2003-01-21 - 6:57 p.m.

Yesterday I spent most of the day feeling like a terminally apathetic amoeba that couldn�t even be bothered to divide its own cell, so forced myself out into the rain to go and sit in a cinema for four hours and watch Three Hobbits and a Computer Generated Gollum II. Unfortunately, someone seemed to have swapped the locations of all the cinemas in central London, and I ended up just wandering into one that was at least close to streets that I vaguely recognised. Luckily they were showing �Bearding for Columbine�, so I thought I�d see that instead.

It was OK. Some interesting footage of people being shot, lots of statistics of all the democratically elected heads of state that the USA had seen fit to depose before slaughtering all that nation�s kids (whilst those kids were picking off the odd student, Clinton levelled an entire primary school in a small Eastern European village! THAT�S how you do it, Goth Boys!), some fake bits of Canada where no-one locks their doors (Canadians, please confirm this was the residential section of Canadaland, Ohio) (though I still want to go and live there), a great stunt where they stuck it to Wal-Mart (I can�t, OK, CAN believe that was in my spell check) and actually affected their corporate policy, and tons of other statistics and observations that nicely reinforced the attitudes of anyone who was ever going to watch it.

I thought the climax, which showed Charlie Heston to be a doddery old gun-toting racist, was a bit pointless � OK, go after the NRA, but not just some coffin-dodging Nazi. We�ll be prying the gun out of his cold, dead hands soon enough, so why not try for someone a bit more relevant?

But anyway, it�s well worth seeing.

If you do, however, try to avoid seeing it sat in front of two horny teenagers who couldn�t keep their hands off one another long enough for Michael Moore to embarrass an LA cop, let alone learn anything important about how nasty Mr Bush is. It reminded me of that episode of Seinfeld where Jerry gets spotted making out at Schindler�s List. I don�t know about you, but seeing children getting a face full of bullets really gets me in the mood for tonsil hockey, yes sir! And hearing about how governments are controlled by international arms dealers really goes down a treat with someone slurping like they�re trying to suck their choc-ice out of the carpet.

I�m thinking, perhaps they thought this was the Jennifer Anniston feature and haven�t come up for air long enough to discover otherwise.

I�m thinking, perhaps the corporate oppression and the political, social and financial exploitation of America�s black working classes really does it for them.

I�m thinking, ignorant fuckers.

I�m thinking, I wish I had a gun.