kcrawford

Maybe it was the beer we snuck into the movie theater, but honestly, I went in expecting a rotten film and found one instead that I really enjoyed.

Anyone who expects a movie to be scientifically accurate is a moron. Science makes movies boring. Hence, you fake science in a movie to make science interesting. Aliens aren't creating a satellite relay formation around the planet, olive oil doesn't cure ALD, and the next ice age isn't going to happen tomorrow. Big surprise. Get over it.

If you suspend your disbelief (and I shudder for people who don't), The Day After Tomorrow is a perfectly entertaining disaster movie. The special effects were cool looking without appearing in every single scene, and the acting was generally understated (with the exception of the hilariously Dick Cheney-like VP). I don't want to spoil the funny parts, but the political humor is well worth the time. (The President looked so much like Al Gore that between his character and the aforementioned VP, I couldn't quite tell which party was getting more lambasted.)

I was impressed by Bowling For Columbine, and particularly impressed by Michael Moore's trademark doggedness in pursuit of answers. The impressive rate of gun violence in America is almost impossible to understand, and thankfully Moore decided to treat it that way -- not as a problem of gun ownership, or history, or violence in all forms of entertainment. As he astutely points out, all of those things exist in other countries that still manage to log annual gun-related deaths in the double digits. Over 11,000 people on average are shot to death every year in this country, and nobody really understands why.

Now, it would be impossible to expect Moore to actually answer that question in three hours or less -- and he doesn't. He makes some interesting points about culture-wide fear (leading Americans to regard everything from plane travel to bean-stuffed teddy bears with anxiety), and manages to get a very unilluminating interview with Charlton Heston, but in the end the movie left me disappointed. Not because I had expected an answer, but because Moore failed to maintain a consistent inquiry into the issues.

One of the most glaring problems came in a segment in which Moore helps (or encourages?) two Columbine victims to take a stand against K-Mart, where the two Columbine shooters purchased their ammunition. Moore, an NRA member himself, has just spent at least 20 minutes discovering that rates of gun ownership (which usually means owning ammunition as well) really have nothing to do with the propensity for violence. He tells us that there are 7 million guns owned in Canada, where the rate of gun-related deaths is miniscule in comparison with our own. So, we've abandoned the hypothesis that legal ownership (hence, legal sales) is the problem. But now we take a moral stand against K-Mart? Yes, it's frightening (and hilarious) to watch the 16-year old K-Mart clerks drop live ammunition, but what point does it serve? If anything, it undercuts the complexity of Moore's exploration, reverting to a simple and overused explanation that simply hasn't proved either effective or true.

The other truly grand-scale problem with the film was Moore's inability to overtly discuss important issues that he raised tangentially. Again comparing Canada to the United States, he briefly interviews Canadians regarding universal health care, the (non)existence of Canadian slums, poverty, and rampant unemployment. What he does not come out and do at any point is discuss the political structure that guarantees health insurance, safe neighborhoods, and welfare checks to Canadians -- socialism.

The flip side of this problem is that he fails to properly address the socio-economic issues of the U.S. -- issues that are clearly relevant to our culture of violence. Moore shrugs off the issue of inner-city violence as little more than a myth, attributing the idea to white fear of black people. I am not convinced. From what I see in the news, African-Americans are involved in American violence -- in large part because of the untenable situation in which they live. How can you expect people to get well-paying jobs and own comfortable homes when they can't get a good education because the homes they own are in lousy neighborhoods with no property value to fund the schools? It's ridiculous, and without blaming the entire murder rate on the black community (yet another highly unfair general assumption), Moore does have to do something other than deny that a problem exists.

His concentration is in the (mostly white) suburbs of America, where gun violence has certainly become a problem (if a much smaller problem than the media coverage would have us believe). Here is the crux of the movie's problem: 11,000+ people die every year in this country because of guns. Less than 1% of those deaths involved suburban school shootings. Moore has a great question with a slightly skewed focus. With a slightly broader scope, he could have had a great film on his hands.