Super Size Me
Carla and I saw the movie Super Size Me last night, and it was really good. It raised a lot of questions about the “average American diet” and why it seems so difficult to escape the temptation of fast food, even when we know how bad it is.
It looks like the film’s director and “star,” Morgan Spurlock, is already catching a lot of flak for not showing us the whole story. It seems ridiculous to want to debunk this film - for all of it’s excesses (yes, he actually ate more than he showed us in the movie…does this surprise anyone?) he makes a valid point about how ingrained fast food is into our culture.
The segment about school lunches was interesting - I don’t ever remember having a la carte lunches at school until I went to college (not that our choices for lunch were all that much healthier than the “fry coke chip” lunches the movie shows kids choosing for themselves). Those classroom rumors of cardboard boxes in the cafeteria marked “fit for human consumption” might not have been accurate, but closer to reality than I’d like to believe.
I didn’t come away with the impression that he was blaming America’s rampant obesity on McDonald’s themselves, but, just as Suprlock documents a lobbyist for the grocery marketing industry saying, they are “part of the problem.” People are paying too much attention to the movie’s “anti-McDonald’s bias.” I found Super Size Me to be a lot more than just a sound McDonald’s bashing.
I also find it interesting that Tech Central Station, the site with the most anti-Spurlock talk, is funded by (among others) Coca Cola and McDonald’s.
Popularity: 6% [?]
June 4th, 2004 at 4:15 am
Bravo, my friend, for seeing this movie. I’m rather envious. I just got back from a midnight viewing of Harry Potter, and it was tripy. If you’ve never been to a midnight viewing of anything, and I can’t, for the life of me, think of any reason why you should, consider the following: Even if you get there two hours ahead of time, there’s no guarantee that you will not share an armrest with a morbidly obese woman who, when she stretches her legs, leaves you with about 2 inches left on your seat, to say nothing of the distressing accidental contact between elbows and thighs. Just thinking about it makes me shiver. To avoid putting up with that scenario for the next 2 and a half hours, I moved to the only seat in the theater in which I could be reasonably sure that I wouldn’t be breathed upon. That seat was about four feet from the bottom right hand corner of the screen. As a result, a film that included flying bird-horses and talking paintings also took on the tone from the film version of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Especially the part where Dr. Gonzo and Raoul Duke think everyone’s faces are expanding and contracting. And I’m not sure if the drunken lizards were originally a part of Harry Potter, or if it was a result of my skewed vantage point.
June 4th, 2004 at 8:05 am
I don’t suppose the Hogwarts kids crashed a police convention where they were showing the instructional film “Know Your Magic Fiend?”