Morgan Spurlock: The Man Who Answers "What If?"

"Alexandra Jamieson is not happy. There she is, a successful vegan chef with a passion for helping people eat well, and her boyfriend turns himself into a gastronomic guinea pig, embarking on a junk-food odyssey of such orgiastic proportions that his liver almost packs up, his heart gets the jitters and his libido vanishes."

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A Brilliant Satire of Product Placement
13 March 2011 | by JustCuriosity (United States) - See all my reviews

Morgan Spurlock has delivered a fascinating satire of the process of placing products into movies and the ubiquitous nature of advertising in our society. He takes us inside the process by showing us what it takes to make a movie and to gain corporate sponsorship for it. He allows us to see the process by getting corporations to underwrite his movie about product placement. He uses humor - as he did with fast food in Super Size Me - to point to the insidious way into which advertising has slipped into film-making and become a major part of its profit model of film making. He isn't the first one to do this, of course. Feature films like Thank You for Smoking and The Truman Show have pointed out this phenomenon. Steve Colbert has also does so regularly on his show. Still by putting it into a documentary form, Spurlock has taken the critique to a new level. The sponsoring companies will likely benefit through their association with his humorous critique of corporate America. The movie-going public will benefit if they become more cognizant of the pervasive nature advertising in films. Spurlock has shown us yet again that it is much easier to get the public to listen to critiques our economic system if they are delivered with a good-natured sense of humor.