The Screengrab : morgan spurlock

DVD Digest for February 17, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week, if you’re lucky enough to be getting some stimulus money, read this column to figure how to use some of it to help build up your collection of movies on DVD and Blu-Ray. And if you’re not getting any money, you can at least see what you’ll be missing.

This week’s highest-profile recent release coming to DVD is the teen sensation High School Musical 3, available in a new “Extended Edition” from Disney on standard-definition and Blu-Ray. Other big-ticket releases this week include Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Angelina Jolie in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (Universal, also Blu-Ray), and the horror double feature Quarantine (Sony, also Blu-Ray) and The Midnight Meat Train (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray). Also this week: Sam Rockwell in Choke (Fox); Greg Kinnear in Flash of Genius (Universal); Bill Maher pulling a Morgan Spurlock in Religulous (Lionsgate); Simon Pegg in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (MGM); and Jiri Menzel’s I Served the King of England (Sony).

In classics, this week brings Warner’s “The Paul Newman Series”, which includes five first-time DVD appearances of five Newman films- his directorial debut Rachel, Rachel, plus The Silver Chalice, The Helen Morgan Story, The Outrage, and When Time Ran Out…. Also this week, Criterion is releasing David Lean’s Hobson’s Choice, and single-film re-pressings of two more John Cassavetes films, Faces and Shadows. And let’s not forget the High School Musical Remix Edition (Disney), for those kids who can’t get enough High School Musical.

This week’s TV on DVD releases include a pair of basic cable rerun favorites, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit Eighth Year (Universal), and Murder, She Wrote Season 9 (Universal).

Finally, this week’s Blu-Ray only releases include a trio from Sony of Oscar favorites: the Best Picture winning Gandhi and Kramer vs. Kramer, and a package deal that includes both Capote and In Cold Blood. Also this week, just in time for Lent- The Passion of the Christ Definitive Edition (Fox).

Reviews By Request: Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (2008, Chris Bell)

Paul Clark — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

Watching Chris Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (*The Side Effects of Being American), the first thing that I noticed was that Bell didn’t look like the typical documentarian. Of course, there really isn’t a mold for what a nonfiction filmmaker ought to look like, but normally documentary filmmakers tend to look either like intellectuals (Errol Morris, Frederick Wiseman) or self-styled man-of-the-people types (Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock). By contrast, Bell is a good-looking thirtysomething, broad-shouldered and well-muscled, in keeping with his life as a former bodybuilder. But in making this, his first feature, Bell obeyed the first rule of writing- when in doubt, write what you know. Or in Bell’s case, film it.

On one level, Bigger, Stronger, Faster is about steroids. However, considering Bell’s experiences in the world of competitive lifting and bodybuilding, the movie is hardly an anti-steroid screed. Bell knows this world too well to come out against chemical enhancement. For one thing, while he’s against taking steroids himself, his brothers Mike (aka “Mad Dog”) and Mark (“Smelly”) have no such qualms. Mad Dog still harbors his childhood dreams of pro wrestling stardom, while Smelly continues to compete in power-lifting competitions, at one point bench pressing more than 700 pounds. Meanwhile, Chris is working at Gold’s Gym selling gym memberships, and is smaller than both his older and younger brother. Did the drugs make the difference?

For years, health experts have warned athletes about the dangers that steroids can wreak on one’s body. But Bigger, Stronger, Faster presents a dissenting opinion, calmly and surprisingly convincingly. According to the scientists and doctors Bell interviews for the film, the health risks that come from taking steroids are relatively minor, and are generally temporary. But while another director might have taken these findings as evidence in favor of steroid use, Bell is up to something altogether different. He’s dispelling the overblown health-related myths of steroids in order to approach the issue on ethical and sociological grounds.

In Bell’s mind, the use of steroids among athletes is symptomatic of a deep-seated desire not only to succeed, but to come out on top. From a young age, Bell remembers idolizing men (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hulk Hogan) whose success came, according to them, as the result both of their muscular physiques and their hard work. Children are taught that if they dream big and follow their dreams, they can be anything they want to be and escape their humdrum lives. And if it takes chemical enhancement to get the edge one needs to prevail, so be it (this doesn't end with muscle mass either- why would I keep getting e-Mail spam advertising penis enlargment unless someone was buying?). Besides, asks the film, if fighter pilots are required to take amphetamines, and teenagers are prescribed Adderall to get the edge at school, why shouldn’t athletes be allowed to use steroids?

