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Post by masterofallgoons on May 24, 2024 15:20:16 GMT
variety.com/2024/film/obituaries-people-news/morgan-spurlock-dead-super-size-me-1236015338/Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock has died at the age of 53 from complications relating to cancer. Most people will remember him by his film Super Size Me in which he ate nothing but fast food for a month and detailed the ways in which it ravaged his body and health. He never nearly touched the zeitgeist in that way ever again, but worked on lots of stuff after that including multiple documentaries that focused on a single topic in that same way, like Freakonomics, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold which was about product placement, The Dotted Line which was about sports agents, Mansome which was about the evolution in men's grooming, Rats which was about Rats, a TV doc about The Simpsons, and Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken, which was about the poultry industry. Amidst the 'Me Too Movement' he wrote an op-Ed where he volunteered a story about how he had been 'part of the problem' and settled a sexual harassment case with a former assistant, which effectively ended his career. But he will always be remembered for that one project that touched the broad social zeitgeist.
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Post by Rey Kahuka on May 24, 2024 15:24:39 GMT
RIP, though I never understood the hubbub around Super Size Me. You mean fast food three meals a day is bad for you? And a corporation, any corporation, would try to entice you to consume more of their product? No shit.
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Post by twothousandonemark on May 24, 2024 15:45:11 GMT
r.i.p. SSM was a legit jolt to both the doc genre & McDonald's as we've known it ever since (cannot say the same for fast food at large with infinite giant heart attack burgers still being promoted).
Oddly, kinda like New Coke failure, SSM seemed to me always a sneaky win by McDonald's - any publicity is good publicity & it's been able to dine out pun on 'fixing' its menu for the better.
As a pre-teen I would order super sized fries & fountain drink - probably just because I could. Burned through it playing sports all the time, so I never fell into a fat trap. McDonald's at the end of my street growing up, they had to relocate because no drive-thru - had to be one of the few like that ever. We tried the McPizza at the time - meh. Replaced by Kenny Rogers Roasters which I miss, they moved within handful of years after that 1991-95 or something.
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Post by novastar6 on May 24, 2024 17:08:16 GMT
RIP, though I never understood the hubbub around Super Size Me. You mean fast food three meals a day is bad for you? And a corporation, any corporation, would try to entice you to consume more of their product? No shit.
And the part they DIDN'T tell us at the time, if you're drinking heavily your health is also going to be shit whether you binge on fast food every day or not.
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Post by masterofallgoons on May 24, 2024 18:22:33 GMT
RIP, though I never understood the hubbub around Super Size Me. You mean fast food three meals a day is bad for you? And a corporation, any corporation, would try to entice you to consume more of their product? No shit. It was something we all essentially knew, but to actually see the negative health effects to occur so rapidly was fairly illuminating... that is, of course if you believe it. A lot of the movie consists of him just explaining that he feels bad. But he did gain a lot of weight in a fairly brief period of time, so there's that. But of course a lot of the success of the movie has to do with him. He was an engaging personality and this was kind of an era where it was en vogue for documentary directors to inject themselves fully into the proceedings to illuminate a topic, and he wasn't as unsightly and annoying as Michael Moore, but was just as committed to exploring a relevant topic.
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