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77 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
McGridles for the Mind, December 2, 2005
Supersize Me felt to me like two movies interwoven together. First off, and most compellingly, this is a documentary about the fast food industry and its role in the obesity epidemic in this country. Although it's an angle most of us have probably already been exposed to, the movie does a good job illustrating the insidious way that the fast food industry pedals its products to the masses and infiltrates all aspects of our American culture. In particular, Morgan Spurlock does an impressive job illustrating the pervasiveness of marketing towards children. We see what today's parents are up against if we try to teach our kids healthy habits. Throughout the movie, we see repeated references to the famous lawsuit in which McDonalds was sued for making people obese. I imagine most people probably have a similar experience to mine, in which I started out thinking such a lawsuit was laughably preposterous, but by the end of the movie I could actually see the logic in it. I wasn't exactly what point he was trying to make with the graphic footage of the gastric bypass surgeries. If it was suppose to gross viewers out, the reality is that any surgery could do that if shown in that detail. I hope it didn't have the effect of discouraging anyone from pursing a gastric bypass, which happens to be a wonderful operation that has helped many people turn their lives around.
The second thread of the movie is the human experiment, in which our protagonist goes 30 days eating only McDonalds food. For me, this part felt like bad reality TV to me. Although posed a scientific experiment, it is clear our narrator knows from the start what direction it will go. For one thing, we see his vegan girlfriend reprove his plans. From even the first couple of days, we get endless shots of him looking at the food and telling us how gross it looks, or telling us how sick he feels. The shock this study, if you can call a sample size of one person with an agenda a study, is that he actually gets even more physically ill than anyone anticipated. Well, he gains weight and has an elevation of his liver enzymes. His doctors appropriately try to coach their patient into reverting back to a healthier diet, putting as grim a spin on it as possible. Elevated liver enzymes however are the normal response of a healthy liver to an acute insult. It's going abruptly from a low fat diet to a massively high-fat diet that causes it. If he wanted to make the case that this was a dire lethal reaction to fast food, we could have checked the liver enzymes of any of the characters we meet in the movie who habitually eat fast food. He would have found them to be mostly normal, since the bump in liver enzymes is a function of the acute change, not the fast food in and of itself. His doctors make the analogy to alcoholics, who get elevated liver enzymes from the insult of alcohol to their livers. But, in fact, it is when an alcoholic binges and doesn't get a corresponding rise in liver enzymes that there is evidence of end-stage liver disease (Morgan's internists hopefully understand this but are either doing their job by trying to scare him, possibly hamming it up for the cameras, and/or the interactions are edited for maximum melodrama and don't reflect the content of the actual visits.) We even see that Morgan's liver enzymes are returning to normal by the last set of blood tests, even though he is still on the diet at that point, but little is made of that in the movie, because it doesn't support the premise that eating all fast food for a month can kill you. His chest pain, which looked like an anxiety attack, and his other physical symptoms such as headaches are hard to interpret, especially in someone with an agenda to get as sick as possible. Then we get to see footage of Morgan on the phone with his mother, her only half joking that she would donate part of her liver if he needs it, and footage of Morgan on the phone with his girlfriend practically mourning his heroic and fated death. Too much. The informational content is important enough without watering it down with the intellectual equivalent of fast food.
My personal Amazon-confession: I love McDonald's, but I do feel gross afterwards. One of my professors in Med school was fond of saying "there's no good or bad foods, just good or bad diets." The McGridle really puts that sentiment to the test, but I would still agree with it. I always hoped he would slip one day and say "there's no good or bad food, just good or bad people," but it never happened.
Overall, a good movie, I'm glad I saw it. The extras don't add much in particular but still a good DVD. For me, personally, I could have watched much more of the documentary footage and skipped the "reality" melodramatics of the 30 day experiment. However, that experiment was probably the gimmick that got the movie financed, publicized, and accessible to a mass audience, so maybe it was necessary from a practical point of view.
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177 of 202 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
McNastiness, October 22, 2004
The current trend towards obesity in the US is not a difficult one to notice, and yet so many people turn their backs on it. Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock does just the opposite. He throws it in the faces of the movie-going public with a unique and intelligent fervor, akin to that of Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation. Spurlock states "Super Size Me is one man's journey into the world of weight gain, health problems and fast food. It's an examination of the American way of life and the influence that has had on our children, the nation and the world at large." Furthermore, "It's a film about corporate responsibility and personal responsibility," and indeed this film is just that.
