I Hate, Hate, HATE Morgan Spurlock

NOTE: I do not talk about thing I hate very much on FILMICABILITY.  I prefer to remain positive, as I find it does no one no good to hear about the bad things. Let's just ignore them, shall we? But this guy? This guy is all over the place, and finally I could not keep what follows inside any longer:

When Morgan Spurlock's desperate, I'm-dead-broke-and-this's-my-last-chance-to-succeed "documentary" Super Size Me erupted in 2004, it seemed to many as if the film was an homemade, impassioned outcry to the world. "This corporation called McDonald's," the movie appeared to say, "is exploiting the poor, the uneducated, the underfed. And I'm here to condemn it." That is, as long as you guys in the audience have paid your ten bucks to see this shit.

The unmitigated jerk-off who directed and egoistically starred in this "documentary"--all without proving outright his thesis--got an miraculous (and scandalous) Oscar nomination, not to mention a whole fattened godammned career out of this stuntifying project involving a gimmicky commitment to eat McDonald's foods for 30 days (in order to see whether or not his health would degenerate). The whole affair was disgusting (c'mon....like he didn't know what would happen? Gimme a fucking break). Relatively few people out there WANT to live on fast food alone, regardless of what Spurlock is trying to spectacularly portray in Super Size Me. Let's face it--McDonald's is out there as a "treat" (which is to say, an easy fix to absolute poverty-driven misery) and, though I do diminish their marketing to children (I've seen Mac and Me), in reality, the American health crisis can't be laid only at the chain's feet.

Please don't read this as being any sort of defense of McDonald's; my feelings about the company are, frankly, neutral. But this article IS an attack on a filmmaker who has, over and over again, used modern-day miseries as a high-powered railway car to his own specious success. In regards to Super Size Me, in particular, here are my problems with his reasoning: Poverty is the result of people having fewer choices in regards to (1) time and (2) money. These things have nothing to do, really, with the McDonald's corporation. This "national crisis of obesity" could have been as easily attributed to Burger King, Taco Bell, KFC, Baskin-Robbins, Popeye's, Steak and Shake, Chipotle's, or the grocery-buying power of the public at large.

I admit I have a problem with any filmmaker post-Michael Moore trying to insert themselves into their own films (Kurt and Courtney director Nick Broomfield, for instance, is another doc filmmaker I despise for many of the same reasons I dislike Spurlock). In Super Size Me, which was basically a reality-TV stunt massivized to movie proportions (Spurlock went on to also do a crappy stunt-filled reality series called 30 Days), the director/actor offered himself up as a guinea pig for a sucky science experiment for which he (and all of us) already knew the outcome. I don't believe one moment of Super Size Me. It's bald-faced, one-sided anti-corporate marketing backed by suspicious science. It became the kind of marketing that would make the most mercenary of the McDonald's team flush with envy (I think they'd now love to have Spurlock's fry-faced puss as a sign of their fries' undeniable deliciousness). That said, I'll go out on a limb and partially agree with what Spurlock maybe meant to say, but I disagree wholly with how he said it; ultimately, I think he put his money-minded mitts into the film business ONLY to feather the nest of his bride and his newborn baby--after all, this shit's he's concocted for the screen represents his try at THE AMERICAN DREAM!!

Again: no one--even the people that Spurlock interviewed--thinks that eating McDonald's for every meal, every day, is a good thing. But when you're hungry, and that's the only option, as it is in a lot of poor areas (when I was living in NYC, I noticed that there was a McDonald's next to every major subway stop), McDonald's becomes the de facto choice du jour (especially if you have kids). It's not a problem that has to do with choice. It has to do with necessity. This is something that Spurlock failed to approach in his first film. He thinks poor people incessantly feed on McDonald's because that's what they want (you can tell this by how he interviewed the chain's customers). But, regardless of his selective editing, this is just not the case. My main problem with Super Size Me? It never once addresses the limitations caused by poverty. It thinks poor people are stupid.

The resignation to McDonald's, for most people, has to do with they are PRESENTED with in moments of emergency, during 15-minute lunch breaks. One HAS to eat something if one is working, and McDonald's often fits the fast-making bill. In Super Size Me, he blamed the whole thing on McDonald's as a company. In reality, we can blame the obesity epidemic on the increasingly intense time constraints placed on workers who do not get an hour to wait on properly prepared, nutritional food. But the lazy Spurlock (who is, I hear from close friends who've tried to work with him, a complete shitwipe) couldn't bother with examining this more complex, troubling issue, and thus exploited the McDonald's angle for his own monetary gain. To do anything else would have required much more work and risk. And Spurlock is not about work or risk. Let's face it: He's the McDonald's of indie documentary filmmaking.

