Change Your Image
joshuak47
Reviews
Bowling for Morgan (2004)
"Morgan Spurlock was overeating"
The title encompasses most of our filmmaker's argument. And he's right. For 30 days, Morgan Spurlock ate at McDonald's, and most likely overate. Spurlock chose to do what the average McDonald's eater does. Spurlock, a healthy American, was definitely not (physically) an average McDonald's customer. But we got to see what McDonald's customers' habits would do to a healthy person. In this film's case, we see the creator's (Caswell's) initial physical: overweight, high blood sugar, and slight liver damage from drinking.
He supposedly eats at McDonald's for 30 days. We only see him eat there a few times though, and he doesn't actually show us his health progressively: just once at the beginning, and once at the end. We don't know what he eats every time, but sometimes we see him have a salad and water, sometimes chicken nuggets and fries, etc etc. I would be willing to bet, though, that he ate healthier than most people do at McDonald's.
We also see him running around frequently (wearing a McDonald's drink costume?). Anyway, this is called exercise, and it's not what the obese people at McDonald's do. Morgan Spurlock did the average amount of exercise that an American does, in order to place himself in the middle. I am almost positive that this man did an extremely high amount of exercise in order to balance out the fat in his McDonald's diet (he refused to say, though...).
He also apparently didn't drink for the duration of the experiment, since his liver got better. That would only change if you stopped drinking---even a "healthy" McDonald's diet would not magically change that.
Caswell's closing argument is that it's not corporations' fault that we're fat, it's our own fault. And that may be true. But if everyone believed that, then New York wouldn't have made trans-fats illegal, and illegal drugs wouldn't be illegal. After all, it's our own fault if we use addictive substances.
Also, I think he missed the point Morgan Spurlock was trying to make. I don't remember if Spurlock blamed McDonald's, but he definitely said "here's what eating super-sized meals will do to you." He was trying to get Fat America's attention.
Caswell, however, kept his diet and exercise regimen a secret. I have to wonder, if he got healthier by eating McDonald's, what in hell was he eating BEFORE he got on the McDonald's diet? He doesn't mention that either.
This was definitely an entertaining film, though. It had a personal story, and some parts almost certainly inspired by Jackass' (the TV show) antics.
Innocents Betrayed (2003)
A short history of genocide... with no real arguments.
This movie first shows some incidents in foreign countries where people were massacred. It discusses how, in many of these incidents, the future victims' weapons were confiscated beforehand.
Yet the video never tells how many weapons the underdogs forfeited. It also does not extrapolate on how much of a difference it would've made even if the victims WERE equipped with firearms during the massacre. Most of the victims were killed by soldiers: weapon experts. Even if the victims had weapons, they wouldn't defeat an army.
One example was of a Chinese farming village versus the military. Another example was of Buddhist monks in Tibet (I've never heard that Buddhist monks WANT to go to war). And another in Uganda, where one tribe's weapons were confiscated and given to another tribe. What if neither tribe had weapons in the first place? We hear about the people killed in the Holocaust, that they were forced to forfeit their guns too. But I doubt that very many of the Jews/Gypsies owned guns. It's the movie's responsibility to tell me those numbers. It also talks about Japanese-Americans who were placed in concentration camps in the US during WW2. The filmmakers probably don't realize it, but they were implying that Japanese-Americans would have had a better outcome had they drawn weapons on the American military, instead of going peacefully to the camps.
They also argue that you should be allowed to bring guns into family restaurants (citing a single incident in which 23 people were killed in a cafeteria). And they are against gun locks, describing a SINGLE incident in which TWO kids were killed by an intruder. They also boldly imply that people should be allowed to bring guns on planes, and that 9/11 could have been prevented if people were allowed to bring guns on planes. In this part, though, they use no narration, just flashing text and pictures. If they had said anything, it would have been such a ridiculous statement, so they chose not to talk instead.
They also don't explain why the US had 13,000 murders in 1998-2000, while Japan had 637 and the UK had 850 (www.nationmaster.com). The latter two nations don't allow its citizens to normally purchase guns.
I give it a 3 because it taught me a little about foreign genocide, and it was short.