Morgan Spurlock, the director of Super Size Me, is fitter and more rational than Michael Moore, his major influence. Spurlock launched a one-man near-suicide mission targeting fast food - and managed to make a first-person muckraker without turning into Moore physically or mentally. This movie is about Spurlock eating nothing but McDonald's food for a month. It's not about him eating up the screen.
The picture is like a kid's all-you-can-eat dream come true, but come true as an adult nightmare involving deteriorating blood pressure and organ function. It may be little more than the record of a juvenile stunt, yet that limitation is also the modest strength of Super Size Me. In his catch-as-catch-can fashion, the West Virginia-bred, New York-based Spurlock creates his own morbid comic landscape. In it, a McAddict can gain energy and satisfaction only from his daily grease and cholesterol fix, and all of America from Manhattan to Los Angeles (especially Texas) is a hazy sprawl of grime and neon glimpsed through fat-fogged eyes.
Spurlock himself becomes a slovenly cartoon of his pre-McDonald's self: gaining a couple of dozen pounds, boosting his cholesterol 40 percent and polluting his liver. And Spurlock suggests that the surreal world of his stunt is threatening to become the real world for too many Americans.
Super Size Me is the latest independent film to make a splash at the Sundance Film Festival and emit a positive buzz that rouses a backlash before it opens to the public. The nay-sayers have questioned Spurlock's methodology as if he were a nutrition scientist with a research grant instead of a filmmaker just trying to follow through on a funny idea.
They argue that people shouldn't limit themselves to any cuisine so rigorously. And they contend that Spurlock could have counted calories even when following his few rules - to eat three meals a day off the McDonald's menu, to "super-size" only if a counter-person offered the option, and to eat every item at least once.
He also mimicked most Americans' workout habits: He stopped exercising.
Eric Schlosser, author of that frightening and scintillating nonfiction best-seller Fast Food Nation, has defended Spurlock, telling Entertainment Weekly, "Most of McDonald's business is based on what they call `heavy users,' and they have advertising specially targeted at them. So what Morgan did is extreme, but it's valid."
