You may perhaps have heard that Bowling For Columbine is Michael Moore's "Anti-Gun" film. If you heard that from a conservative friend who used that as a justification for hating the film, that friend is a moron and shouldn't be allowed out of the house. On the other hand, if you heard that from a liberal friend who told you that you've gotta seen this great brilliant new anti-gun documentary, that friend is also a moron who shouldn't be allowed out of the house (though I may agree with his politics). Bowling For Columbine is many many things, but it's most certainly *not* anti-guns.

Michael Moore isn't opposed to guns, because that would be a topic that's open to endless debate. What he's opposed to is guns killing innocent people in large numbers. This raises the question: If you're offended by the message of this film, what does it say about you?

One character after another miss represents the Second Amendment right to bear arms and Michael Moore never contradicts him. In fact, he admits early on that as a child he won NRA sponsored marksmanship contests and he endears himself to Charlton Heston by showing the ex-Moses his lifetime membership card. And when Moore uses Canada as an example of a country loaded with guns, but short on gun deaths, he never suggests that Canadians should give up their firearms. Sure, he's a tiny bit uncomfortable with K-Mart just selling ammo to anybody who walks in and he doesn't entirely understand why anybody would sleep with a loaded .44 under their pillow, but he never suggests that these folks shouldn't be allowed to pack their heat. No. Michael Moore has other questions in mind and his questions aren't about anything as simple as gun control. And regardless of what you may have heard, they also can't been simply pidgeon-holed under liberal or conservative ideology. Even in our post-9/11 world, Michael Moore has the courage to ask "What's Wrong With America?" But, more importantly to me, he has the intelligence to realize that in a two hour film he probably won't be able to come up with the answers.

If you know Michael Moore's work — Roger and Me, The Big One, The Awful Truth — you're aware that this is a man with out a single subtle bone in his shambling oversized body. Michael Moore has never made any claims of objectivity or even-handedness. He's been called a populist crusader and that's probably appropriate. He's a zealot for common sense that isn't so commonsensical in much of the country. Like most muckrakers, Michael Moore's work plays better if you agree with him him. The point of muckraking is to stir up emotions that people may not have known they had, but not, necessarily to convert the heathen masses. As a result, the screening I was at of Bowling For Columbine was full of upper-middle class educated viewers (of all races) and they clapped, laughed, and cheered through the entire movie. For my audience, Bowling For Columbine confirmed things we already knew. I assume that the packed houses in Toronto and New York will be similarly composed and similarly excited. How's the movie gonna play in, say, Texas. Or Denver? It probably won't. If you don't like Michael Moore's message, Bowling For Columbine may outrage you so badly that you can't even see what his message is. You may be outraged that he's picking on George Bush Jr. and Dick Chenney so soon after 9/11. You may be outraged that the film makes a mockery of Reagan/Bush Sr. foreign policy. And you may, apparently, come away with the incorrect reading that Michael Moore is anti-guns. Moore doesn't have a soft touch and if you're not his target audience, it may feel like you're getting beaten over the head with propaganda. Which you are. Deal with it.

But how can you go wrong with a documentary where the two most reasonable interview subjects are South Park's Matt Parker and a certain Brian Warner, b.k.a. Marilyn Manson?

We live in a nation of guns. Moore begins his film by going to a bank in [if memory serves] Minnesota, where if you open a certain kind of account, they hand you a gun on the spot. Well, not exactly on the spot, but very quickly, because in addition to being a bank, it's also a licensed gun dealer. What does it say about a country where Michael Moore can walk into a bank unarmed and walk out brandishing a rifle? Oh yes, everything's up to date in Kansas City!

Who has guns? Well, everybody. Even Michael Moore who, as I've already mentioned, grew up in a state of hunters and was once an award-winning crack-shot. Moore shows archival footage of old commercials for toy guns so realistic that even cops think they look and sound real (somehow he resists the urge to discuss the countless shootings in the past decade prompted by people who were just holding toy guns). It's a gateway from the realistic ton guns of childhood to the bigger and more deadly guns of adulthood. It's not like kids are playing with toy guns modeled after your basic "for home safety" handgun. No, they're playing with riffles and automatics and it's no wonder that those kids grow into...

