>On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Dennis Perrin wrote:
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>>Some good points made, but a lot of hair-splitting. Moore does embellish in
>>order to make polemical and humorous points, however "right" he may be
>>overall.
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>>
>I've read these lists attacking Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine,
>usually they're long lists of dozens of items listing the supposed
>multiple lies in the movies. Most of them are inaccurate or hair
>splitting to the extreme...each movie has maybe one or two errors, or
>statements that could possibly be considered deceptive. It's just a
>standard mud-slinging attack, what else would you expect, and of course
>the DLC'ers just swallow it right up.
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>
I rented _Bowling for Columbine_ last night, and one of my housemates
came in to watch a bit ofhe. He began to ask when the segment with
Heston turned up, because he'd read some detailed refutation about how
much Moore had twisted the facts. He told me a few of them. One of the
points he mentioned was that Moore would have Heston giving a speech,
and then cut to an audience shot while the soundtrack had a different
segment of the speech, thereby "implying" that the speech was
continuous. I didn't think much of this, because if the general gist of
the speech was intact and accurate, then that's acceptable. I thought
the housemate was worrying over this point _way_ too much.
Well, the segments came up, and we watched them. My housemate was actually pretty abashed, because the stuff he'd read made Moore's editorial choices seem a _lot_ worse than they actually were. In fact, the only two points which seemed to be slightly egregious were as follows:
1. In the segment at Heston's house, there's a shot of Moore waving the picture of the murdered girl at Heston. It's fairly obvious that this was shot after Heston had left. Not an especially egregious thing to do, assuming that Moore was repeating what he'd done merely for a better camera angle.
2. Moore didn't mention that the NRA's convention at Littleton had been scheduled long in advance, and-- according to my housemate's account-- they'd actually cancelled a _lot_ of the convention; but they held what they'd held because too many people had made travel arrangements and reservations and such. _If_ this was the case-- and I'll probably browse the Web today to check the facts-- it's understandable, and Moore should have at least mentioned this.
Obviously, the stuff my housemate had read was directed more at discrediting Moore than anything else: editorial choices that were standard for documentaries were bloviated into the equivalent of Soviet photos erasing unpersons, and nits that were picked were placed at the same moral level as the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion."