Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
Village East Cinema, May 28, 2011
Movie #32 for 2011
MORGAN SPURLOCK (Super Size Me) is not a journalist. He’s not an investigator. He’s more of a have-an-idea-and-turn-the-cameras-on-it kind of documentary film-maker. And the thing he most turns the camera on seems to be himself. Luckily he - as both a character/narrator and director - has an infectious energy to him.
In The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Spurlock makes a film “about product placement, marketing and advertising where the entire thing is funded by product placement, marketing and advertising”. The film crew follows him around as he pitches to potential film sponsors and lays bare the entire process and guts of “brand partnership” in the entertainment industry, the scarily pervasive successor to product placement.
Most powerful for me was not the revelation of brand partnership in film - anyone with half a brain can see what’s going on there - but how it is now such a work-a-day thing in the movie business. Spurlock interviews a bunch of heavy-hitting directors who shrug (or cuss) and accept the place of something so anti-creativity in their creative process.
Spurlock smiles a lot and shakes a lot of product-people’s hands as he tries to raise the 1.5 million required to make the film. This is wearisome after a time (which is I guess indicative of how wearisome it would be in real life), but his side trips are illuminating - from Sao Paulo (where they have banned all outdoor advertising) to a poor American school district (who is selling advertising space on their fences and inside buses) to the pokey, book lined offices of academics.
But, although energetic and entertaining, Spurlock is no investigative journalist - he meets with some big minds and gets only their elevator pitch about the issue, or shows montages about the prevalence of advertising and product placement rather than anything truly illuminating.
