two documentaries

When people complain that there aren't any good movies, I really have no choice but to groan and roll my eyes. Movies right now haven't been this good in two decades.

Sure, they are hard to find and never advertised. But between the internet for promotion and a strong and growing niche theater market, movies are getting around. Some are even getting critical praise. And nowhere is this more obvious than with American documentaries.

I'm still amazed at how much it has grown and matured. Plotlines that 10 years ago would have sounded like fodder for PBS ("it's about a spelling bee", "it's about birds flying from place to place") have become such magical experiences as "Spellbound" and "Winged Migration." It's gotten so good, that even the "Best Documentary Oscar", which 5 years ago was a joke, having never even nominated Errol Morris, awarded him the trophy over other also-qualified achievements like "Capturing the Friedmans" and "My Architect."

But it's also a critical time for documentaries. Michael Moore, who is more talented than his critics give him credit for, has proven that one can take a formula for political op-ed pieces glossed over as documentary and make quite a commerical success. And it's with this mindset that we have to approach Super-Size Me.

Everything about Super-Size Me made me uncomfortable on the first viewing. First, it's gimmicky. In case you don't know, this is the story about a healthy man who binges on McDonald's, eating only three servings of it a day for 30 days, and his subsequent health breakdown. He puts on weight. He becomes depressed. He loses his sex drive. The gimmick doesn't bother me per se.
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What bothers me is the way it handles itself. This movie is of the type that makes it's "argument" within the first 4 minutes, and then plays out the remaining 83 laughing it's way to the climax.

Say what you will about Michael Moore, but the man has extreme heart. I always find it funny when critics point out how much money he has made. His notable charity aside, everything about Moore screams with compassion for people down on their luck. It's immediately checked by a contempt for those in power, but his considerable girth and sloppy, gravy-stained fashion sense, isn't a ploy. It's what the man is. He is blue-collar America, pissed off and with access to a camera.
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He can also connect with people well: be it a blue-collar auto worker having a breakdown after being layed off or a security expert crying just by thinking about the Columbine massacre.

Super-Size Me is a lot like Moore without any of this compassion.

It shows sequence after sequence of obese people with a sense of morbid delight, instead of concern for their well-being. While Moore's narrator voice can register sympathy and humor, Super-Size's narrator's voice is always one of glib condescension. I had a hard time believing that I should give him any credit when he was trying to take the moral high ground against a food industry lobbyist – I kept thinking "shouldn't you be thanking him for giving you people to look down at?"

And like Moore, Spurlock (the guinea pig/director of the movie) will always take a cheap shot instead of developing an argument. One example is when Spurlock is talking with a principal over the unhealthy choices at a high school which serves fast food. Instead of asking how much money lobbyists got for the school boards and parential communities from the fast food lobby, he picks on the poor principal, asking why her kids are eating chocolate and soda for lunch. Like the security guards and cops Moore always goes after, this poor principal has no real influence over what the school board does with their budget (she is employed by them, after all). He completely avoids the argument that Americans are exercising less by only leaving it to a compromised fast-food industry lobbyist to develop it.

In the end, there isn't much here that will be new if you've read the excellent "Fast Food Nation", or "Fatland", or any of the other literature about the effects of fast food on our health and the malling of our country. However there is one level that the movie worked on, and it competely surprised me, because it's the last level it should have worked on: the effects of fast food on one man. Going in, I thought that I would see him get fat, and yeah it would be kinda funny and sad that this poor healthy guy is now a fat American like everyone else in the movie. Ha-ha, roll credits.

Instead, you get to see this man fall apart at the seems. You know he doesn't die, but when his doctors find his liver crumbling like an alcoholic's, you are genuinely worried about him. You see how he changes, how his eyes look glazed over after eating a hamburger, and how he becomes irratible and defeated. He changes from being energetic and lively, and enters what looks like a mind-dead slumber where drinking a 50oz Pepsi and downing french fries robs him of the energy necessary to do trivial tasks like watch TV or talk with his girlfriend. Everyone eats fast food now and then, and everyone feels a little sick and regretful afterwards. But to actually see the changes of a lifetime condensed into 30 days editing into 87 minutes is powerful – does our entire nation feel this miserable, this irratible, this unhappy because of all the crap that we are putting into our bodies?

Where Super-Size Me presents most of what it is going to say within 10 minutes of the opening credits, "My Architect" never presents you with what it wants you to believe. This amazing documentary, put together by the illigitimate son of great modernist architect Louis Kahn, is created almost 20 years after Kahn's death. His son was 11 when his father died, and this movie is his attempt to try and figure out what his father was all about.

The first thing that becomes obvious is how impossible it is to know someone that has already gone. Even with most of his contemporaries alive, and a large collection of video, letters, notes and other archival matters, we leave with no idea of what the man was really like outside of anecdotal evidence. And everyone's opinion of the man seems completely influenced by themselves, as if the dad was focused through a personal prism each time. The co-worker who left his job to spend more time with his kids feels that Kahn didn't spend enough time with his kids, an architect from Bangladesh believes that Kahn exists only as a demi-god of architecture who brought democracy to his country with design, and his put-upon mom, who was Kahn's girlfriend on the side, still believes that Kahn was about to take off from his family to be with her.

Even by the end, the movie gives you now easy answers. And even the simplest things are difficult to work your mind around. Kahn would spend weekends with his son, using his secretary to lie to his wife so he could play with him and draw with him. Is this because he was a great dad, very concerned about his child in difficult situations? Or is was this an excuse to play make-believe a with family that caused him no real stress, to escape from what seemed to be a horrible wife and failing marriage? There's no way to know once it is gone. And the movie turns into a quest for peace of mind rather than an actual biography.

The film is very emotional, which is surprising considering how unemotional the narrator is. I was almost disappointed in him at times – all around him are people talking about his father as a quick-tempered man prone to arguments, and we see in his son nothing more than a sense of curiousity. No anger, no sadness, and not even all that much glee: just someone trying very hard to make sense of something. At his worst he loses his temper with his mother over the way his father treated her, but even this sounds less like him speaking as an adult and more like a hurt 8 year old wondering why they just couldn't be a family.