Super Size Me: Movie Review

dir. Morgan Spurlock, USA 2004
I know I've done the whole Morgan Spurlock/Super Size Me thing before, but since I caught the movie the other day, of course I had to write about it. Plus everytime I would write something, usually about shit that didn't even have that much to do with the movie, people would come in here all like, "You haven't even seen the movie." So now I've seen it, beeyotch. I just eliminated the crux of some idiot's argument.

I totally went into this movie prepared to at least be amused if not convinced by our boy Spurlock, since I had heard so many people go, "You should see it, it's actually funny," but I didn't really find that to be the case at all. I could see where he was trying to be funny, but I don't think he succeeded very much. There were basically 2 kinds of jokes in the movie. One was when he'd get his order from Macs and he would hold the sandwich up to show how either huge or disgusting it was. That was funny about once (the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese). The other joke would be to put some "amusing" statistic up on the screen. I caught myself laughing at the fact that Mississippi is the fattest state in the union and again that Texas has something ridonkulous like 5 of the 10 fattest cities in the country, but even in those cases, I didn't like how he just kinda threw those statistics out there without examining them any further.

Like I figured before I had even seen the movie (based on shit I read and saw on TV), the movie doesn't really get into a lot of the race and class issues behind this fast food problem. Maybe this isn't news to my 3 black readers, but according to this one uncle of mine, the most successful McDonalds of all time is the one across the street from Howard University (or was it some other HBCU?). And when's the last time you saw a McDonalds commercial with any white people in it? Not to turn this into something that it's not, but not everybody's mom gets home from work in time to prepare a decent meal and not everybody's mom can afford to make their kids a decent sack lunch to take to school everyday. One scene in particular that struck me as kinda odd was toward the end when Hüsker Dü Mustache was doing a little preemptive damage control and he says something to the effect of, "Some people really do eat this shit everyday," and then the camera cuts away to a buncha fat black women and their kids in line for their Big Macs and fries.

But there was a lot of shit in this movie that struck me as being kinda odd. The little story about him stuffing himself on Thanksgiving and then seeing a story on the news about those fat girls who sued McDonalds sounds like the kind of bullshit created by PR people. I'm not doubting that he saw that shit, but I doubt it was the eureka moment he claims it was and to portray it as such in the film insults the audience's intelligence. I don't know how well a person could see something on the news and then jump up from the couch and make a film about it even if they wanted too. Obviously there had to be lots of planning and fundraising and learning how to create a film and what have you that went into the process. In the film he makes it seem like he's just some random yokel who decides to make a movie about McDonalds. The fact that, according to the IMDB, he has a degree in film from NYU makes you wonder what else there is about him that he didn't bother to mention. If he was going to make himself such a central part of the film, it might've been instructive learn a little bit more about him and what it is that motivates him.