Bigger, Stronger, Faster isn’t an especially distinguished documentary- it’s fairly nuts and bolts from a directing standpoint, and Bell is occasionally prone to digressions that don’t really go anywhere. He occasionally includes a surprising scene such as the one where he interviews Donald Hooten, who famously spoke out against steroids after his steroid-using son killed himself. But he also includes such unnecessary sequences as the one where he decides to make his own energy supplement, hiring a couple of migrant workers to help him prepare the supplement and even staging an ad campaign. More often than not, however, Bell’s points hit home.

One of the key points he addresses is the paradox of modern professional sports- that on one hand we demand our athletes win, while on the other we need them to play fair. During the film, Bell remembers the incident when the hated wrestler The Iron Sheik was arrested for doing drugs with fellow wrestler Hacksaw Jim Duggan, and Bell recalls being shocked less by their actions as he was by the idea that the two were supposed to be mortal enemies. Perhaps this explains much of the outrage stirred up by the Congressional hearings on steroid use in Major League Baseball- that deep down, we still want to believe in our sports heroes as we did when we were young. In a world that’s complicated and difficult to figure out, we need a place where success is easily measured, everything is governed by rules, and there are clear-cut winners and losers. Above all, we need to believe that our dreams are attainable. In one of the last scenes of Bigger, Stronger, Faster, we see Mad Dog, now thirty-six years old and married, putting on a unitard and making an audition video for the WWE. Of course, his chances of making it in professional wrestling are long gone, but he forges on. After all, it’s easier and more comforting than reality.

What’s next for Reviews By Request? I’m still catching up on some 2008 releases, and this week’s choices include a low-budget comedy starring one of the year’s most dependable scene stealers, a spring horror release that received decidedly mixed reviews, two very different documentaries, and finally, the latest film from the Troma team. So, what’ll it be?

What movie should I review next? | BuzzDash polls

Voting closes on Monday night. Remember, the comments section is open for you to talk up your favorites or recommend other titles for future installments. See you in two weeks!

All-Night Mockbuster Marathon

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:30:00 GMT

It’s time for another all-night marathon, so put on a pot of coffee, find the sweet spot on the couch and join me for a nocturnal journey into the shadowy world of the mockbuster. (If you’re not sure what a mockbuster is, here’s a handy primer.)

12 midnight. We begin with the latest mockbuster from the good people at the Asylum, Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Lost Skulls. I’ll bet you can guess which blockbuster-in-waiting occasioned the release of this one. Although the character of Allan Quatermain actually predates the creation of Indiana Jones by nearly a century, his reappearance now is a case of history repeating itself. Temple of Skulls is based on H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines, as was the 1985 film starring Richard Chamberlain, a mockbuster before they had a word for it. (Back then, we charitably called it a Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoff.) This doesn’t stop the producers from claiming that Allan Quatermain inspired Indiana Jones, which is partially true but certainly misleading in this context. In any case, there is no temple of skulls in the movie, so you can bet it was retitled once Lucasfilm announced the name of the latest Indiana Jones flick. Anyway, as Temple of Skulls begins, two rugged prospector types in South Africa find the map to King Solomon’s mines. Not trusting each other, they split it in half to ensure they’ll stick together. Shortly thereafter they are attacked by Zulus and the map pieces blow away. Some time later, rugged great white hunter Quatermain (Sean Michael) gets his hands on one half.

12:20 am. I’m trying to figure out when this movie is set. We’ve got coal-burning trains, ladies in frilly frocks, black dudes in hip-hop hats and Nazi references. So I guess…some time in the last 70 years or so? Anyway, Quatermain has teamed up with Sir Henry and Lady Anna, a wealthy couple with the other half of the map. They are being pursued by Quatermain’s arch-nemesis, a scenery chewer straight out of an old Hammer horror movie.

12:30 am. Here we have a five-mile-an-hour chase between a truck and a locomotive engine. It’s like someone stuck a Monty Python sketch in the middle of the movie.

12:45 am. Our heroes dodge CGI bugs, then encounter a (real) rhino. This scene is edited Survivor-style; we have no idea if the rhino is even in the same hemisphere as Quatermain and the gang.

1:00 am. In fine National Geographic tradition, Quatermain and company are captured by bare-breasted natives. There is a bizarre CGI Zulu head-removal ritual.

