Morgan Spurlock's Navel Is Getting All Gazed Out
This is going to be a difficult argument for someone with a BLOG to make, but I find Morgan Spurlock to be kind of self absorbed. Here were the main points that Super Size Me made, as far as I could tell:
1. McDonald's makes you fat, especially when eaten in extreme excess.
2. Morgan Spurlock loves to talk.
I can't say that the fact that McDonald's discontinued the Super Size line in response to the film isn't a good thing, and there was one moment of interest in the film when Spurlock traveled to the restaurant chain's headquarters and confronted a VP, but those are tertiary effects of the project. The film itself was mostly about how Morgan Spurlock's vegan girlfriend was not as interested in him sexually.
Well, guess what, NEW MOVIE.
So, what are the major points Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? is making, at least as far as one can tell from the trailer?
1. We have extreme cultural differences with the Middle East.
2. Morgan Spurlock loves to talk.
I don't know. It looks kind of funny. He picks subjects that are in the social conscience, and he's good at putting this stuff together, and it's not like I don't myself have an unfortunate tendency to insert myself into everything I write (fart sound), but it would be nice if he'd start with a premise that had some kind of mystery to it. Not that I'm not looking forward to the hard-boiled journalism of his "Everybody Uses Email And Cell Phones These Days" and "Gay People Don't Seem To Have The Same Social Status and Basic Rights as Heterosexual People" projects.
Posted by Gabe at 10:16 AM in Backlashes, Trailer
Tags: Documentaries | Morgan Spurlock | Super Size Me | Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden?
I'm often weary of documentary filmmakers who make themselves the star of their films, but I didn't have a problem with "Super Size Me." Yes, the end result of Spurlock's 31-day McBinge is not as shocking as the film makes it out to be, but I was more interested in the other aspects that film covers, i.e. the school cafeteria segments, our obsession with dieting, and just the general look at fast food's takeover of American culture.
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it wud be funny if he actually found him
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Frankly, I think you're missing the point. It seems like the value of these films aren't always instructional or informative in the sense that they are "teaching you something new" -- as much as they are dramatizing, deepening and providing evidence for things that you already know. That may seem a tad, I don't know, narrow in scope or pointless - but it makes sense if you apply that standard to fiction or movies. You don't walk away from something like Schindler's List with any newfound factual enlightenment that would ecllipse your own historical assumptions - but that experience has made those historical assumptions a bit deeper and more immediate, if only temporarily.
It just seems like Spurlock and others are applying that kind of standard to the documentary. The paradoxical thing is that we have a hunger for "digestible information" -- and our distrust of metaphoric thinking or "experienced meaning" is what drives us away from fiction. And yet, here is Spurlock or Frey or Moore trying to straddle that line. That distrust has helped create a "non-fiction" genre that tries to replicate narrative function. Thus you're not really learning, but experiencing. The problem is, of course, that we're used to learning from non-fiction and experiencing from fiction. When we use one vehicle to get at the other result -- it can frusterating.
Sorry for the long post.
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