Product Description

Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, rejected five times by the USC film school, won the best director award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival for this alarmingly personal investigation into the health hazards wreaked by our fast food nation. Under extensive medical supervision, Spurlock subjects himself to a steady diet of McDonald's cuisine for 30 days just to see what happens. In less than a week, his ordinarily fit body and equilibrium undergo dark and ugly changes: Spurlock grows fat, his cholesterol rockets north, his organs take a beating, and he becomes subject to headaches, mood swings, symptoms of addiction, and lessened sexual energy. The gimmick is too obvious to sustain a feature documentary; Spurlock actually spends most of the film probing insidious ways that fast food companies worm their way into school lunchrooms and the hearts of young children who spend hours in McDonald's playrooms. French fries never looked more nauseating. --Tom Keogh

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1065 in DVD
• Brand: Son
• Released on: 2004-09-28
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.20 pounds
• Running time: 96 minutes

Amazon.com
Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, rejected five times by the USC film school, won the best director award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival for this alarmingly personal investigation into the health hazards wreaked by our fast food nation. Under extensive medical supervision, Spurlock subjects himself to a steady diet of McDonald's cuisine for 30 days just to see what happens. In less than a week, his ordinarily fit body and equilibrium undergo dark and ugly changes: Spurlock grows fat, his cholesterol rockets north, his organs take a beating, and he becomes subject to headaches, mood swings, symptoms of addiction, and lessened sexual energy. The gimmick is too obvious to sustain a feature documentary; Spurlock actually spends most of the film probing insidious ways that fast food companies worm their way into school lunchrooms and the hearts of young children who spend hours in McDonald's playrooms. French fries never looked more nauseating. --Tom Keogh

DVD features
Fans of Morgan Spurlock's engaging documentary Super Size Me won't want to miss almost an hour of extra footage on the DVD. Best of all is a 25-minute one-on-one interview with Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, but other interesting moments are a chat with a couple who collects McDonald's memorabilia; an analysis of a supermarket's layout; further conversation with Big Mac fan Eric Gorske and his wife; a look at the deep-fried Twinkie; and a disgusting but funny piece on how McDonald's food rots (or doesn't). Spurlock also provides a commentary track along with his girlfriend Alex Jamieson (you know, the vegan chef) in which they discuss why he included certain scenes, how many times he ate McDonald's salads, and his recommendations for books to read and action to take. And because he and Jamieson received so many inquiries about the "last supper" he ate on film before embarking on his special diet, an insert contains the recipes, including the highly sought-after tofu and vegetable phyllo tart. --David Horiuchi

From The New Yorker
Fascinating and nauseating. As a life-style stunt, the documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock eats only at McDonald's for thirty days. It's not a happy set of meals: he puts on twenty pounds, develops heart palpitations, and is rendered impotent (much to the smirking dismay of his vegan girlfriend). While even "heavy users" of McDonald's don't eat fast food as often as Spurlock does during the experiment, he becomes an overweight case in point that Big Macs and their brethren have contributed to the supersizing and the deteriorating health of Americans. Even more worrying are Spurlock's forays into school cafeterias, which have become nutritional wastelands. He tells this toxic story with visual flair and the statistical punch of an inspired muckraker. And, if you want to eat something after the movie, be sure to look away during the shots of stomach-reducing surgery. -Michael Agger
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

McGridles for the Mind
Supersize Me felt to me like two movies interwoven together. First off, and most compellingly, this is a documentary about the fast food industry and its role in the obesity epidemic in this country. Although it's an angle most of us have probably already been exposed to, the movie does a good job illustrating the insidious way that the fast food industry pedals its products to the masses and infiltrates all aspects of our American culture. In particular, Morgan Spurlock does an impressive job illustrating the pervasiveness of marketing towards children. We see what today's parents are up against if we try to teach our kids healthy habits. Throughout the movie, we see repeated references to the famous lawsuit in which McDonalds was sued for making people obese. I imagine most people probably have a similar experience to mine, in which I started out thinking such a lawsuit was laughably preposterous, but by the end of the movie I could actually see the logic in it. I wasn't exactly what point he was trying to make with the graphic footage of the gastric bypass surgeries. If it was suppose to gross viewers out, the reality is that any surgery could do that if shown in that detail. I hope it didn't have the effect of discouraging anyone from pursing a gastric bypass, which happens to be a wonderful operation that has helped many people turn their lives around.

