Super Size Me

Super Size Me

For all the hype abut this doco, Super Size Me contains a massively ‘Duh' premise that I was always sceptical of. STOP THE FUCKING PRESSES: Apparently, and you may want to sit down for this, but Maccas and fast food isn't good for you!!! Um, kind of something any kid knows from about age four. Why the hell do you think kids love it so much? Next there will be documentaries telling us not to stick knives in our ears.

However frightening levels of obesity and multinational corporations running the world are things that are so ingrained with today's Western society that they are like power lines: you know they're there but after a while you just get used to it and stop noticing the ugliness they bring to their surroundings. Sometimes we need a wake-up call.

The much publicised gimmick of filmmaker Morgan Spurlock eating nuttin but Maccas for thirty days is just that - a hook to get ya in, before hitting ya with insights into America 's obesity problem and it's very obvious link to fast food. That's right folks – this is educational!

Spurlock also steals a few of Michael Moore's tricks to make his essay as entertaining as possible. Thus we have several comical cartoons and humorous vox pops with stupid Americans. Of course Spurlock's doco-with-a-social-conscience was always going to be compared to Moore 's work, especially with the notion of making himself the centrepiece of it all – giving an informative film a face. In this I actually found him to be more personable, and especially mote down-to-earth than Moore – interesting perhaps given Moore works so hard to be portrayed as a fighter for the working class everyman.

I myself did a two-and-a-half week version of Spurlock's experiment and suffered no real repercussions. I was in Japan , couldn't speak any of the language and couldn't just walk into a restaurant and order haphazardly because I'm allergic to seafood. It makes me vomit. For hours and hours. And they love their seafood. Luckily Maccas in Japan cater for ignorant Westerners, and when you walk in they pull out the Maccas-for-dummies picture book and you just point to the photos of what you want to eat. Well you're not meant to point, because apparently that's rude over there, but you wave over the photo like a game show model revealing a prize. It was the best Maccas I've ever had and I had a shitload of it. Unlike Spurlock I didn't get fat/impotent/near-death, but I also didn't eat the motherfucker monolithic-proportioned Super Sized meals he had.

You get the feeling that the medical evaluations Spurlock gets along his journey are filtered down greatly to what he decides to show. He can't exactly make the point that many people eat nothing but fast food and then go on an all-fast food diet and say he was near-death can he? Sure fast food lovers get massively fat quickly and will probably drop dead at an early age – but not after a month. Which brings me back to the ‘Duh' factor. If you eat only one kind of thing for a month you'll most likely get ill. I'm sure if you had nothing but apples for a month you would probably be quite ill too. But as I said before, it's just a gimmick to draw you in, and even if it's not as enthralling an experiment as you may have been led to believe, watching this film won't do you any harm at all in the long run.

Funnily enough during the recent screening of this on the teev those fucking “Make up your own mind” Maccas ads (that coincidentally have appeared just before the Fast Food Nation movie comes out) popped up frequently in the breaks. If nothing else, my hatred for those ads have forced me to do exactly that, and I've made up my mind to give Maccas the arse for as long as I can. Take that Ronald!