1:15 am. I was expecting pretty much constant action and zero plot from Temple of Skulls, but that’s not actually the case. For all I know, it’s a reasonably faithful adaptation. I must give the Asylum credit for scenery at least; the movie is purty to look at.

1:40 am. Let us move on to King of the Lost World, another literary adaptation posing as a recent blockbuster. It’s loosely based on A. Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, with the addition of “King” to the title and a picture of a big scary ape on the cover to fool drunk people at Blockbuster into renting it. The box also trumpets an appearance by Bruce Boxleitner – star of Scarecrow and Mrs. King! Well, that’ll bring the kids into the tent. Anyway, King opens with a plane crashing onto an island, announcing its intentions to rip off not only King Kong and Jurassic Park but also Lost. This is confirmed when we see a stewardess trapped up in a tree. Three minutes into the movie, a giant gorilla snatches her. We won’t be seeing him again for a while.

2:00 am. Giant bug attack!

2:10 am. There’s a glitch in the DVD and I have to jump ahead five minutes, at which point maggots are being used to heal a woman’s wound. So glad I didn’t miss that.

2:25 am. Our heroes find a fighter jet with an active nuke. The mysterious Bruce Boxleitner knows how to hot-wire it.

2:40 am. Things are happening now! One dude gets impaled by a giant scorpion. The others are taken hostage by skull-face painted natives. There are boobies! And lesbian natives!

2:50 am. A flurry of terrible CGI: we’ve got pterodactyls, plus the giant ape finally returns, though he looks blurry and pixilated. (Another reason CGI must die: think about how much progress in giant robot ape technology could have been made by now.) Boxleitner reveals he was sent to disarm the nuke, which really makes no sense, especially once he explains that the bomb has a limited range of 300 yards. Anyway, they blow up the ape real good. Okay, I’m lying. It’s not real good.

3:00 am. It’s time for The Da Vinci Treasure. Here’s how you know these folks at the Asylum aren’t completely shameless: the film concerns a forensic archeologist and his search for the Da Vinci codex. See – they could have called this The Da Vinci Codex! Maybe they didn’t quite have the grapes for that (though they did make The Transmorphers, unreviewed here – I’ve got my limits too, junior.)

3:15 am. Anyway, the main players here are a haggard C. Thomas Howell as our hero Michael Archer, an earring-sporting Lance Henriksen as the villainous Dr. John Coven, and Nicole Sherwin as your typically hot linguist/theologian. Throughout the movie, director Peter Mervis (Snakes on a Train) employs an annoying effect that kept making me think there was something wrong with my DVD player. It’s a sort of freeze-frame/flash/jumpcut deal – like someone mentions Jesus, and suddenly there’s a flash of light, a whoosh, quick shots of a crucifix and the Last Supper, and then back to the scene. I guess this pumps up the excitement level, as if looking for hidden clues on the Shroud of Turin weren’t exciting enough!

3:20 am. We have our first mention of the Knights Templar! Also, the Shroud of Turin is apparently kept in the basement of the Alamo.

3:30 am. And Da Vinci invented 3-D glasses, in case you were wondering.

3:45 am. In what must be the most expensive scene in any of these Asylum movies, there is a smash-em-up car chase through the streets of London (or San Diego, whatever) involving a tour bus. Fortunately they didn’t have to pay the guy playing the Casio on the soundtrack too much.

4:15 am. Apparently I nodded off during the big revelation scene in The Da Vinci Treasure. I’m sure it changed the face of Christianity forever, but there’s no time to go back! Let’s wrap this up with an old school mockbuster to cleanse the palate, shall we? Of course I’m talking about 1988’s timeless E.T. ripoff, Mac and Me. We begin on another planet, where a family of aliens is accidentally sucked into the vacuum hose of a rover from Earth. The aliens, I guess, are meant to be cute, but to me they look like giant sea monkeys or very confused burn victims.

4:30 am. After the alien family is brought to Earth, the smallest alien, or Mysterious Alien Creature, or MAC (you see?), hitches a ride with a single mother and her two sons moving to California. They don’t notice him, but he keeps getting into mischief, and the youngest, wheelchair-bound brother Eric keeps getting blamed for it.

4:45 am. Eric plummets off a cliff in his wheelchair and is rescued by Mac. When he tells the doctor what happened, the doc diagnoses him with “schizofreakia” and decides to dope him up. Ah, the 80s.

