Verlaine77

What an amazing film from such a simple resources. The director has filmed the view of the St Petersburg city street from his window and the changing environment, but with a particular focus on the actual road (as in in the literal tarmac) outside his window. Essentially is a year in the life of this street and the various characters who walk up and down it, and the workers who are consistently required to repair and clean it.

If this sounds boring, well take it from me, if approached in the right mood in mindset, it's not.

At times the film looks like it's going to lapse into American Beauty-esque "plastic bag" nonsense (as the director films leaves, dust, snow and rain blowing up and down the street in what are, it has to be said, visually poetic moments) but it soon becomes an ode to the oddities of human interaction and the dogged hard work of ordinary working people, juxtaposed with a humorous commentary on bureaucratic incompetence, civic short-termism, and Russians' general disregard for even the most basic health and safety procedures - to say more would be to give away spoilers. However what the director is really interested in is people. The film is full of sweet little vignettes of filmed character interactions in the street between various characters, or just observed passers by. Sometimes the juxtapositions between the the environment and the people walking around it seemed too good to be true but given that it was filmed over a year hundreds of hours of material must have been sifted for these nuggets.

The film is occasionally a little bit too pleased with the idea of being a sort of observational documentary comedy, the occasional silent movie style sped-up motion, intrusive jangle-piano and other music cues are a little overbearing at times, the film is at its best when it simply seems to observe. Look out for the director's cameo about an hour in.

What a fantastic movie. I saw Aguirre: Wrath of God at the cinema a few years ago and decided I never wanted to see it on the small screen, but haven't foreseen a chance to see Fitzcarraldo so, so I submitted to seeing it on DVD. I watched it twice that day! Like Aguirre, it's visually a beautiful film, which makes far better use of the landscape than similar "white man goes nuts in the Jungle" movies. It's also far less patronising than "Mosquito Coast" and not as portentious as "Apocalypse Now".

Herzog can escape the tired jungle-as-Id cliché (one which he himself may have set the template for in Aguirre) because his and Fitzcarraldo's real dreamscapes are opera. It also has a far more honest approach to the jungle than those movies. Rather than setting it up as a primeval Conradian hell (a comparison which the interviewer sets up but Herzog seems to ignore in the DVD commentary) in which the basest instincts of man are unleashed, it is a strange but beautiful world which offers potential for banal business exploitation. The natives are not the virtual extraterrestrials of old but simply another social organisation with different values and ways of comprehending the World. Unlike Kurtz, it is not the Jungle that defeats Fitzcarraldo but the rather more modest natives who simply and innocently exploit Fitzcarraldo even as he is selfishly exploiting them.

At 2hrs 30m, it probably is too long for such a simple story but this has more to do with a very leisurely first act, establishing Fitzcarraldo's love of opera, the time and society of the rubber barons, and Fitzcarraldo's touching relationship with his Madame wife. It takes Fitzcarraldo an hour to actually set out up the river. And anyway, is that really such a harsh criticism in a world that can tolerate 3:15 hours of the trite Titanic and over 9 hours of the overblown Lord of the Rings. The film is packed with detail and incident but Herzog needs to present this as a slow painstaking endeavour. Cutting it down to 100 minutes (Herzog's usual running time, he's not known for making long films) would have diminished the difficulty of Fitzcarraldo's enterprise. The viewer needs to share at least some of that effort.

There's not much to choose between the English soundtrack and the German, though admittedly some of Kinski's line readings sound a little more stilled in English (mainly in a couple of admittedly redundant exposition scenes), but then the lip movements match better as the film was shot in English.

It's interesting to see this documentary arouse so much ire from the American pro-gun lobby - possibly those most fervent with criticism haven't seen it, as it extends much of the argument that the NRA itself puts forward: that guns themselves are not the problem. Yes, Moore plays a little fast and loose with the chronology and comparisons. OK, so Germany and Japan have hugely violent histories, but the violence was State violence, committed by governments against their own or foreign populations, not the citizen led "frontier" violence which is seen to make up so much of US history. Moreover Moore can be accused of resorting to the same hype and hysteria that he then berates the US media for indulging in.

Moore works a lot on guilt by association - that Columbine and the bombing of Belgrade happened on the same day is only of symbolic importance. In the end, it's not really guns that Moore is after. He sees them as a symptom of the deeper problems that are his real targets - US foreign policy, the lack of an adequate welfare system, White America's mistreatment of its minorities, and corporate malfeasance and perniciousness.

Moore's real heart and energy lies in issues like the failure of welfare to work schemes, which seems to take up a quarter of the film's running time, and the way big business has left the working classes to rot as they move out in search of cheaper foreign labour and a higher profit margin - pretty much the themes of Roger and Me and Downsize This. But he rightly knows that these are not hot-button issues. Guns are!

Seen this way, it's no surprise that his critique of gun culture is so scatter shot and poorly aimed, pardon the puns, relying on the likes of Marilyn Manson, himself an arch exploiter of the culture of fear and alienation to produce popular consumer fodder that he and Moore attack, to spew out glib Oprah-isms: "I would have just listened to them (Klebold and Harris, the Columbine killers) - That's what no-one did", etc. How much of their well documented, pathetic, often racist fantasies and paranoia he would have been able to sit through before telling them just to grow up a little?

After this, it comes across as a little unfair that Charlton Heston and the National Rifle Association are held up as Moore's prime scapegoats, (though one has to wonder, as Heston surely does in retrospect, "what was he thinking, if thinking it was?" in response to many of his poor, ill-or-rather-unadvised responses, his alleged mental incapacity notwithstanding).

After all, as obnoxious as they are, the NRA's crimes are merely gross insensitivity, blatant opportunism and misguided zeal. However while the gun issue is never satisfactorily resolved, Moore really strikes home by correctly widening the question beyond the simple issue of gun availability, to point out these issues do not exist in a social vacuum, that the violence and fear emerge from underlying structural problems in American society, even though such problems seem to exist elsewhere in the developed world without such lethal results.

Could it be that the core American values of self reliance, meritocracy and achievement, and the equivalent distaste at such concepts as social justice (read "social engineering") and community (read "communism") can't help but breed this degree of panic, insecurity and paranoia? If you are constantly in competition with your neighbour, isn't it natural to fear and resent him? In one of the film's few worthwhile celebrity moments, Matt Stone of Southpark fame identifies the fear of failure relentlessly hammered into school children as a major source of the damage. (ironically, and much to Michael Moore's chagrin, George Bush has tried to do something to repair the harm, by exhorting in a graduation speech, that these days "...Even a C student can get to be President")

Many have questioned the film's value as a documentary, whether such an obviously partial and polemic film can be considered a documentary at all. After all the film is far shorter on facts than it is on shock, sensation and opinion. Such questions are not asked by people interested in the epistemology of the documentary form, but by those who wish to denigrate the film by holding it against some bogus "gold standard" of objectivity, no doubt inspired by the bland pedagogy of the educational programming found on the National Geographic or Discovery Channels.

Bowling for Columbine is not and never pretends to be journalism (apart from maybe in its more "gonzo" forms). Moore's approach maybe more closely related to satire and agitprop than the traditional documentarian would feel comfortable with, but that in itself is not a fault. Those who offer such criticism fail to see that ALL documentaries have a subjective point of view and will never achieve unsullied access to some supernatural truth. "Bowling for Columbine" admits and confronts you with its biases is all the stronger for admitting its position. Identifying it as something other than a documentary would neither mitigate its weaknesses nor diminish its effectiveness and power. Those who disagree are invited to make their own films and add to the debate.