Well, normal adults, for the most part. Most people who play with toy machine guns grown into adults who don't own guns at all. But some of them grow into members of the Michigan Militia, who would like to present themselves as a group of good ol' boys who just get together on weekends for some target shooting and just happen to also keep loaded AK-47s in their homes. These are reasonable men who want to distance themselves from Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who attended meetings, but weren't actually members. These are just good citizens who want to be prepared if the town crier ever announces that the British are coming. Again. They're certainly not extremists or anything.

Even Terry Nichols's brother John is quick to say that serious weapons should be kept out of the hands of "wackos," though John is quick to declare that while the pen is mightier than the sword, sometimes you've gotta keep that sword handy.

Is Michael Moore mocking these wackos? Of course he is. It's part of his great gift as a filmmaker that he's able to get unguarded honestly from his subjects while making it clear to his superior-feeling audience that he's talking to loonies. But he never indicates explicitly to either his subjects or his viewers that he disapproves. But note his concerned look when a Militia-man says that in the outside world he's a real estate negotiator. Somehow, though, Moore manages to avoid using the Moxy Frovous song (featuring the chorus "Happy Birthday Tricia, I'm in the Michigan Militia") in these sequences.

Finally, though, Moore gets to Littleton, Colorado and the shootings at Columbine High School. He shows the tragedy. He discusses the tragedy. But mostly he questions why it happened, avoiding overliteral answers. Did it happen because school officials underestimated an established threat? Maybe. Did it happen because the boys were able to illegally acquire guns? Maybe. But that's not the central issue. The question is why Columbine happened in America and, equally crucially, why tragedies of this magnitude don't happen as often in other countries.

He begins with a central irony: The day of the Columbine massacre was also the day that US forces dropped more bombs on Bosnia than at any other point in our campaign there. And just hours after Bill Clinton gave a self-satisfied press conference announcing the day's successes abroad, he had to appear in full "I feel your pain" mode discussing Columbine. People who call Bowling For Columbine a liberal movie should note just how horrible Clinton comes across in this sequence. Or just how awful a string of Democratic politicians come across in blaming video games and finally Marilyn Manson for the actions of the Columbine killers. Moore mocks any notion that the solution is that simple. How can you blame Marilyn Manson, when the US military commits nearly endless crimes against civilians of countless nations on a daily basis. It's one thing to fight wars against the militaries of other nations, but Moore accurately points out that American foreign policy has been indiscriminately meddling in world affairs for decades. We kill to install puppet rulers and then kill to take them out of power and we give billions in aid to rebels and then we have to spend billions to fight those rebels years later. And even when we're fighting wars, we still do things like bomb aspirin factories "by accident." So how can people blame Marilyn Manson for inspiring senseless acts of violence when the Columbine kids could have been equally inspired by Bill Clinton, Ronny Reagan, Senior Bush, Junior Bush, and everybody else in between.

People say that we have more gun deaths in America because we have a culture built on violence — from the revolutionary war to cowboys and indians to the civil war. But don't Japan and England and German have histories of violence? They all have markedly fewer gun deaths. Or is it because we have more guns per capita? Canada has just as many guns and many fewer gun deaths.

We live, Moore argues, in a culture dominated by fear and that fear contributes to our culture of violence. Again, people who claim that this is a liberal film should note how Moore demonizes the so-called "liberal media." Critiquing a media system where the motto is "if it bleeds it leads," Moore goes even deeper, examining how if the media doesn't have true fear to stir up, they're more than willing to create panic over Y2K or Killer Bees, or escalators.

In an absolutely brilliant animated sequence (by Harold Moss, I believe), Moore traces the history of American fear from the Pilgrims through the Civil Rights movement. Suggesting how much of American violence is about the fear of the "Other." With tricky cutting, Moore even makes a convincing argument that the media frenzy over Killer Bees was a piece of inferential racism, paranoia that the more aggressive "Africanized" bees might mate with our meek and respectable "European" bees.

