BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE ****
DIRECTED BY Michael Moore
US 2002 119 mins.
NO MAN’S LAND ****
DIRECTED BY Danis Tanovic
STARRING Branko Djuric, Rene Bitorajac, Katrin Cartlidge, Simon Callow
France / UK / Slovenia 2001 97 mins.
In Serbo-Croat and English, with Greek subtitles.
By Preston Wilder
REMEMBER H.M. Bateman? He’s the British humourist of the 30s, whose ‘The Man Who¼’ cartoons showed assorted chaps caught in acutely embarrassing faux pas (‘The Man who Lit his Cigar before the Royal Toast’). Were he around today, I might have a new one for him: “The Man who said Political Movies could be Fun”. Cue the unfortunate speaker, surrounded by myriad detractors giggling and pointing, or laughing heartily, or making puke sounds. Political movies? Yuck! How can they be fun? Yet they can, dammit!
Bowling for Columbine is political, yet it’s great fun. Indeed, it may be more fun than political, though director Michael Moore would no doubt bristle at the suggestion. Moore is a former factory worker from Flint, Michigan who’s spent the past decade turning himself into a one-man counter-culture — making TV shows, writing a bestseller (Stupid White Men), railing against corporate greed in The Big One and Roger and Me. As the latter suggests, he makes himself very much a part of his politics, and his stand-up-comic style — deadpan innocence masking heavy sarcasm — is his most powerful weapon: he gives people rope, and of course they hang themselves.
Moore started out caring only about Flint (Roger and Me is about General Motors’ decision to shut down a factory in his home town), but his list of grievances has grown longer and more sophisticated in recent years. He’s deeply aggrieved by the ‘stolen’ Presidential election of 2000. He’s debated US government officials over the imminent war in Iraq. He’s spoken out against the role of the media in the US. He deplores the cynicism of money-is-everything corporate thinking. He’s become a vocal supporter of gun control.
Which of the above is Bowling for Columbine about? All of them, as it happens — which may well be why the film got a 20-minute standing ovation at last year’s Cannes festival and was recently (if controversially) named the best documentary of all time by the International Documentary Association.
“In the end it all comes back to bowling for Columbine,” claims Moore at the very end, valiantly trying to pull it all together, but in fact the film has a showman’s sensibility, bringing together as many things as possible under the same Big Top. No matter what your hobby-horse, you’ll find something of value in Bowling for Columbine — at least if you’re a ‘liberal’ (in the American sense) and appreciate the sight of a tubby, bespectacled man getting the better of right-wing stooges and corporate spokespersons.
Columbine is the high school in Littleton, Colorado where a pair of misfit students went on a shooting spree some years ago, killing 13 people (the title refers to the fact that they stopped by a bowling alley and played a few games before embarking on the massacre). Thus, the film is initially about guns in America. Moore meets the members of a rural militia, one of whom insists that “It’s an American responsibility to be armed”. He debates the Second Amendment — the one that gives everyone the “right to bear arms” — asking if that means everyone can have a nuclear bomb in their home (an excellent point, though as usual Moore’s content to get a cheap laugh and move on).
Then, as happens throughout the film, one thing leads to another. It turns out that Littleton is also a corporate headquarters to Lockheed Martin, a big weapons manufacturer: could there be a connection between the school violence and violence wreaked by American missiles, manufactured next door to the school? A Lockheed spokesman counters that the missiles are solely for defence purposes, which is actually quite true — the US has never been expansionist per se, just a little paranoid about defending itself from perceived ‘enemies’ — but still leads Moore to a montage reviling US foreign policy to the strains of Louis Armstrong singing ‘What A Wonderful World’, ending with the planes smashing into the World Trade Centre.
So the film goes, free-associating wildly (and very enjoyably). We speak to controversial rock star Marilyn Manson, who opines that American society is built on a mix of “fear and consumption”. A theme emerges, the climate of fear created by the media in the US. Moore goes to Canada, where the crime rate is far lower than the US even though there’s just as many guns floating around. So why did we previously talk to the rural gun-nuts, a viewer may wonder, if gun ownership turns out to be irrelevant? Because everything is connected (the answer of those who agree with Moore), or because he’s making it up as he goes along, and can’t resist poking fun at gun-loving bumpkins (the answer of those who don’t).
I’m not entirely sure which answer I prefer. On the one hand, Moore is primarily an entertainer, with an uncanny ability to zero in on fatuous behaviour — e.g. when it turns out the militia’s published a calendar with pictures of gun-toting babes (it shows “a level of sophistication you wouldn’t expect out of a militia”, explains a member). It’s annoying that he never goes in depth, and casts himself in the role of Chief Protector, and spends much of the film on publicity stunts — e.g. getting a couple of Columbine survivors to pester a supermarket chain for selling ammunition. Yet the film is often startling, often chilling, and often so provocative it makes you think, ‘This is a movie everyone should see’. And of course it’s fun, as well. Did I mention that it’s fun?
Surely the war in Bosnia isn’t fun, though? Not as such, no — but No Man’s Land is squarely in the tradition of Eastern European gallows humour, turning the conflict into black farce. A Serb and a Bosnian are trapped in a trench together. The Bosnian has the gun, but also has a wounded comrade with a mine under him, primed to explode if he moves. The result is stalemate, both sides temporarily frustrated. What can they do? Call the UN, of course — whose arrival sparks joyful / scornful cries of “Here come the Smurfs!” — closely followed by the well-meaning vultures of the international media.
This is another Cannes favourite (winner of Best Screenplay), albeit the year before Bowling for Columbine. Moore’s film is tailor-made for Cyprus, tapping into everyone’s favourite sport (viz., America-bashing), but No Man’s Land may rub some people the wrong way, starting out even-handed but finally blaming the Serbs for the whole mess in a strident burst of propaganda. Yet director Danis Tanovic — a Bosnian — is sharp enough to see the bigger picture, including the complicity of foreign powers. The film’s final shot isn’t so much angry as supremely ironic.
Above all, it’s full of golden moments, some very funny. The upended cliché of rifling through a dead comrade’s wallet (where we expect to find photos of the wife and kids, but find instead a very campy Postcard from San Francisco!) got the biggest laugh when I saw it, and the “You started the war” / “No, you started the war” routine — resolved according to the rule of the gun — is clearly a crowd-pleaser. My favourite by far, though, is the throwaway gag of the Bosnian soldier reading a newspaper in the trenches, shaking his head sadly and saying to his comrade, “What a mess in Rwanda, eh?” — a wry comment on all us armchair well-wishers, following the war (as we follow all wars) from a safe distance, objectifying the participants even as we claim to sympathise.
No Man’s Land is showing for three nights only at the Friends of the Ci
nema Society in Nicosia (hopefully with a couple of additional nights in Limassol and Paphos).
Bowling for Columbine plays for one week only at the Cine Studio. Political movies tend to be a tough sell with the Analyse That crowd, which is why you’ll have to rush if you want to see them. Both films are flawed and over-partisan, but also smart, perceptive and endlessly fascinating. And they’re lots of fun as well. Oh yes they are.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
