Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold: Slick pitch

The Greatest Movie Ever sold (2011) • View trailer for The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for brief profanity and mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang


Noam Chomsky describes it best, during a short interview within this documentary: We approach the inevitability of testing the water by tentatively sticking in a toe ... then, before we realize what has happened, we’re suddenly swimming.

Morgan Spurlock and his young son have fun concocting their own commercial
for JetBlue, a whimsical endorsement that's far more creative and entertaining
than most of the ads that clutter an average hour of television. Clearly, Spurlock
could have a second career, should he so choose...

Chomsky is discussing whether filmmaker Morgan Spurlock will be able to retain his artistic integrity while explaining the pernicious onslaught of branding, advertising and product placement in a movie financed solely by branding, advertising and product placement ... but the observation holds equally true in all sorts of other contexts.

Looking back on the 1950s and ’60s, the presence of the advertising industry seems laughably quaint ... and wholly manageable, from the standpoint of a citizen on the sidelines. Advertisers spread their messages through newspaper and magazine display ads, roadside billboards, radio spots and television commercials and sponsorships. Characters in movies and TV shows never consumed products that we’d recognize; the labels on cans, bottles and boxes were always vague, indistinct and nonspecific.

How times have changed.

Watching television in this ad-laden 21st century has become an exercise in frustration, with station logos, informational crawls and pop-up announcements obscuring so much of the screen image that it becomes difficult to follow the plot ... not that this matters much, since precious little story can be told in the roughly 40 minutes that aren’t commercials in an average prime-time hour. Quite a few cable and satellite channels are nothing but commercials, and radio stations that play more than one song between eardrum-shattering ad spots are becoming an endangered species.

But that’s just the obvious stuff. Spurlock, in his engaging new film, is much more concerned with the advertising industry’s subtler behavior: product placement, whether blatant or clandestine. The days of “Brand X” fuzziness are long gone; now on-screen characters drink Cokes and chow down on Subway sandwiches. They proudly wear name-brand clothes, check the time on name-brand watches, and drive name-brand vehicles.

As Spurlock demonstrates, in a few eyebrow-raising clips, sometimes a show’s very dialogue will be crafted to include brand-name product placement.

The assault has become ubiquitous and omnipresent; there’s literally no getting away from it. Public schools across the entire country sold their souls years ago for “free” technology: TV screens in every classroom ... in exchange for children obediently remaining in their seats each morning, during the product-laden “infotainment” daily show on Channel One. That’s our kids, being indoctrinated by the advertising industry, in the very place — the halls of learning — that should be free of such malicious interference.

How many restaurants can you cite, even here in Davis, that don't have TV screens? A local pizza joint recently went from one to four. Gas stations blare ads while we fill up. Entire buildings have become display ads, much as Ridley Scott envisioned them years ago, in Blade Runner.

Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? -- Fool's quest?

Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? (2008) • View trailer for Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?
Three stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.25.08
Buy DVD: Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?


During World War II, the beloved Warner Bros. cartoon characters joined the propaganda effort in a series of wincingly hilarious shorts that were so caustic and racist that they tend to be repressed in these more enlightened times.

No matter how dire their circumstances, most of the people encountered by
Morgan Spurlock, far right, insist on sharing a meal while chatting about their
lives and hopes — and their view of terrorists who cite religious convictions.

Back then, though, cartoons such as Confessions of a Nutzy Spy, Tokio Jokio and (ouch) Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips served a legitimate purpose: They belittled — and therefore cut down to size — an essentially faceless enemy that had, in the minds of frightened Americans, become larger than life.

Puncture the bully's balloon, and suddenly he's not so ferocious.

Documentarian Morgan Spurlock, fresh from his impressive battle with the fast food industry in Super Size Me, now has set his sights on the world's most notorious terrorist, in Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? Spurlock's intentions are good, but the results are uneven at best.

The lessons also aren't as eye-opening; it's hard to forget the striking image of all those bags of sugar, which represented Spurlock's intake of the sweet stuff during a month of binge-burgering. No single scene in this new film resonates as well.

Since the events of Super Size Me, the filmmaker has married then-girlfriend Alex, the counter-culture vegan who played such an important role during Morgan's month-long ordeal with burgers, fries and soft drinks.

Alex's developing pregnancy is just as crucial a part of Where in the World as her husband's journey of discovery about Bin Laden, which takes him to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Palestine, Morocco and Jordan.

His film's title notwithstanding, Spurlock hasn't any more expectation of actually finding Bin Laden than Michael Moore had of obtaining an audience with General Motors chairman Roger Smith, in 1989's Roger & Me. The point is the trip itself, and the people encountered along the way.

Spurlock also skewers U.S. arrogance, although generally with the sort of wink and nod that makes such an attitude more palatable.

"If I've learned anything from more than 30 years of movie-watching," he says, prior to embarking on his journey, "it's that if the world needs saving, it's best done by one lonely guy, willing to face danger head-on, and take it down, action-hero style."

Spurlock knows what we think of Bin Laden and al-Qaida; he wants to learn what families, journalists, rug merchants and other everyday civilians think of the terrorist in the countries that birthed, shaped and continue to nurture him and his followers.