Word: superealism
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...level, Morgan Spurlock's 2004 Super Size Me is an incisive look at American appetites, health and consumerism. On another, it's just a brainy Fear Factor episode. Spurlock spends 30 days eating nothing but McDonald's. He gets fat, he gets ill, he vomits copiously. Documentarian, schmockumentarian: any man who will hurl in the pursuit of truth has the goods to make an excellent reality show...
...made one. 30 Days (FX, Wednesdays, 10 p.m. E.T., debuts June 15) franchises Super Size Me's high concept. In each episode, someone undergoes a transformation for a month: living as a Muslim, undergoing anti-aging treatments and so on. But this time Spurlock (who also has a new book out about fast food) is not the sole guinea pig. When he pitched the series, he says, "the idea was each month, I'd go off and do these things. And Alex [Jamieson, his girlfriend] said, 'You're not going to have a girlfriend if you do that...
...enlisted volunteers for all the episodes but one, in which he spends a month living on the minimum wage (along with Jamieson, now his fiancé). The experience is as rough on their relationship as Super Size Me was on his waistline. They set off jauntily, she getting a job busing tables, he doing manual labor. One ant-infested apartment and many rice-and-beans dinners later, they're fighting over everything from bus money to splurging on a dollar movie. They scrimp, but a couple of minor illnesses wipe out their savings. "It's a life-size game of Chutes...
...MAGIC BUTTON On top of its Super NightShot feature for low light, Sony's DCR-HC32 (about $400) has an "easy" button that switches the cam into automatic mode...
...folks into a documentary, and they can't stop talking about it. In the past two years, Fahrenheit 9/11 had audiences proclaiming Michael Moore as savior or anti-Christ. Super Size Me, that Big Machiavellian experiment in fast-food bingeing, made a star of director and guinea pig Morgan Spurlock. Capturing the Friedmans posed a troubling mystery about a seemingly nice suburban family that viewers had to resolve for themselves. And Winged Migration turned every moviegoer into an awestruck ornithologist. The moral: films needn't serve as just pacifiers or pulse racers. That's what Hollywood does. Get people arguing...