5:00 am. Breakdancing! At McDonald’s! With Ronald McDonald and football players and – don’t take my word for it, see for yourself:

5:15 am. By now everyone believes Mac exists, and they help reunite him with his family members, who are trapped in a mineshaft out by those windmills from Rain Man. The kids nurse the aliens back to life with nourishing sips of Coca-Cola. I tell ya, this movie is Morgan Spurlock’s worst nightmare.

5:30 am. Of course, government agents are in hot pursuit of Mac, and in their attempts to capture him they manage to blow up an entire mall and kill Eric in the process. Fortunately, Mac and his family are able to suck the death right out of him. Apparently the aliens don’t hold their ill treatment by the agents against their government, as the movie concludes with the whole family becoming U.S. citizens. A final ominous title card claims “We’ll Be Back.” We’re still waiting. And by “we,” I mean “not me.” Good night.

Previously: All-Night Bigfoot Movie Marathon

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of April 18-20, 2008

Paul Clark — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Richard Jenkins- still the indie box office king! For the second consecutive week, The Visitor (Overture Films), directed by Tom McCarthy and starring Jenkins, reigns supreme for per-screen grosses, bringing in an average of $9,249 on eighteen screens. Along with the ever-dependable Mr. Jenkins, credit overwhelmingly positive press and some really good word of mouth among arthouse-goers in the major markets, as well as the relatively meager selection of new indie releases this past weekend. Overture currently plans to expand the film over the next few weeks in an attempt to continue its successful run before the summer blockbusters sweep aside all competition. Will it succeed? Watch this space.

The weekend's other big indie success story was the strong showing of second-ranking film The Singing Revolution (Abramorama Entertainment), which returned to the top 10 for only the second time in the twenty weeks since its initial release. The documentary deals with popular song festivals in Estonia during Soviet rule, and the distributor has wisely tailored its release to Estonian populations in the cities where it's playing. This would indicate that interest for the film might be limited outside these areas, but as any independent filmmaker would tell you, any audience is better than no audience.

Coming in at #3 and #4 are the weekend's top debuts, both documentaries: Scott Hicks' Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts (Koch Lorber), and Constantine's Sword (First Run). Filling out the top five was the crowd-pleaser Young@Heart (Fox Searchlight), followed closely by the winner from two weeks ago, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon.

Finally, falling just outside the top 10 was the top-averaging indie that played on more than 1,000 screens, the "intelligent design" documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (Rocky Mountain Pictures). The documentary, featuring Nixon-speechwriter-turned-cranky-TV-personality Ben Stein, brought in a $2,824 average on 1,052 screens, and frankly beat the tar out of the weekend's other high-profile piece of info-tainment, Morgan Spurlock's Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? (Weinstein Co.). Audiences must have seen the documentary hoping Stein might inquire about the whereabouts of a certain Mr. Bueller, or perhaps give them some of his money. Because honestly, I can't believe that intelligent design is really still an issue.

Top 10: Weekend of April 18-20:
1. The Visitor [Overture Films] ($9,249 per screen)
2. The Singing Revolution [Abramorama Entertainment] ($7,079)
3. Glass: A Portrait Of Philip In 12 Parts [Koch Lorber Films] ($5,546)
4. Constantine's Sword [First Run] ($5,066)
5. Young@Heart [Fox Searchlight] ($4,606)
6. The Flight of the Red Balloon [IFC Films] ($3,818)
7. Water Lilies [Koch Lorber Films] ($3,350)
8. La Traviata [Emerging Pictures] ($3,238)
9. Anamorph [IFC Films] ($3,120)
10. Bab'Aziz [Typecast Releasing] ($2,842)

Source: IndieWire.

SXSW Review: Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Just to get this out of the way early: yes, Morgan Spurlock does find Osama bin Laden in his new documentary. He runs into the Al-Qaeda leader at a Starbucks in Islamabad, wrestles the nonfat vanilla latte out of his hands, and delivers him into the arms of Prince Harry and his British Army battalion. Hard to believe this didn’t make the papers, isn’t it?

OK, I apologize – that’s not really what happens, but hey, if it’s all right for documentarians to fudge the truth here and there, why can’t we humble ink-stained…er, pixel-stained wretches do the same? Not that Spurlock is guilty of any real whoppers here – or at least, none that I’m aware of yet. But the premise of Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? is just a tad disingenuous: Spurlock, upon learning that he is about to become a father for the first time, attempts to track down Public Enemy #1 to make the world safer for his unborn child.

