Bowling for Columbine

Filmmaker, muckraker and provocateur Michael Moore (the left-wing Rush Limbaugh) explores America’s gun culture and fascination with violence in terms surely calculated to warm the hearts of European intellectuals (they loved it at Cannes) and college freshmen in full I-hate-America bloom. The film is a rambling, discursive catalogue of Moore’s complaints, some of them gun-related, many of them not. It’s, by turns, funny (because Moore is, after all, a witty guy), thought-provoking (he asks many pointed questions), frustrating (he doesn’t—can’t—answer them) and infuriating (he’s such a pontificating, passive-aggressive bully). Moore’s bag of tricks is familiar from Roger & Me—smirking, oozing false sympathy, insinuating and fiddling with facts—and it works best the first time you see it.