‘Bowling for Columbine’ probes gun culture

In theaters

BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE, written and directed by Michael Moore, 120 minutes, rated R. Now playing Movie City 8, Bangor.

The new Michael Moore documentary, “Bowling for Columbine,” finds the director of 1989’s “Roger & Me” and 1998’s “The Big One” up to his old tricks, this time out using the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School as a launching pad to expose what he believes is an epidemic of gun violence in the United States.

From Michigan to New York, Los Angeles to Canada, Moore schleps and shuffles, going about his infamous confrontations and tense standoffs with just the sort of mischievous glee that has become a hallmark of his work.

Crisscrossing North America with his cameras in tow, he seeks out a whole host of people – from rock star Marilyn Manson and Dick Clark to Charlton Heston and James Nichols, brother of Terry Nichols, who was sentenced to life in prison for his part in the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, to answer one question: Why does the United States have the most gun-related deaths of any developed nation in the Free World?

Is it our cowboy mentality that’s making us shoot each other dead in the streets? Is it the entertainment industry that’s turning some of our children into monsters? Is it big business that’s fueling our need for guns?

Or could it be that we’re all a little bit edgy thanks to the news media, which, as Moore sees it, have created a culture of fear that conveniently nets them billions of dollars worth of advertising revenues each year?

Like all of Moore’s films, “Columbine” explores these options without a trace of objectivity. He’s a populist with a leftist’s agenda and he stacks his films to serve that agenda.

Knowing this, one doesn’t go to a Michael Moore movie to be fully enlightened on a subject. Instead one goes to view the director’s sometimes chilling, often hilarious observations and to be inspired to continue the conversation when the movie ends.

At times crude and other times brilliant, Moore is at his best when highlighting the inexplicable, such as when he obtains a free rifle from a Michigan savings and loan as an incentive for opening an account. The bank, we learn, is also a licensed gun dealer, to which Moore asks: “Should a bank be a licensed gun dealer?”

That’s a fair question, which Moore plays for laughs. But what isn’t so fair is the way he ambushes NRA president Charlton Heston at his Beverly Hills estate, literally laying the blame for 6-year-old Kayla Rolland’s death at his feet, to say nothing of the 12 students and one teacher gunned down by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High.

Moore has every right to challenge Heston and question his organization’s views, but since Moore himself is a lifelong, dues-paying member of the NRA, his otherwise excellent movie ends with a whiff of hypocrisy that clings to the director himself.

Grade: B+

On video and DVD

K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, written by Christopher Kyle, 138 minutes, rated PG-13.

Kathryn Bigelow’s submarine thriller, “K-19: The Widowmaker,” is set in 1961 – one of the hottest points of the Cold War – a time when the Soviet Union and the United States were in such a bitter nuclear showdown, the world could have ended at any moment in a sudden flash of mushroom clouds.

As the film opens, audiences are given this information in a series of title cards drummed onto the screen with the considerable heft of Klaus Badelt’s masculine score.

They’re told that the film is about the first Soviet submarine to carry nuclear weapons and that the story behind the film is based on true events, which, incidentally, took 28 years and the collapse of Communism to become public.

Why the embarrassed silence? Apparently, the Soviets didn’t want the world to know that they’d hammered together a great clunker of a submarine.

In spite of this intriguing opening – and the formidable presence of Harrison Ford as the K-19’s new captain, Aleksei Vostrikov, and Liam Neeson as the sub’s former captain and now second-in-command, Mikhail Polenin, neither of whom see eye-to-eye on anything – the film runs shallow alongside such submarine classics as “Run Silent, Run Deep” and “Das Boot.”

The problem is that Bigelow only occasionally realizes the drama within the film’s premise: Vostrikov’s mission is to take the sub to a Polar ice cap and fire off a test missile, proving to the United States that the Soviets are indeed capable of launching a nuclear war.

The film does generate some heat when the ship’s nuclear reactor springs a leak midway through, but as Vostrikov and Polenin come to throws over how to best deal with the unfolding crisis, Bigelow loses her grip, favoring moments of ripe melodrama and tacking on a forced ending that doesn’t offer the emotional punch she seeks.

Grade: C+

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, Tuesdays and Thursdays on WLBZ 2 and WCSH 6, and are archived on RottenTomatoes.com. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.