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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 61.29%
Worth A Look: 27.1%
Average: 4.52%
Pretty Bad: 1.29%
Total Crap: 5.81%
9 reviews, 101 user ratings
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| Super Size Me |
by Erik Childress
"Make Your Final Drive-Thru Appearance Now!"
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SCREENED AT THE 2004 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: When a documentary can not only sinfully entertain and inform on your greatest suspicions and worst fears but also change your life, that’s a feat that few parents can accomplish. The word is still out on whether or not my life will have been dutifully changed for the better as a result of my experience with it, but I immediately vowed to stop eating fast food on a 30-day trial basis to counter what filmmaker Morgan Spurlock set out to do with his diet. Simply put, Spurlock would eat nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days, three squares a day and nothing else. Let the health scare begin.It’s quite unfair to set you up believing that Super Size Me is nothing but a fright tactic put into longform. The truth is that Spurlock has created one of the funniest reality experiments you’ll ever be privy to. The Great American Mantra of “sue the bastards” inspired Spurlock when he saw the case of two young girls who were blaming the Big Mac for their rapid obesity. Apparently no one ever told them how pushing themselves away from the table can be fabulous exercise. But along with his experiment, Spurlock was determined to uncover when personal responsibility begins and corporate responsibility ends.
Enlisting the services of three health specialists to monitor his progress (a nutritionist, cardiologist and gastroenterologist) and against the wishes of his vegan girlfriend, Morgan takes us right into his daily supplement of anything and everything on the Mickey D. menu. Never gorging or overindulging himself, it takes no less than 3 days for Spurlock to start feeling the ill-effects of “McGas” and his eventual on-the-spot purging is both disgusting and hysterical. After a single week, his doctors and the audience are horrified to learn that he had gained 9 pounds.
Spurlock’s quest takes him across the country, visiting different McDonald’s with different menus. His one rule other than the absence of anything non-Golden Arches is that if the cashier asks if he wants to “super size” his meal, he MUST do it. Interspersed are facts about the franchise that may shock you and how all fast food outlets have gravitated towards bigger sizes. (Most of the large sodas have an undertow for god’s sake.) We learn about school lunch programs, the children’s marketing hook of the clown known as Ronald McDonald and the ongoing (and hypocritical) fat hog problem in the USA. (Smokers are bad, but big is beautiful?) The only person McDonald’s doesn’t seem to be affecting in the negative is Big Mac record holder, Don Gorske, whose double-Mac-a-day diet spits in the face of Subway Jared.Super Size Me is like the best of Michael Moore without the ambush tactics. Sure, Spurlock tries to get a hold of an McDonald’s exec to comment on the research, but his calls go ignored. Watching Morgan go through the symptoms of a drug addict would be an almost heartbreaking experience if it wasn’t for the good humor he holds onto throughout (and needs when he gets potentially damning news after his third week on the McDiet.) This is an amazingly thorough documentary that never falls to “wait-a-minute” modes with the convenience of camera placements. Spurlock has delivered an anthem to American overindulgence, a comedy of extra-large proportions and a wake-up call to anyone who needs two hands to count their weekly allegiance to the “good food quickly.” Surely, you will be laughing but you have also been warned.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=8631&reviewer=198
originally posted: 01/27/04 07:20:56
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Sundance Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Sundance Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 SXSW Film Festival. For more in the 2004 South By Southwest Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Philadelphia Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Philadelphia Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 San Francisco Film Festival. For more in the 2004 San Francisco Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Palm Springs Film Festival. For more in the 2005 Palm Springs Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
07-May-2004 (PG-13)
DVD: 28-Sep-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
03-Jun-2004
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