What could disgust you more than this image, concocted for his similarly hypocritical new "film" called Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Story Ever Sold, conveniently and lucratively about painfully obvious subject of product placement in media (which side do you think he falls on: pro or con?):

As someone else in the stratosphere has commented, he looks like a porn star trying to whore his pale white skin for profit. The fact that he's doing it "to prove a point" does not make it palatable (it's not even a point that needs proving or underlining; we all already KNOW we're being bombarded by advertising every day). Even the movie company backing this piece of shit hid the initial, sickening ad campaign with a phony Brooks Brothers-square replacement:

Just take a gander at this dickwad pointing to himself as if he's won the godammned lottery. It makes me wanna vomit. And, mind you, this is a ad-created image. This is what he WANTS us to see. And this newest movie of his completely cements my bottom-rung opinion of him. Spurlock is a guy that has no morals. He's so remarkably hungry to eat the heart of success that he limply exploited Osama Bin Laden's name to get even more movie tickets sold (see the abysmal Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, another of the worst documentaries ever filmed). Spurlock is the modern-day snake-oil hawker, replete with golden-arched facial hair, grinning while pawning off intellectual poison for profit. He has nothing to offer any of us. He stinks to even the highest heaven of anything we thought stank to high heaven ever before. But I think he likes this sort of attention. Anything to get his name out there...

Jesus, I even despise this dolt's very name. Fucking Morgan SPURlock. What says "jackass" more than that? With his proud disregard for the bottom-line values of truth, I sincerely hope he rots in obscurity. But, given how things are going nowadays, he's going to thought of as a modern-day Albert Maysles in a couple of years. And, given that most people don't even know who Albert Maysles is, that's looking on the bright side of things. The following image is the depressing visage of his ambition:

NOTE: Don't you just even hate LOOKING at this tool? He's a dead-faced, nuclear-flavored trout! Somebody just deep-fry him already.

RIP Michael Sarrazin (1940-2011)

With an unassuming face, not so unworldly and yet not so evil, he sometimes seemed like a blank slate, and was often used as such. But Michael Sarrazin remains an interesting icon from the 1970s, even if he'd faded from view by the 1980s. For me, he'll always be the wide-eyed innocent caught in the middle of Depression-era misery, often at the mercy of the suicidal Jane Fonda, in Sydney Pollack's 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

But he also hit another much different note on TV in 1973 as Frankenstein's slowly rotting creation in the most accurate telling of Mary Shelley's seminal horror tale, filmed as Frankenstein: The True Story (and co-starring Leonard Whiting, David McCallum, James Mason, Jane Seymour, Tom Baker, John Gielgud and Agnes Moorehead). Sarrazin's Creature actually steals the film; you cannot forget the sight of his high-cheekboned visage being ravaged into pulp by the elements, nor the Creature's reaction to his doom. I still think that, Karloff aside, Sarrazin might be the most perfect version of Mary Shelley's monster.



In the title role for the recession-tinged comedy For Pete's Sake, he held his own opposite the always overpowering Barbara Streisand:



He was the lead performer in The Gumball Rally, the original Cannonball Run, centering around a cross-country car race (it's a LOT more fun than the Burt Reynolds film). But no one can remember him in that because the movie features so many other, wilder characters (including an early but no less insane appearance by Gary Busey, who makes much noise in the film's trailer):



I haven't seen The Reincarnation of Peter Proud in a long time, and I'm just now discovering it's available on You Tube (I'll surely be watching it soon). I can't remember much about it, having seen it at a drive-in when I was seven, but I do recall that it frightened me deeply at certain points. It co-stars horror queen Margot Kidder, and has quite the denouement, if I remember correctly. Here's the film's first part:



After 1978's failed epic Caravans, Sarrazin's career burnt out big time, at least on the big screen. He spent the rest of his life doing guest appearances on shows like Murder She Wrote, while co-starring in low-profile films that often hailed from his native Canada. But I remember him in so many movies (including more obscure 70s fare as The Groundstar Conspiracy, Sometimes A Great Notion, and opposite James Coburn in Harry in Your Pocket) that I felt compelled to say goodbye to him here.