Certainly if the Super Size Me director had managed to stumble upon bin Laden, he would have been thrilled to capture the encounter on camera, assuming he’d escaped with his life. But what he’s really up to here is using his genial everyman persona to chat up the people in the streets of Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Afghanistan and Pakistan and find out what they really think about this whole crazy Islamic terrorism/American imperialism situation we’ve got going on here. In service of this quest, Spurlock makes sure we’re constantly entertained by animated sequences, goofy songs, videogame graphics, funny disguises and Cliffs Notes history lessons in the form of standup comedy routines.

As a result, the film is about as deep as the old Depeche Mode lyrics: “People are people, so why should it be that you and I should get along so awfully?” But Spurlock is such an amiable presence that, truth be told, he doesn’t get along awfully with anyone aside from a hostile gathering of Hasidic Jews. He’s the kind of guy anyone would want to have a beer with (in fact, full disclosure here: due to a power outage during the SXSW screening, there was a 30-minute delay during which Spurlock bought a round for the house), which makes the vanity project aspect of Where in World a little more forgivable. But fair warning: expect to learn a lot more about Spurlock’s personal life than about Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts.

Trailer Review: Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?

Paul Clark — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

To quote the tagline for last year's awesome The Hunting Party, a movie I'll continue to reference on a weekly basis until you all see it, "how can they find the world's most wanted war criminal when the CIA can't? By actually looking." At least one person has taken this tagline to heart — Morgan Spurlock, documentary filmmaking's logical successor to Michael Moore. In Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, which premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Morgan Spurlock goes on a quest to find Bin Laden, armed only with a camera and a satchel full of culture-clash gags. Most of the trailer is comprised of the latter, as when Spurlock shows up the Middle East wearing traditional Muslim garb while still sporting his trademark trucker 'stache. It also looks like he tries to get a lot of comic mileage out of simply asking people if they've seen Bin Laden, which wears pretty thin by the end of the trailer. All in all, Spurlock's films, while just as reliant on issues-based comedy as Moore's, are less concerned with actual politics, although how you feel about this probably depends on your thoughts on Michael Moore. As far as Spurlock is concerned, I'm still waiting for him to really impress me.

The Five Most Intriguing SXSW Trailers: Documentaries

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:30:00 GMT

The 2008 SXSW Film Festival kicks off a week from tomorrow, and naturally the Screengrab will be your go-to source for wall-to-wall coverage. We're whetting our appetites by browsing through the trailers for the official selections and making a checklist of can't-miss screenings. Tune in tomorrow for the five most intriguing narrative films; for now, here are the documentaries that have our attention.

Crawford

In 2005, I went to Crawford, Texas for a wedding. This was at the height of "Camp Casey," the makeshift protest community that grew up around Cindy Sheehan and spent the summer heckling the vacationing president. Looking around at the nondescript one-traffic-light town in the ass-end of nowhere, I wondered why Bush would move there on purpose, when he could be spending his considerable leisure time kicking back in Kennebunkport, Maine. Apparently the townspeople of Crawford have wondered the same thing:

Super High Me

They drug test us once a week here at the Screengrab, so I wouldn't know anything about the marijuana or "pot grass" as I believe you kids call it. But apparently comedian Doug Benson knows quite a bit about it; he was named High Times magazine's Stoner of the Year in 2006, and now he's following in the footsteps of Morgan Spurlock by smoking "medical marijuana" for 30 straight days. Sounds like more fun than eating a month's worth of Egg McMuffins. Not that we'd know, of course!

Dreams With Sharp Teeth

Here at the Screengrab, you don't have to tell us that Harlan Ellison still has his edge; we found out firsthand. So we're very much looking forward to this portrait of the world-renowned author, and we're not just saying that to get on his good side! Although we are sort of wondering what Robin Williams is doing in this thing.

Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie

Bigfoot is back, baby! The star of countless cheapo creature features and pseudo-documentaries of the 70s has been spotted in such recent fare as Strange Wilderness, The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang and The Wild Man of Navidad. This documentary from first-time director Jay Delaney follows a pair of amateur Bigfoot hunters whose cryptozoological quest provides "a source of hope and meaning that transcend the harsh realities of life in a dying steel town."

