The other week, we watched Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden?, Morgan Spurlock's follow-up to Supersize Me.
Basically I thought it was mostly poor. Whereas guys like Louis Theroux and Jon Ronson (and indeed to an extent my old mucker Andrew Mueller) clearly get clued-up beforehand and then ask disingenuous questions of politicians and warlords to elicit an interesting response, I got the impression that Spurlock genuinely was pretty naive about geopolitics - despite the montage at the start where we see him poring over countless 'Islam For Dummies' type books.
I suppose it's decent and honest of him to start out from the position of the apocryphal insular, ignorant member of the American public and work from there, but you wonder whether it merited a movie budget.
Really, the locations were the stars. He took cameras into places you don't normally see on screen (even in TV news reportage), like a Palestinian school classroom that had been bombed that morning.
One scene that will stay with me is the one in Jerusalem where he got menaced by an ever-growing crowd of orthodox Jews, who objected to him merely standing on the street with a cameraman and asking people if he could talk to them. (Of course, we have to take Spurlock's word for it that he didn't say or do anything more provocative than this, beforehand, off-camera.) The sight of all those angry guys, in their full Stamford Hill Cowboy gear, encircling him and issuing threats, was genuinely chilling.
The Saudi students who were really rubbish at disguising how much they were working to a script were quite something, too.
The bits with his now-pregnant wife, irritating enough already in Supersize Me (you may remember she was a holier-than-thou vegan organic chef), were nauseating.
And he totally bottled it when he got to the Afghan-Pakistan border, saw the sign that said "No foreigners beyond this point", and rather than crossing into the region where pretty much everyone reckoned OBL was, made some overdubbed homily about his newborn son and the world he was being born into, asking "What will I really achieve?", then turned cinematically into the sunset.
I know nobody seriously expected him to achieve what the US Army has failed to do in seven years (i.e. actually uncover the beardy, kidney-diseased one), but in every sense - intellectually, emotionally, artistically - it was a cop-out of an ending.
Basically I thought it was mostly poor. Whereas guys like Louis Theroux and Jon Ronson (and indeed to an extent my old mucker Andrew Mueller) clearly get clued-up beforehand and then ask disingenuous questions of politicians and warlords to elicit an interesting response, I got the impression that Spurlock genuinely was pretty naive about geopolitics - despite the montage at the start where we see him poring over countless 'Islam For Dummies' type books.
I suppose it's decent and honest of him to start out from the position of the apocryphal insular, ignorant member of the American public and work from there, but you wonder whether it merited a movie budget.
Really, the locations were the stars. He took cameras into places you don't normally see on screen (even in TV news reportage), like a Palestinian school classroom that had been bombed that morning.
One scene that will stay with me is the one in Jerusalem where he got menaced by an ever-growing crowd of orthodox Jews, who objected to him merely standing on the street with a cameraman and asking people if he could talk to them. (Of course, we have to take Spurlock's word for it that he didn't say or do anything more provocative than this, beforehand, off-camera.) The sight of all those angry guys, in their full Stamford Hill Cowboy gear, encircling him and issuing threats, was genuinely chilling.
The Saudi students who were really rubbish at disguising how much they were working to a script were quite something, too.
The bits with his now-pregnant wife, irritating enough already in Supersize Me (you may remember she was a holier-than-thou vegan organic chef), were nauseating.
And he totally bottled it when he got to the Afghan-Pakistan border, saw the sign that said "No foreigners beyond this point", and rather than crossing into the region where pretty much everyone reckoned OBL was, made some overdubbed homily about his newborn son and the world he was being born into, asking "What will I really achieve?", then turned cinematically into the sunset.
I know nobody seriously expected him to achieve what the US Army has failed to do in seven years (i.e. actually uncover the beardy, kidney-diseased one), but in every sense - intellectually, emotionally, artistically - it was a cop-out of an ending.
Comment