Forgotten Movie Songs #3: "Take Off With Us" from ALL THAT JAZZ

One of the biggest gob-smacking scenes from any movie I've even witnessed takes place at a crucial juncture for Joe Gideon (played by Roy Scheider). He's a director and choreographer, working at once on a new musical called NY/LA and a new movie about a troubled comedian, played here by Cliff Gorman. The musical he's toiling away at is a veiled version of the now world-famous Chicago, and Gorman was the actor who originally played the first notoriously blue-working comedian, Lenny Bruce, on Broadway in Julian Barry's Lenny. And both were directed in real life by Bob Fosse who, with longtime friend Robert Alan Aurthur, concocted one of the few director-driven film memoirs out there, called All That Jazz. Obviously inspired by Fellini's 8 1/2 (Fosse even stole Fellini's treasured collaborator, cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, in order to shoot the film), All That Jazz is absolutely the greatest film autobiography available to us (only Fellini's admittedly fantastic originator and Woody Allen's similarly-inspired Stardust Memories approach this masterpiece, though neither own its unique force).

I have no idea who wrote the double entendre lyrics to "Take Off With Us"--I assume it was the libidinous Fosse himself--but I know that the music was composed and arranged by Ralph Burns, who'd won an Oscar previously for Fosse's Cabaret, and had worked on Fosse's debut film Sweet Charity, Woody Allen's Bananas, Mame, Lenny, Martin Scorsese's New York, New York, and Mel Brooks' High Anxiety before winning his second Oscar for All That Jazz. Somehow, this absolutely central song for one of the most acclaimed films of 1979 escaped an Oscar nomination. But that doesn't mean it wasn't good. In fact, it was the best song of the year, even though I absolutely love the eventual winner, "It Goes Like It Goes" (from Norma Rae, music by David Shire, lyrics by Norman Fox). To me, "Take Off With Us" was the musical event of 1979: it begins as a spoof of the old show-stoppers Fosse might have had to choreograph as part of The Pajama Game or Damn Yankees, but then it violently explodes those big marketing expectations by segueing into the darkly sexual "Airotica," which would have problems bringing in the family crowd on Broadway even these days. With "Take Off With Us," Fosse and Burns seduce us with show biz, and then smushes the sordidness of it all in our faces.

Here are only 18 carefully selected frame-grabs from this caffinated sequence, played in front of director Gideon (Schieder, doing a spot-on imitation of Fosse) and his producers (played scuzzily by William LeMassena, Robert Hitt, and David Margulies) and songwriter (the flaming Anthony Holland) The dancing team is spearheaded by the gorgeous Sandahl Bergman (whom most will probably remember as Red Sonja from the early 1980s Conan the Barbarian series); the dancing team features Fosse stage regulars Eileen Casey, Bruce Anthony Davis, Gary Flannery, Jennifer Nairn-Smith, Danny Ruvalo, Leland Schwantes, John Sowinski, Candace Tovar, and Rima Vetter (all of whom were acting under their own names). They are accompanied by the finest Broadway musicians available, set off to the side and beautifully photographed:

I think the reason this song wasn't nominated for an Oscar--even though Burns won for adapting and composing the score--was that the board was confused by its origin. It seemed like this song had been around forever. To add to the confusion, in the movie, the song didn't just end--it was augmented by the ominous "Air-otica" and, as it does with the guys playing the producers, it must have stunned the hell out of the Academy's song voters.

So here is Bob Fosse's crowning film sequence--the best thing he ever did, in my opinion--in its resplendent entirety, edited with utmost precision by Alan Heim (who won an Academy Award for this work). The song is presumably written by Bob Fosse (lyrics) and Ralph Burns (music):



Here are the song's lyrics (and I'm not including "Air-otica" in the mix); the backing vocals are in parentheses:

Take off with us! (Doo doo doo doo)
Take off with us! (Doo doo doo doo)
We're warming up, so (we're warming up) take off with us!

N.Y. to L.A., going all the way
Won't you climb aboard? You'll ride as smooth as glass (glass)!
Glass (...glass)

Meet our friendly, eager crew; they only live to service you!
[girls] (service, service, service, service)
[boys] (service you, service you)

(This flight) This flight comes complete, with your choice of seat.
And any seat you grab will be first class!

Up there where the clouds are pillowy,
You'll as-a close to heaven as you'll ever be.

Lean back, relax – here come the snacks!
Drop your diet have a ball – don't stop, don't stop, don't stop
with one – try ‘em all! (try ‘em all) [yeah, yeah, yeah]

Music's ready to begin;
Take out your headset – plug it in!

What's you're answer, chum?
Are you gonna come on the coolest, hottest
Coolest, hottest, coolest, hottest trip that's ever been?

(Don'cha, don'cha, don'cha, don'cha, don'cha,
Don't you wanna go?
(Don'cha, don'cha, don'cha, don'cha, don'cha,
Don't you wanna go?

Fly, fly, fly, fly

Lean back, relax, uh!