Shine a Light

Next to organized crime, rock and roll is Martin Scorsese's favorite subject – and who's to say there's no overlap between the two? An editor on Woodstock, Scorsese made one of the great rock movies of the 70s in The Last Waltz, and presided over the definitive Bob Dylan bio with No Direction Home. Now he shines his light on the Rolling Stones – although if this trailer is any indication, Marty himself is at least a co-star. Ironically enough, early word indicates this is one Scorsese movie that doesn't feature "Gimme Shelter" on the soundtrack.

Morgan Spurlock: Shuttle Diplomat with a Camera

Phil Nugent — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Morgan Spurlock, Jeremy Kay writes in the Guardian, "is no journalist; rather, he is a direct activist with a camera who tries to use his platform to engage audiences in an age where the blizzard of technology and information causes people to lose sight of one basic truth." For his first film, Super Size Me, Spurlock suffered irreversible liver damage in order to make his point about the dangers of subjecting himself to a diet of McDonald's products, so it figures that, for his new film — Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?, recently premiered at Sundance and due for release later this year — he wouldn't have any hesitations about trying to run down the face of Al Qaeda for an interview. Where in the World had its genesis in Spurlock's detecting, in the wake of the gradual, dawning realization in the country at large that the invasion of Iraq might not have solved all the world's problems and made the United States safer, an upsurge of media interest in bin Laden's continuing existence. Part of the joke of the new movie is that some people actually took its title conceit seriously. "The media blew things way out of proportion before the film came out," says Spurlock, "and made everybody think it was going to be a certain type of movie. The goal was initially to capture Bin Laden, but a friend once told me that if your notion of what your film will be hasn't changed by the time you get to the end, then you didn't listen to anybody. You walk through a door and there are three more that take you in a new direction." While Spurlock was setting up the project, his wife discovered that she was pregnant, a development that caused the film to take on "a whole different meaning. The question becomes: what kind of world am I bringing this kid into? Anybody who's on the verge of becoming a father will know that feeling: you want the world to be a better place."

The prospect of becoming a father didn't keep Spurlock from sauntering, sometimes with hair-raising results, into such hot spots as Afghanistan and the Gaza Strip — "We were scared to death a lot of the time, actually," he admits — though his wife forbid him from visiting Iraq. Spurlock saw part of his mission as illuminating the views and motives of people who are inclined to follow bin Laden, though as he dug deeper and traveled wider, he began to see himself as providing a forum for those in the region who've been shut out, because they don't fit the Western media's preferred stereotypes. "I met so many people who want the same things for themselves and their families that we want. These moderate voices are not represented in the media. All we hear about are the extremists, the terrorists, because it's all about fear and scare tactics. I wanted to give these people a voice."

Bin-Laden 2, Documentary Filmmakers 0

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:30:00 GMT

When you think about it, the movie that made Morgan Spurlock famous — Super Size Me — wasn't that much of an accomplishment. All he did was eat McDonald's food for every meal for a month. There are probably millions of Americans who eat the equivalent of McDonald's food every day for most of their adult lives. His follow-up movie, Where in the World is Osama bin-Laden?, set the bar a lot higher, however. This time, he was going to do something that no one in America — indeed, no one in the entire world — seems capable of doing: finding the world's most sought-after terrorist.

Spurlock's not the first person to give it a whirl. Plenty of journalists make the finding of America's bogeyman their job one, and another noteworthy documentarian, Michael Moore, made a half-assed attempt at it himself in Fahrenheit 9/11. (That Spurlock and Moore's efforts may be little more than glorified publicity stunts doesn't diminish the fact that, unlike a number of right-wing documentarians who make terrorist fearmongering their stock in trade, at least they gave it the old college try.)

We doubt we're giving away much by revealing that, at least according to Slash/Film, Spurlock has considerably less luck in locating Osama bin-Laden than he did a McRib sandwich. According to their man in Sundance, Where in the World ends with Spurlock approaching a tribal camp in Pakistan marked with a huge warning sign telling unauthorized visitors they will be shot. Thinking of his newborn child, the director decides to turn around and head home.

Leaving aside the plausibility of this conclusion (would bin-Laden's people really put up a huge sign alerting strangers to their presence?) and the questionable dedication Spurlock seems to have to his craft (hey, pal, bin-Laden may have as many as two dozen children, and he still finds time to get shit done), we'd like to suggest that America's documentarians are taking the wrong approach in the hunt for Public Enemy #1, with their high-tech recording equipment and expensive digital cameras. We think they should trade down for a cheap hand-held tape recorder and a first-generation VHS video camera; that's what everyone who's actually laid eyes on the guy in the last 6 years or so has used.