The second thread of the movie is the human experiment, in which our protagonist goes 30 days eating only McDonalds food. For me, this part felt like bad reality TV to me. Although posed a scientific experiment, it is clear our narrator knows from the start what direction it will go. For one thing, we see his vegan girlfriend reprove his plans. From even the first couple of days, we get endless shots of him looking at the food and telling us how gross it looks, or telling us how sick he feels. The shock this study, if you can call a sample size of one person with an agenda a study, is that he actually gets even more physically ill than anyone anticipated. Well, he gains weight and has an elevation of his liver enzymes. His doctors appropriately try to coach their patient into reverting back to a healthier diet, putting as grim a spin on it as possible. Elevated liver enzymes however are the normal response of a healthy liver to an acute insult. It's going abruptly from a low fat diet to a massively high-fat diet that causes it. If he wanted to make the case that this was a dire lethal reaction to fast food, we could have checked the liver enzymes of any of the characters we meet in the movie who habitually eat fast food. He would have found them to be mostly normal, since the bump in liver enzymes is a function of the acute change, not the fast food in and of itself. His doctors make the analogy to alcoholics, who get elevated liver enzymes from the insult of alcohol to their livers. But, in fact, it is when an alcoholic binges and doesn't get a corresponding rise in liver enzymes that there is evidence of end-stage liver disease (Morgan's internists hopefully understand this but are either doing their job by trying to scare him, possibly hamming it up for the cameras, and/or the interactions are edited for maximum melodrama and don't reflect the content of the actual visits.) We even see that Morgan's liver enzymes are returning to normal by the last set of blood tests, even though he is still on the diet at that point, but little is made of that in the movie, because it doesn't support the premise that eating all fast food for a month can kill you. His chest pain, which looked like an anxiety attack, and his other physical symptoms such as headaches are hard to interpret, especially in someone with an agenda to get as sick as possible. Then we get to see footage of Morgan on the phone with his mother, her only half joking that she would donate part of her liver if he needs it, and footage of Morgan on the phone with his girlfriend practically mourning his heroic and fated death. Too much. The informational content is important enough without watering it down with the intellectual equivalent of fast food.

My personal Amazon-confession: I love McDonald's, but I do feel gross afterwards. One of my professors in Med school was fond of saying "there's no good or bad foods, just good or bad diets." The McGridle really puts that sentiment to the test, but I would still agree with it. I always hoped he would slip one day and say "there's no good or bad food, just good or bad people," but it never happened.

Overall, a good movie, I'm glad I saw it. The extras don't add much in particular but still a good DVD. For me, personally, I could have watched much more of the documentary footage and skipped the "reality" melodramatics of the 30 day experiment. However, that experiment was probably the gimmick that got the movie financed, publicized, and accessible to a mass audience, so maybe it was necessary from a practical point of view.

McNastiness
The current trend towards obesity in the US is not a difficult one to notice, and yet so many people turn their backs on it. Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock does just the opposite. He throws it in the faces of the movie-going public with a unique and intelligent fervor, akin to that of Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation. Spurlock states "Super Size Me is one man's journey into the world of weight gain, health problems and fast food. It's an examination of the American way of life and the influence that has had on our children, the nation and the world at large." Furthermore, "It's a film about corporate responsibility and personal responsibility," and indeed this film is just that.

Spurlock spends 30 grueling days eating nothing but McDonalds food, and exploits the health risks accompanying such a lifestyle in the process. Under the supervision of three medical doctors and a nutritionist, Spurlock's health steadily declines, his weight steadily increases, and his cholesterol skyrockets. All the while, his vegan chef girlfriend, Alex Jamieson, is in the background rolling her eyes.

Interspersed throughout the documentation of Spurlock's McDiet are highly intriguing facts regarding the food industry and its somewhat less-than-benign ventures, as well as interviews with key people who have attempted to urge the public to change their eating habits for the better (such as author John Robbins and former Surgeon General David Satcher). Though this film is chock full of facts and statistics, Spurlock is not without witty repartee and humor. In other words, this is not your average snore-inducing PBS special.

I must agree with the criticism this film has received for not being as scientific as it could have been, as his personal results may not be representative of what others would experience (the Big Mac fanatic Eric Gorske is a prime example of this). Nonetheless, his results are still rather eye-opening and almost vomit-inducing. The public should be aware of the things they are placing in their mouths everyday, and the effects those things could potentially have on them.

This is definitely a movie worth buying and watching over and over again, particularly when you get the urge to go grab a meal from a local fast food joint. This film caused McDonalds to put an end to Super-sizing before it even entered theaters, and that in itself should say something. For more information on the malevolence of the fast food industry, go and read Fast Food Nation as well!

A funny, informative, witty movie that's a little bit scary

Morgan Spurlock creates a funny, informative documentary about the health issues with poor nutrition, fast food diet and soda. It is not realistic, as many people do not have a pure diet of fast food, but it emphasized the point of the unhealthy aspects of fast food.

I asked my doctor who saw the movie what he thought of it and he was amazed by the elevated liver enzyme levels and dramatic changes in Morgan's cholesterol after only one month. He said that he would've told him to stop because permanent changes to the liver could happen with sustained elevated enzyme levels.

The information about school children and school lunches was very informative especially after he interviewed the school for troubled students whose behavior seemed to change with the assistance of a nutritious diet. It was also more interesting when showed that there was no cost difference between the healthy and unhealthy meals. It makes you wonder why a school would not pick the option for nutritious food.

Morgan's portrayl of satiation is right on as the noises that he made after a fatty supersized meal are the same ones that I find myself making.

Check out the extras where he shows the decay rate of the fast food.

Overall a very funny and informative movie exhibitting the growing epidemic of obesity in America. Anyone see "The Biggest Loser"?

I would recommend High School Health classes show this movie as part of their education.