American Anarchist

All this documentary does is blame this old man over and over again. I own a copy of the book and like hundreds of thousands of other people, that's where the story ends. Very hard to finish due to the fact that it focuses on shaming the author for a full hour instead of delving into the actual book itself and more about why it was written. Terrible

American Anarchist is exactly the type of "documentary" i hate to watch. Director is totally biased and he spends 80 minutes trying to prove his point. And the point is: William Powell, a 65 year old teacher who lives in France is responsible for almost every mass shooting in the US. Because he wrote a book about how to make explosives and how to use guns when he was 19.

It's not an easy movie to watch because it's so one sided and judgmental. At some point you feel like you're watching someone being ambushed and coerced into saying things he doesn't want to say.

I have just watched the film and was sufficiently disturbed by the interviewer attempting to attribute the current state of the world to a book that Bill Powell wrote as a shocked reaction to the world as it was 50+ years ago. The book was written/assembled from information that was freely available in a public library, which makes who responsible for its availability? It is clearly wrong to me to attempt to blame the Columbine killings on the the book as unhappy people bought guns and then killed those that they thought had done them wrong. How is that possible? (American law is the answer).

The filmmaker was a guy trying to work a premise and fulfill a hypothesis that has no grounds. Bill Power and his wife seemed the nicest people in this film.

The filmmaker showed absolutely no class or ethics on the making of this film, and worse yet does not even seem to recognize how poorly put together his line of questioning is. He asks leading questions and shows extreme bias. He even includes a point where Mr. Powell questions him on his rhetoric. The film itself seems well made, but the filmmaker needs some serious help in understanding how to conduct an interview.

Like some other reviewers, I fell most of the value in this was in the opportunity to hear Powell talk about his life, and its value is IN SPITE of Siskel's attempts to place blame on Powell for things that others did. If it weren't for the obvious agenda that Siskel was trying to push here, it would have been 7/8 stars for me.