Spurlock spends 30 grueling days eating nothing but McDonalds food, and exploits the health risks accompanying such a lifestyle in the process. Under the supervision of three medical doctors and a nutritionist, Spurlock's health steadily declines, his weight steadily increases, and his cholesterol skyrockets. All the while, his vegan chef girlfriend, Alex Jamieson, is in the background rolling her eyes.
Interspersed throughout the documentation of Spurlock's McDiet are highly intriguing facts regarding the food industry and its somewhat less-than-benign ventures, as well as interviews with key people who have attempted to urge the public to change their eating habits for the better (such as author John Robbins and former Surgeon General David Satcher). Though this film is chock full of facts and statistics, Spurlock is not without witty repartee and humor. In other words, this is not your average snore-inducing PBS special.
I must agree with the criticism this film has received for not being as scientific as it could have been, as his personal results may not be representative of what others would experience (the Big Mac fanatic Eric Gorske is a prime example of this). Nonetheless, his results are still rather eye-opening and almost vomit-inducing. The public should be aware of the things they are placing in their mouths everyday, and the effects those things could potentially have on them.
This is definitely a movie worth buying and watching over and over again, particularly when you get the urge to go grab a meal from a local fast food joint. This film caused McDonalds to put an end to Super-sizing before it even entered theaters, and that in itself should say something. For more information on the malevolence of the fast food industry, go and read Fast Food Nation as well!
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Already Super Sized, December 11, 2004
What can one say besides WOW at the very premise of this film. Mr. Spurlock has done something very foolhardy and dramatic to prove a point... we are killing ourselves with the over consumption of food that is cheap, easy to obtain, grossly over proportioned and harmful in more ways than one. Mr. Spurlock points both barrels at the McDonalds Corp. with this exercise (an obvious and widely recognized target), but it literally could have been any of the dozens of fast food restaurants that populate the urban landscape across North America. To eat only McDonalds food, three meals a day for 30 days is something not even the most die-hard McD's fan would recommend, but to do so under close medical examination is revealing to say the least. And the impact this diet has on his physical condition is stunning. Obesity is a major problem worldwide, and all you have to do is look around you to see the impending health care disaster waddling from meal to meal. I'm 47, and when I was in public school in the sixties I remember perhaps two or three girls who had a healthy amount of baby fat and one boy who was slightly obese. Today, children of this age group are phenomenally large and have already established disastrous eating habits. Eating habits and patterns which will get harder and harder to shed as they get older. The primary difference between then and now? Similar to Mr. Spurlock's experience I can count on one hand all the times my Mother and Father and I ate in a restaurant, and I wouldn't use all my fingers. My Mom made virtually every meal we ate, and there wasn't a fast food joint on every other corner and donut shops on all the others. We were not surrounded by things to eat nor where we bombarded with advertising showing us how happy our lives could be if ONLY we went to MacDonald's and ate things. Our society has been so inundated with the EAT = HAPPY and HAPPY = EAT message that we don't stand a chance when the Golden Arches come into view; "I'm having a cruddy day... but look, happiness is right there on the corner! All I have to do is get a huge hamburger, giant fries and an enormous soda... super size? HELL YEAH!". If consuming enough food to feed four people is clearly not enough to fill your considerable gullet, they'll glad give you two more portions for only 39 cents more.
Bon appetite!
The most shocking moment in this film for me was Mr. Spurlock's interview with the man about to have his stomach stapled smaller to control his adult onset diabetes and lower his body weight. In this interview he reveals the major factor driving his serious health problems was his consumption of three to four two litre bottles of pop a day... and he drank that amount until he was temporarily blinded due to diabetic complications. Whoa!!! Could there possibly be any more compelling evidence that respectable companies in our society manufacture food products that are perfectly legal, produced to government regulated standards, cheap to buy, broadly and readily available... and are highly addictive. Not so you say, it's just soda right? Well then try and imagine yourself drinking 6 to 8 litres of anything in a single day... and then go ahead an tell me it's not addictive.
This movie and the book "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser should be mandatory viewing and reading for all high school age children. If our society took more interest in what their kids where eating before school, at school, after school at the dinner table and then for snacks before bed, perhaps movies of this nature would seem totally ridiculous. Until then watch this movie and learn what "just a hamburger" or "just some fries" or "just a can of soda" can be setting you up for.
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