Frankly, as I write this review, I'm realizing just how much ground Moore covered in his film and it's clear I'm not going to be able to cover it all in any depth. And that's OK.

Who are the heros of this piece?

Well, Moore is always his biggest hero. It's just part of the way he makes films. Whether he's pounding on Chalton Heston's gate to demand an explanation for why Heston spoke at pro-gun rallies outside of Littleton just days after the massacre, or whether he's storming K-Mart headquarters with two survivors of Columbine, Moore is the man of the hour.

The other major hero? Canada. Our friendly neighbors to the North. While American newscasts try to scare the populace, Canadian newscasts try to reassure them. While Americans struggle to get healthcare and to make ends meet, Canadians have nationalized health care. Heck, Moore says, Canadians are so secure they don't even lock their doors. This despite having a fairly diverse populace, a higher unemployment rate than the United States, just as many guns, and as big a taste for American violent movies. While Moore resists the urge to just declare America a nation of hosers, you know that's what some of his interview subjects are thinking.

And who, then, are the villains of the piece?

Well, the American government doesn't come off looking so sharp. And it doesn't matter who was in charge of the government at any given point. Democrats and Republicans both look like fools. In the nature of full disclosure, it should be said that Republicans do look worse than the Democrats. But I'm fine with that if you are.

Dick Clark is another villain of the piece, though at first only by extension. In Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan a six year old boy shot a six year old girl in front of elementary school class. The boy found his gun in his uncle's house, where he was living because he mother had just been evicted from her home. The eviction came even though she was working 70 hours a week as part of Michigan's current welfare system. She was being bused 90 minutes to work at a Dick Clark Rock and Roll themed restaurant. Moore asks who this current welfare system is benefiting, taking mothers away from children to do work that still doesn't make them enough money to live on. But when Moore approaches Dick Clark for an interview, Clark shoos him away.

Charlton Heston comes across as a villain, which has become increasingly bittersweet in recent months. Sure, Heston's decision to show up outside of Littleton and mock those who didn't want him there was nothing short of evil, but when Moore badgers Moses, its tough not to think that the filmmaker is spending an awful lot of time taunting a man in the early states of Alzheimer's (which Moore didn't know). So granted that Heston is an ignorant and evil man (listen to his failures to rationalize the high rate of gun violence in this country), but it still feels slightly mean to pick on him.

And Lockheed Martin comes across doubly as the villain. Firstly the weapons manufacturer is a leading employer in Littleton, which Moore suggests might play a part in the communities underlying culture of violence, but they're also responsible for privatizing several states' welfare systems in manners that Moore finds unfortunate.

Bowling For Columbine works because Moore knows when to be funny and when to be serious. Sometimes his sense of irony is a little overdeveloped. This is especially frustrating in the sequence where American foreign relations fiascoes are shown with Louis Armstrong's "What A Wonderful World" playing on the soundtrack. But even this heavy-hand, doesn't take away from the shocking impact of the final footage of the plane flying into the World Trade Center, an image that doesn't lose its horror no matter how many times its rebroadcast. Nor do the 9-1-1 calls or security cam footage from Columbine. On the other hand a commercial for a school safety service showing how many weapons a kid can hide in his clothes is just hilarious no matter how serious it was meant to be.

Oh and the title... It's the ultimate argument that this isn't an anti-gun film. Apparently, on the morning of the Columbine shooting, the two killers were at a local alley bowling a couple strings. Moore wonders why with all the blame going around, nobody thought to blame bowling for the violence in society. His point is that the answers aren't simple. And he never really comes to any final conclusions on why Americans are gun crazy and why that love of guns translates into killing. He offers possibilities, but knows that just as you can't blame violence of bowling, there's no single cause that does the job.

Bowling for Columbine is sad, funny,scary, and irreverent. It's also one of the smartest films of the year thus far. I think it's darned near a masterpiece, then again, I agree with Moore. Those who don't will feel otherwise.

Recommended: Yes