by Clément
This year I spoke about the film « Bowling for Columbine” directed by Michael Moore and shot in 2002. It’s about the problem of the liberty to have weapons in USA and particularly about what happened in the highschool of Columbine.
Columbine is in Littleton in Colorado. On the 20th April 1999, two students called Eric Harris and Dylan Klebord came to the school with weapons and shot pupils. They killed one teacher and some pupils.
After that, American schools got metal detectors and controlled people who came in; there were still more than 10000 people killed with bullets in one year in USA.
Here I will shortly introduce the director of “Bowling for Columbine”.
Michael Moore was born on the 23rd April 1954 in Davison.
When he was 22, he left high school of Flint and created a small newspaper called “Flint Voice”.In 1989 he began his career in cinema with his first film “Roger and me” against the director of General Motors, Roger Smith. His other films were "Canadian Bacon" in 1995, "The Big One" in 1999 against Nike which made children work in Indonesia, "Bowling for Columbine" in 2002 and "Fahrenheit 9/11" in 2004. This last film was made just before the elections to make Georges W. Bush lose them.
I’m now going to speak about a few moments of "Bowling for Columbine" :
- First I will introduce a very special offer in an American bank : if you open an account in this bank, you get a free shotgun. This strange offer shows how it’s easy to get a weapon in USA.
- Another moment of the film speaks about racism in USA : for the most of crimes suspects are black people. We see it’s easy for a white person to commit a crime and then accuse a black person. For example, a white lawyer killed his wife and told everybody the killer was a black man, and everybody naturally believed him. The difference between rich white families and poor black families creates tension and violence in USA.
- In the film there was a small cartoon about the history of USA : during the entire cartoon we could see colonists always living in fear particularly of black slaves . We saw this fear made them have weapons and we understood Michael Moore’s idea is American people have weapons because they always live in fear.
- To finish I will speak about the comparison Moore made with Canada. He went to a Canadian town and shows that lots of door weren’t locked. Then he told Canadian people aren’t afraid like American because the Canadian medias don’t show danger everywhere as the American medias.
So it was the idea… The medias which give fear to American everyday.
Now I’ll give my opinion and Rosie’s one (Rosie is the American assistant of this year) :
- Before seeing the film I thought the problem only came from the liberty of weapons. I’ve never thought the American were living in a fear which made them easily shoot somebody.
- After the presentation of the film, Rosie who saw it before gave her opinion. She said Michael Moore didn’t make a documentary but just gave his personal opinion. She agrees with him about the very powerful medias which make fear everyday. She agrees with racism too but she told us lots of American people don’t lock their door.
