24th April, 2003
Yeah Yeah Yeah
Thursday, 2:57 am in Movies & TV
People are always trying to discredit Moore. Sure, he’s biased, but he’s no more guilty of piecing together a ‘version’ of the truth as the regular news is. Besides, the writer here misses some points completley; the whole thing about ‘legally-justified’ homicides, for instance (the message of the film is that all gun deaths are bad, no matter the circumstances).
And as for the whole “resolution” thing… The news is different from a videogame. In fact, I think one of the Canadians (one of the deadbeat kids, I think) in the film may have even mentioned this while talking about watching the American news channels. There’s a difference between watching something and knowing that it’s ‘fake’ (ie. a videogame) or ‘over there’ (ie. foreign news articles), and something which is in your own country. Take zombies, for example. Lots of videogames feature zombies. Lots of movies, books and comics also feature zombies. A zombie in the context of a movie may scare you at the time, but (so long as you remain a sane, rational human being) you’re not going to go out and buy some ZombiRepellent Duct Tape. Now take SARS. It’s likely that you have some instances of SARS in your area. It’s even more likely that you’ve heard about it, form the news, and are scared of it. You might even be taking precautions for it (god knows how). You’re scared of SARS because the news is hyping it up at the moment (mostly because it’s a new virus). If the media told you the true figures of how many people died of the flu every year, you’d probably be scared of that, too. Same deal whenever people get antsy over deaths caused by vaccinations. Because this stuff is on your local news and is ‘in your area’, there’s the fear that it could Happen To You, and that you should take measures to prevent this. As opposed to zombies. Or ninjas. Or whatever.
And now I’ve lost my train of thought … damn.
Anyway, moral: All media is biased. Bowling for Columbine is good (and made me respect Marilyn Manson). Uh… I can’t think when Chasing Amy is playing on shitty speakers in the background.
Damn.
Oh well.
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