but a footnote to his illustrious career. And what of the officers and innocents killed or injured by the Barrow gang? The movie makes their loss seem like so much fun at the penny arcade. Director Penn should be ashamed.

I doubt the positive reviewers of this film would be so quick to praise a movie that made Charlie Manson's group out to be a fun-loving bunch of misguided hippies. This is the exact sort of thing this movie did. The only difference is how old the crimes are. In fact in terms of the suffering they caused, the Barrow gang was worse than Manson. Those that glowingly praise this movie would be well served to crack a history book once in a while. I suggest Milner's The "Lives and Times of Bonnie and Clyde."

If you do decide to read about B&C, you'll be surprised to find that some of the most interesting facts were left out of the movie. For example: They broke one of their buddies out of a major Texas prison from the outside. Clyde was a small Beaver-Cleaver-looking guy who deftly used a large machine gun (a Browning Automatic Rifle) because tommy guns, which are revered by Hollywood and used in this movie, could not reliably penetrate the steel of early 30s cars. And best of all, they really loved each other. All that lover's tension and sexual dysfunction in the movie is BS.

The actors did a decent job. They probably didn't even know that the script had very little to do with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Even if they did know, they probably wouldn't care. The casting was horrible, but hey, once you cast off the annoying constraints of what actually happened, who cares? If the movie had been titled Bob and Suzy, it would have been worth watching in its day. Even if it were, these days it would be a waste of time.

Overall well worth watching. It does have the standard host of Army reality errors -- calling NCOs sir, wearing hats indoors when not bearing weapons, calling a Sergeant Major "sarge," etc. Curiously, having extremely defective people (like the nut with the bat) in the Army, especially combat arms, is NOT an error. When I was a tanker in the late 80s, I saw America's finest, most giving, young men. I also saw a lot of mutants that wouldn't make it on the outside. At that time 90%+ of both types were rabidly homophobic. I doubt much has changed. Because of that, I find it a bit difficult to buy that the main character wouldn't hide his affair much better than the movie depicted. Then again, things did go terribly wrong. Even though I'm a strong supporter of the military, when "don't ask, don't tell" was created, I thought that a gay person must be insane to want to go into the service. Clearly, little has changed.

A real waste of film. Having been in the Army during the period depicted, I can say this movie has little to do with reality or humor. It is a lot to do with bashing the Army. This is NOT to say that the Army isn't messed up, often beyond words. It is, just not like this. EMs (junior enlisted men) messing with battalion Sergeant Majors, nonsense. Trucks full of weapons disappearing without whole posts being locked down and swarmed with CID (Criminal Investigative Division), nonsense. There are very few upstanding soldiers of character in the movie. Even the by-the-book Sergeant Major admits to being a scumbag in Vietnam. Gee, I wonder why? Worse yet, it's far from a respectable military farce like the great "Dr. Strangelove." It's just mean and dumb.

I expect Hollywood to come out with unfunny, one-sided trash like this. But even they should have seen this as a bad investment given the post-Gulf-War climate. I am even more disappointed with the German government that loaned them the (German) tanks. We didn't shield them from the USSR for nearly half a century just to have them help these fools.

How about using the resources that went into this film on a thoughtful dramatic/humorous critique of what really is going wrong in the Army? "Three Kings" or "Kelly's Heroes" are both much nearer the mark.