documentaries

friday

I’m on record as loving a good slasher movie. I grew up in the 1980s and slashers were all the rage. I didn’t actually watch any of them in theatres and rarely saw any in their unedited forms on VHS. Mostly, I watched them on late-night, basic cable television. Which was probably the best way for my pubescent self to have seen them. With some of the sex and violence edited out for TV, my hormone-addled mind filled in the blanks with things far more sexy and gruesome than any of the films could possibly have produced.

I actually remember later in life watching some of those films and being disappointed with how little I had missed.

Friday the 13th and its many, many sequels are not good movies. They aren’t even particularly interesting slash flicks. But there is something about them that has excited horror hounds, including myself for decades.

This documentary covers everything you’d ever want to know about the franchise. It interviews nearly everyone involved in any of the films (or the television series) and breaks them all down into the minutest of details. For seven hours it does this. That’s more Jason Vorhees than anyone can handle.

Except me, apparently. I watched the entire thing and wrote a review about it. You can read that review here.

super size me poster

This was originally written on May 20, 2006.

Between Fast Food Nation and Super Size Me it is a rare thing indeed for me to eat at a fast food joint. Both Eric Schlosser’s book and Morgan Spurlock’s documentary go to great lengths to show the average Joe just what he’s picking up at the 99-cent menu.

Like Michael Moore, Spurlock has a definite agenda for his film. From the onset, the viewer understands that he is out to attack the fast food corporations. This is not a balanced agenda. If everyone who watched the film never eats fast food again, I suspect Spurlock would be very happy.

The reality TV concept of the documentary is that Spurlock will eat nothing but Mcdonalds for 30 days and document its effects on his body. Indeed the effects are enormous. His weight balloons and by the end his doctors are literally begging him to stop eating fast food.

The drama of Spurlock eating another McSandwich is interspersed between various factoids about the fast food industry. It is all very entertaining and mostly informative.

Certainly, there are dangers in eating so much fast food. The US obesity records are obscene. The amount of junk food consumed is enormous. However, laying this completely at the feet of fast food, and even Mcdonalds is a bit much.

Part of Spurlock’s plan is to eat everything on the menu at least once. He certainly doesn’t consume moderately either. Often he is seen gorging himself on large burgers, large fries, and large drinks and finishing off with a milkshake or ice cream. As with many overweight people, Spurlock’s battle should be more with his own habits than anything coming out of the double arches.