Rating of
2.5/4
Moore's inexperience shows
patjohnson76 - wrote on 07/21/08
I had never seen Michael Moore's documentary until recently, and I have to say I'm a little baffled at the heaping praise it got when it came out. Maybe it's because, two documentaries later, we've seen Moore grow as a filmmaker. I suppose this had a lot of impact at the time because he was being critical of our country when we were going off to war.
The main problem is that Moore loses focus halfway through. This happened in his follow-up, Farhenheit 9/11, when he lost the film toward the end and just started complaining about the Iraq war. Here, he starts out examining gun culture, but then decides he wants to try and examine what brought us here, so he goes off on tangents about the media, race relations, killer bees...eventually he brings it back with a story of a child shooting and taking two Columbine victims to K-Mart to complain about their sale of bullets. He has humor, which gets you through the documentary, but his finger pointing gets a little old at times. I would have liked to see him go to gun shows or politicians that vote against gun legislation rather than trying to tell off Charlton Heston, Dick Clark, and a PR representative at K-Mart.
