Super Size Me- - - - Morgan Spurlock, a man in excellent health, decides to eat nothing but McDonald's food for 30 days and see what happens to him. The rules are: he has to have three square meals a day; he can't eat or drink anything except purchases from the McDonald's menu; he has to sample everything on the menu at least once; and he only Super-Sizes the meal if the order-taker suggests it. Also, while his normal lifestyle involves a lot of walking, he tries to walk less to be more representative of a sedentary person. Meanwhile, he travels around the country talking to people-- food industry executives, nutrition activists, school cafeteria workers, people on the street-- about fast food. I saw the movie at the Santa Monica Laemmle and was sort of interested to realize that several of the people-on-the-street interviews had taken place one block to the east. It's clear that Spurlock has an anti-fast-food agenda and a preconceived idea that the McDonald's food will be bad for him, and as a double-blind medical study, his experiment leaves a lot to be desired. (I wonder what would have happened if he suffered no ill effects from the diet? Would the film still have been made? Still have been distributed? What if by some miracle he had lost weight? Would Morgan Spurlock then have become McDonald's answer to Jared Fogle?) Nevertheless, Spurlock manages to avoid seeming like a fanatic, even seems relatively fair-minded, partly because he is cast as a moderate when compared to his girlfriend, a vegan chef. We don't see Spurlock being mean, sarcastic, or confrontational with anyone, so the documentary seems more informative than argumentative. Spurlock even gives some screen time to a Big Mac superfan who has eaten over 19,000 Big Macs without any apparent ill effects. It's not clear just what Spurlock's regular diet is. He's not a full-time vegetarian although his girlfriend is a vegan chef. At the end of his first day of eating McDonald's food, he throws up, which seems like a pretty violent reaction to me. Over the following weeks he gets sick, sick enough to surprise and alarm his doctors, but perhaps this is a short-term "system shock" effect as much as anything else? He seems to be stabilizing at the end of the 30 days. Spurlock was asked if he wanted to super-size his meal 9 times. That's 9 out of 90 (or maybe 9 out of 60 since I'm not sure you could super-size a breakfast). I would have expected the percentage to be higher. |